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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: October 4th, 2023

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  • If that email is actually from Logitech, it probably has some way to unsubscribe. Might have added you for some nonsense reason like a warranty registration, but I’ve never hit problems with a reputable company not providing a way to unsubscribe.

    The random scam stuff…yeah, probably can’t do much about that.

    One possibility I’ve wondered about is whether, someday, email shifts to a whitelist-based system. I mean, historically we’ve always let people be contacted as long as they know someone’s physical address or phone number or email address, and so databases of those have value – they become keys to reach people. But we could simply have some sort of easy way to authorize people and block everyone else. In a highly-connected world, that might be a more reasonable way to do things.


  • your foreign minister was Madonna

    This is like that.

    kagis

    Not that much like it, apparently.

    https://www.nme.com/news/music/madonna-shares-support-for-ukraine-with-release-of-sorry-remix-video-3170167

    In the early hours of this morning (February 26), Madonna took to social media to share a fanmade video set to a remix of her 2005 song ‘Sorry’.

    “Russia’s Pointless and Greed Driven Invasion Of the Ukraine MUST be stopped!!” the queen of pop captioned the post. “Please Send in Humanitarian Aid to help millions of citizens of the Ukraine who’s lives are being affected by this CRISIS at this very moment !!

    “Putin has Violated Every Human Rights Accord in Existence. Putin has no right to try to erase the existence of the Ukraine. We support you President Zelensky!! We are praying for you and your country! 🙏🏼.”

    She concluded: “God Bless You All! Lets not feel helpless when confronted by Geo-political Actions of this magnitude. There are things we can do.”



  • Well, it depends on what you want it for.

    I wanted specifically to find a search engine that has a subscription-based model and does not generate its income from data-mining and ads. It doesn’t retain search logs. For me, it’s what I had wanted for some time – a service where I was the customer rather than the product – so I am pretty happy with it.

    It has some other features, but I generally don’t care much about them other than its “Fediverse Forums” search lens, which lets one search the Threadiverse (Lemmy/mbin/piefed).

    looks

    It looks like they also have a Usenet archives search engine that I haven’t looked at. I might look into that, as I used to use Usenet archives search engines.

    I’m happy with it. Depends on what you’re looking for, though.





  • Alexey Pajitnov, who created the ubiquitous game in 1984, opens up about his failed projects and his desire to design another hit.

    He prefers conversations about his canceled and ignored games, the past designs that now make him cringe, and the reality that his life’s signature achievement probably came decades ago.

    The problem is that that guy created what is probably the biggest, most timeless simple video game in history. Your chances of repeating that are really low.

    It’s like you discover fire at 21. The chances of doing it again? Not high. You could maybe do other successful things, but it’d be nearly impossible to do something as big again.



  • “I was not panicking as I know the roads and know he is mature enough to walk there without incident,” she says.

    The sheriff disagreed.

    “She kept mentioning how he could have been run over, or kidnapped or ‘anything’ could have happened,” recalls Patterson.

    Even if his mother was walking there too, it’s not likely going to do much to stop a car from running him over. She’d just be some extra mass to fling.

    Kidnappings – and a number of other serious crimes – are usually done by people who are known, not random strangers.

    kagis

    https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/zmldiz/til_there_are_only_between_150300_kidnappings_of/

    There are only between 150-300 kidnappings of children by strangers each year in the US. The other 200,000 kidnappings each year are by relatives.

    Even more lopsided than I’d expected.

    And as for “anything” happening, I’d imagine that “anything” could have happened at home, too.



  • The downside of building the phone/tablet into the car, though, is that phones change more quickly than cars.

    A 20 year old car can be perfectly functional. A 20 year old smarphone is insanely outdated. If the phone is built into the car, you’re stuck with it.

    Relative to a built-in system, I’d kind of rather just have a standard mounting point with security attachments and have the car computer be upgraded. 3DIN maybe.

    I get the “phone is small” argument, but the phone is upgradeable.

    And I’d definitely rather have physical controls for a lot of things.


  • Plus, even if you manage to never, ever have a drive fail, accidentally delete something that you wanted to keep, inadvertently screw up a filesystem, crash into a corruption bug, have malware destroy stuff, make an error in writing it a script causing it to wipe data, just realize that an old version of something you overwrote was still something you wanted, or run into any of the other ways in which you could lose data…

    You gain the peace of mind of knowing that your data isn’t a single point of failure away from being gone. I remember some pucker-inducing moments before I ran backups. Even aside from not losing data on a number of occasions, I could sleep a lot more comfortably on the times that weren’t those occasions.


  • When the market is flooded, any paid title has an incredibly difficult time standing out.

    If that’s true, that it’s simply an inability to find premium games, but demand exists, that seems like the kind of thing where you could address it via branding. That is, you make a “premium publisher” or studio or something that keeps pumping out premium titles and builds a reputation. I mean, there are lots of product categories where you have brands develop – it’s not like you normally have some competitive market with lots of entrants, prices get driven down, and then brands never emerge. And I can’t think of a reason for phone apps to be unique in that regard.

    I think that there’s more to it than that.

    My own guesses are:

    • I won’t buy any apps from Google, because I refuse to have a Google account on my phone, because I don’t want to be building a profile for Google. I use stuff from F-Droid. That’s not due to unwillingness to pay for games – I buy many games on other platforms – but simply due to concerns over data privacy. I don’t know how widespread of a position that is, and it’s probably not the dominant factor. But my guess is that if I do it, at least a few other people do, and that’s a pretty difficult barrier to overcome for a commercial game vendor.

    • Platform demographics. My impression is that it may be that people playing on a phone might have less disposable income than a typical console player (who bought a piece of hardware for the sole and explicit purpose of playing games) or a computer player (a “gaming rig” being seen as a higher-end option to some extent today). If you’re aiming at value consumers, you need to compete on price more strongly.

    • This is exacerbated by the fact that a mobile game is probably a partial subsititute good for a game on another platform.

      In microeconomics, substitute goods are two goods that can be used for the same purpose by consumers.[1] That is, a consumer perceives both goods as similar or comparable, so that having more of one good causes the consumer to desire less of the other good. Contrary to complementary goods and independent goods, substitute goods may replace each other in use due to changing economic conditions.[2] An example of substitute goods is Coca-Cola and Pepsi; the interchangeable aspect of these goods is due to the similarity of the purpose they serve, i.e. fulfilling customers’ desire for a soft drink. These types of substitutes can be referred to as close substitutes.[3]

      They aren’t perfect substitutes. Phones are very portable, and so you can’t lug a console or even a laptop with you the way you can a phone and just slip it out of your pocket while waiting in a line. But to some degree, I think for most people, you can choose to game on one or the other, if you’ve multiple of those platforms available.

      So, if you figure that in many cases, people who have the option to play a game on any of those platforms are going to choose a non-mobile platform if that’s accessible to them, the people who are playing a game on mobile might tend to be only the people who have a phone as the only available platform, and so it might just be that they’re willing to spend less money. Like, my understanding is that it’s pretty common to get kids smartphones these days…but to some degree, that “replaces” having a computer. So if you’ve got a bunch of kids in school using phones as their gaming platform, or maybe folks who don’t have a lot of cash floating around, they’re probably gonna have a more-limited budget to expend on games, be more price-sensitive.

      kagis

      https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/fact-sheet/mobile/

      Smartphone dependency over time

      Today, 15% of U.S. adults are “smartphone-only” internet users – meaning they own a smartphone, but do not have home broadband service.

      Reliance on smartphones for online access is especially common among Americans with lower household incomes and those with lower levels of formal education.

    • I think that for a majority of game genres, the hardware limitations of the smartphone are pretty substantial. It’s got a small screen. It’s got inputs that typically involve covering up part of the screen with fingers. The inputs aren’t terribly precise (yes, you can use a Bluetooth input device, but for many people, part of the point of a mobile platform is that you can have it everywhere, and lugging a game controller around is a lot more awkward). The hardware has to be pretty low power, so limited compute power. Especially for Android, the hardware differs a fair deal, so the developer can’t rely on certain hardware being there, as on consoles. Lot of GPU variation. Screen resolutions vary wildly, and games have to be able to adapt to that. It does have the ability to use gestures, and there are some games that can make use of GPS hardware and the like, but I think that taken as a whole, games tend to be a lot more disadvantaged by the cons than advantaged by the pros of mobile hardware.

    • Environment. While one can sit down on a couch in a living room and play a mobile game the way one might a console game, I think that many people playing mobile games have environmental constraints that a developer has to deal with. Yes, you can use a phone while waiting in line at the grocery store. But the flip side is that that game also has to be amenable to maybe just being played for a few minutes in a burst. You can’t expect the player to build up much mental context. They may-or-may-not be able to expect a player to be listening to sound. Playing Stellaris or something like that is not going to be very friendly to short bursts.

    • Battery power. Even if you can run a game on a phone, heavyweight games are going to drain battery at a pretty good clip. You can do that, but then the user’s either going to have to limit playtime or have a source of power.


  • I know that modern dryers often use a humidity sensor, and I can imagine that it’s maybe hard to project that.

    But I don’t know what sort of sensors or dynamic wash time a washer would use. I thought that they were just timer-based.

    kagis

    Oh. Sounds like they use water level sensors and time to drain is a factor, so if the draining is really slow, that it’ll do that.

    https://old.reddit.com/r/mildlyinfuriating/comments/1dd4k6g/my_clothes_washer_has_had_one_minute_left_for_the/

    My clothes washer has had one minute left for the past 7 minutes. (i.redd.it)

    Funny… Someone else had a similar issue a few days ago. This was my reply to them:

    This sounds like a drainage issue. Not uncommon. I first learned of this on my previous washer several years ago.

    The machine took a lot longer to drain than it should have, so what should’ve taken a minute or two, took 15.

    A potential cause is that your drainage filter is clogged. Most people don’t even know they have one, much less how to clean it.

    In MOST modern washers, it’s behind a small hatch on the front of the machine. (It may be located elsewhere, depending on your model.). Open the hatch, pull out a short hose, unplug the stopper on the hose to drain any excess water (into a small container of some sort). Then remove the filter…

    The filter itself is typically a cylindrical piece that resides next to the hose. The filter may need to be unlocked somehow to remove it, but either way, once you slide it out you can clear it off of any buildup of hair, lint, and other gunk that’s collected on it.

    Check your user manual (or Google) for your specific model.

    If they have a display capable of it, might be a good idea for washers to suggest to the user that it’s draining slowly and that checking the filter might be in order.



  • tal@lemmy.todaytoGames@sh.itjust.worksTried Stardew
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    6 days ago

    my thought was, '“oh am i going to have to do all this myself?” Idk why I would want to spend my time and effort doing what someone in Rimworld does without needing micromanagement.

    Not really my cup of tea either.

    I don’t think that Stardew Valley is really all that similar to Rimworld. Maybe Oxygen Not Included, Satisfactory/Factorio, Kenshi, or Dwarf Fortress if you’re looking for something similar.



  • Lynne Ingram, a Somerset beekeeper and the chair of the Honey Authenticity Network UK, said: “The market is being flooded by cheap, imported adulterated honey and it is undermining the business of genuine honey producers. The public are being misinformed, because they are buying what they think is genuine honey.”

    The UK is one of the biggest importers of cheap Chinese honey, which is known to be targeted by fraudsters. Honey importers say supply chains and provenance are carefully audited, but there has been no consensus on how technical tests should be applied, or which are most reliable.

    A fun bit of perspective that I like to mention in discussions about this. Roll back a bit over a century:

    Scientific American, November 2, 1907

    Artificial Honey

    Prof. Herzfeld, of Germany, recently brought out some interesting points regarding the manufacture of artificial honey in Europe. It is noticed that when we bring about the inversion of refined sugar in an almost complete manner and under well determined conditions, this sugar solidifies in the same way as natural honey after standing for a long time, and it can be easily redissolved by heating. Owing to the increased production of artificial honey, the bee cultivators have been agitating the question so as to protect themselves, and it is proposed to secure legislation to this effect, one point being to oblige the manufacturers to add some kind of product which will indicate the artificial product. On the other hand, it is found that the addition of inverted sugar to natural honey tends to improve its quality and especially to render it more easiIy digested. Seeing that sugar is about the only alimentary matter which is produced in an absolutely pure state, its addition to honey cannot be strictly considered as an adulteration. Bees often take products from flowers which have a bad taste; and the chemist Keller found that honey coming from the chestnut tree sometimes has a disagreeable flavor. From wheat flowers we find a honey which has a taste resembling bitter almonds, and honey from asparagus flowers is most unpalatable. Honey taken from the colza plant is of an oily nature, and that taken from onions has the taste of the latter. In such cases, the honey is much improved by the addition of inverted sugar. Prof. Herzfeld gives a practical method for preparing this form of sugar. We take 1 kilogramme (2.2 pounds) of high-quality refined sugar in a clean enamelware vessel, and add 300 cubic centimeters (10 fluid ounces) of water and 1.1 grammes (17 grains) tartaric acid. This is heated at 110 deg. C. over an open fire, stirring all the while, and is kept at this heat until the liquid takes on a fine golden yellow color, such operation lasting for about three quarters of an hour. By this very simpIe process we can easily produce artificial honey. Numerous extracts are now on the market for giving the aroma of honey, but none of them will replace the natural honey. However, if we take the artificial product made as above and add to it a natural honey having a strong aroma, such as that which is produced from heath, we can obtain an excellent semi-honey.