Khrux

I’m trying to make my own smart watch as a hobby experiment at the moment, and one of my most important features is NFC payments. It’s a nightmare, although I understand why. Currently my plan is to buy another smart watch or smart ring and take the NFC chip from it, which is maddening, but more or less my only option due to contactless payment security.

To do contactless payments, your bank must effectively permit the specific device, otherwise go through GPay or Apple Pay, who in turn just do the permitting themselves. Anything outside of the standard ecosystem just gets overlooked.

The best workaround while avoiding these companies is to find a smart watch or ring that has compatibility with a proxy card, such as Curve. But beyond halving the price of the accessory, this is pretty much an arbitrary decision.

And sometimes just super plain ones. I remember getting my favourite Skyrim potion texture mod from there specifically.

One thing I did notice a while back, was seeing the 2022ish interface for YouTube and Google search and feeling how dated it was, still absolutely usable mind you, just clearly with a design ethos from an older era.

Most the time, I feel that changes Google make are absolutely arbitrary, rounding a button and then squaring it again, but I need to give them credit that there is something more, something about staying at the forefront of GUIs. It’s still all bullshit of course, the old one looks older but is identically useful.

It it to wait 30 mins then do it every 10, and pop it in startup, those were the days.

The other was Free_Cupholder.EXE. I miss disk drives for this reason more than for actual use.

Indie also covers an enormous financial area. People generally group games into AAA, Some nebulous middle ground games that are generally produced by the major studios but aren’t AAA and Indie.

There is a difference between indie games that sell millions of copies vs dozens and this lack of discrepancy makes this complex. I once pirated a game called infernium after seeing a friend play it on switch, then learnt that it’s an absolutely tiny game by a solo developer. I happened to adore the level design and lore of that game so much that I bought it on steam and then bought all of his other games too just to support him.

On the flipside, we refer to a game like Hades as indie. I love supergiant games and have purchased all their titles but I would have felt zero remorse at pirating Hades.

Maybe the only thing that I feel is sad in all of this is that the massive AAA games takes years to be cracked nowadays, which means only indie games are pirateable. I don’t like the unfair dichotomy this creates. There are probably a reasonable amount of people who pirate indie games and buy AAA games for this reason, and that’s bad for industry.

Yeah I absolutely do not miss snagging my headphone cable on every door or drawer handle in a 1 mine radius. Also I think I used to go through 3-4 sets of headphones a year by wearing out the cable, spending the last few weeks precariously holding the cable 24/7 to enjoy the music.

Wireless does have it’s issues but I’m on my 2nd wireless pair, both bought in the £30 region and it’s probably been 5+ years since I used wired now. Battery hasn’t been an issue really, and although I lost one headphone on my previous wireless set, I can live with it.

I absolutely support the want for a headphone jack so people can choose wired, but I’d still choose wireless.

Yeah I really doubt streaming would change anything to 4:3.

Disney+ famously changed classic Simpsons to 16:9 and in the process, cropped enough to make some visual gags not work, but I can’t imagine them preferring 4:3 over 16:9.

Funnily enough the YouTube algorithm looks at titles, so if you watch a lot of bootleg musicals on YouTube, you also recommended softcore slime fetish content.

Or at least my girlfriend does, maybe I should ask her about that…

I should say I’m actively opposed to anyone gaining control of the fediverse but when I started using Lemmy, Masterdon and Peertube, (until about an hour ago) I was unaware that it would be this easy for a big company to just engulf it if they wished to.

If I knew that the fediverse could be controlled and then drained like every other internet community, I would have approached it differently.

I’m don’t totally understand the fediverse and how it works. How does meta making one of their options federated harm the rest of the fediverse?

I just took a look, it’s only £18 but that’s still reasonably pricey for an app when I don’t really need the improvement while I have the ads blocked, especially as I had paid for a lifetime subscription before for Reddit.

I bought sync for Reddit at probably about £5. I can’t bring myself to buy it for lemmy at £100 or whatever so I’m having to get by with just blocking ads.

The only other two paid apps I have is a driving theory test app and the pro version of a cocktail guide app which I’ve probably had for a decade now.

Although I could probably fix it, this also plagues me on android, just not quite enough to do anything about it.

Is PixelFed trying to offer a subjectively better experience to Instagram or just an open source and decentralised equivalent to it?

It would be nice to see options to turn off seeing this content but really what some of us consider bloat, others may love to use.

They’re generally useful in promoting temporary content such as festivals. In places such as Instagram they’re found their use in being used for casual posts that aren’t of the quality of the users more cultivated actual posts. For example promoting a friend’s page or casual holiday pictures. Particularly if the account has a brand such as hand made goods, it’s a place for the owner to post personal content too.

I don’t actually know what PixelFed is really but I currently only use web content where I don’t really follow people as much as ideas and content, I couldn’t name a single lemmy or Reddit user, I only follow hashtags on Masterdon and I don’t really have much loyalty to who I watch on YouTube, so this content doesn’t appeal to me because I don’t often care about their stories. If PixelFed is a content site where you do follow personal content, then it’s probably right for them.