OpenStars

OpenStars , 1 day ago to Technology in Key misinformation “superspreaders” on Twitter: Older women

We are more than just Lemmy now - there's Kbin, its fork Mbin, and others like it that are integrating Mastodon into the mix as well.

Maybe Fedizen?

OpenStars , 1 day ago to Comic Strips in ‘FLAT EARTH’ [OC]

BE the change that they want to see in the world - EXCELLENT! :-P

OpenStars , 1 day ago to Comic Strips in Portable convenience [The Square Comics]

Oh I see. I use my Macs (at home + work) as daily drivers, though I rarely use the right-click action iirc - so much of working on a Mac only requires one left-click. Also I use the Terminal to log into a work Linux, so a lot of keyboard interaction too, and like alt-tab and such.

But it sounds like your UX is entirely different: if you rarely use the Mac itself, and/or then use an external mouse the vast majority of the time, and even then don't do right-click actions constantly, then I see what you mean: you almost may not even have trackpad experience!?:-D It would then be harder to retain yourself to do differently, and the few times something doesn't work would stick out in your mind more in that case. If you think you'll keep needing to use a Mac setup in the future, you might try to force yourself to get used to it - like pick a slow day of the week and don't allow yourself to use the external mouse and only use the trackpad. Like learning to type in QWERTY rather than hunt and-peck, building habits takes time but does have a pay-off:-). Even if you don't need to do this, it could make the whole experience more pleasurable i.e. less painful for you! Ofc you know your setup far better than I, it was just a thought, in case it helps:-).

OpenStars , 2 days ago to Comic Strips in Portable convenience [The Square Comics]

I did a search and there are not many ways to change that, unfortunately:-(. Macs often let you do customization settings, even if you have to copy/paste a command-line to do it, but not this time. There is supposedly an app, but I wouldn't recommend downloading strange apps from an unknown maker.

I did find out that there is an Accessibility -> Pointer Control option that will let you assign any hotkey you want rather than click, like F11 by default is left-click and F12 is right-click. I am not sure if you can do just the right but not the left. Though remember, already by default you can hold down the control key while left-clicking, and that is interpreted as a right-click action. I had used a Windows laptop in combination with a Mac OSX desktop at some point, so I hated the damn trackpad of the former, but I had already gotten used to the control-click functionality of the latter, and then when these force-trackpads came out it was a more natural move for me who was already into the zone there.

Plus as people are saying it's noice hardware - the smooth glass feeling and all:-).

The trackpad click-with-two-fingers is not so bad - at least for me, since I rarely use it and I just add one extra finger to the click (I even use the 3-finger expose swipes sometimes, though I never even recall what the 4-finger ones do, and yet the pinch-and-zoom is nice:-)

I am sorry that it isn't working well for you, but I hope you can find something more to your liking:-). At worst, perhaps you can put Linux onto your existing Mac hardware and therefore configure it more directly?

OpenStars , 2 days ago to Comic Strips in A non-guilty pleasure

A fish gotta eat...

OpenStars , 2 days ago to linuxmemes in Shit...

img

OpenStars , 2 days ago to Comic Strips in Portable convenience [The Square Comics]

I am using a Mac touchpad on a laptop right now and no matter where I do the right-click action (extremes of upper-left, upper-right, lower-left, and lower-right, center-of-quadrant again for all of those, true center, etc.) it always takes the click. One-finger clicking is equivalent to "left-click" on Windows while two-finger clicking is equivalent to "right-click", or alternatively hitting control while one-finger clicking will do the trick. I've done this for years and years and it's always worked for me before...

OpenStars , 2 days ago to Comic Strips in Portable convenience [The Square Comics]

I probably misremembered some stuff but also stated it too broadly - it was a lot more "mainstream" in Macs than in Windows, in part b/c you could purchase a low-end Windows machine, whereas all Macs start off at a baseline minimum that is fairly high.

Also, Apple put BSD Unix into the very core of their Macs years before Microsoft started poking their noses around the subject.

The end result was a machine that "just worked", right out of the box, which was pretty nice.

OpenStars , 2 days ago to Comic Strips in Portable convenience [The Square Comics]

"Apple" the company gets hate, b/c they deserve it, but Mac OSX is fantastic - they really put a ton of effort into it, though iOS is a piece of crap - e.g. now they are trying to extort the users to pay money to send files b/t their desktop computer vs. phone, which is just not okay imho. Mac OSX was from an older era, when Steve Jobs was running the company, and people would have legit left Macs (or not switched to it) if it had not been "solid" like it was. Since then, the new era is not to provide "products" but rather "services".

Oddly enough, with the advent of Windows 7 (so many years ago now), it is fucking Microsoft that has been innovating their software - they are such a terrible company (as too is Apple, and Google, etc.), but they at least were pushing forward, more than Mac OSX, as the Apple corporation switched to put nearly all of their development efforts into iOS, and Music, and TV, and so on.

Apple ofc also has that hardware+software integration thing going on - monopolies really do have their advantages, as well as detractions too. You mentioned hackintoshing a Thinkpad, so I guess you are aware that often people will take a Mac and put Linux onto it as well, it's wonderful that people have put in the efforts so that we have such possibilities:-).

The issue you described with the touchpad on the hackintosh sounds more like a particular driver issue, which gets deeper than I have any knowledge of so I'll stop there:-). I will say tangentially that the Mac OSX has a shit-ton of cool features like font antialiasing, the Preview program is amazing, and I could go on and on but what usually gets lost on people is how Mac tended to have had things first, like everything has Bluetooth now, but Mac OSX had it long before Windoze did. I know nothing about Windows 10 or 11 though, except that they push to offer things as a service rather than product, and they show advertisements throughout:-( - those aspects alone turn me away from wanting to use it, even if the rest was somehow a better experience than Mac OSX (which I expect is NOT:-P).

Wow, a nightmare thought just struck me: if Apple enshittifies Mac OSX... the world will become a noticeably worse place, overall:-(. Fortunately someone will have it backed up and we can hack it (even if having to use older hardware), and there's always Linux that while significantly behind - especially in drivers & UI/UX concerns - is better than it has ever been.

OpenStars , 2 days ago to Comic Strips in Portable convenience [The Square Comics]

I also love the handy expose swipe features, offering more functionality that does not require still yet another button. The aesthetics are good but most important it's just so functionally beautiful. Those are probably tied to mainly be usable on a Mac OSX though.

OpenStars , 2 days ago to Comic Strips in Portable convenience [The Square Comics]

I've never used a PC one that I liked, but Macs have superb ones. They are so good I now get trackpads for every desktop I work on too (home + work).

OpenStars , 3 days ago to Technology in New York governor to launch bill banning smartphones in schools

These seem all over the place - or maybe it is just this article that is not explaining it well?

For starters, "smartphones" aren't the only SIM-carrying devices that can access the internet and install apps - dumbphones can do the former and tablets can do both, which you wouldn't even be able to visibly see someone using, if it is in their bag and they use something like a watch interface to it. Laptops too...

The Stop Addictive Feeds Exploitation (Safe) for Kids act addresses algorithmic feeds. It would require social media platforms to provide minors with a default chronological feed composed of accounts they have chosen to follow rather than algorithmically suggested ones.

Ngl, that sounds awesome - and not even just for kids! But immediately after that the article continues:

The bill would also mandate that parents have more wide-reaching controls like the ability to block access to night-time notifications.

Isn't this already built-in to various OS's, so why put the onus onto the app itself?

Electronic devices like calculators have been a staple inside schools for half a century at least, and poor people who cannot afford one of every type of device will generally opt for one device that can install many different types of apps - so to now ban these apps, b/c they might be used in a certain particular manner... while simultaneously NOT stopping school shootings, it blows my mind.

"Political theater" is the phrase that comes to mind. Another phrase is "No child left behind", given how the parents seem to be against these policies, but the State has deemed that it knows better(TM).

Then again, perhaps it has a real purpose in mind after all, as a law designed to extract money out of big tech companies as fees pile up?

OpenStars , 5 days ago to Comic Strips in Pure light being

I choose the hell demon spawn. I wonder what that says about me? Oh wait, no I don't.:-P

OpenStars , 5 days ago to Technology in The Internet Archive is under a DDoS attack

If each request simply came from the same IP address then yeah, all the recipient has to do is block that one and the whole attack is over.

But what if piracy websites were trying to stream content directly from the internet archive rather than make a copy of it first, and messed up to cause this attack. So intentional to cause the traffic but unintentional to cause this amount of it. Or even if those websites first opened the door, and then someone tried to DDoS them, which propagated onwards to the internet archive, whether knowingly or otherwise.

Anyway, I was just postulating that it was theoretically possible... and odder things have and continue to happen all the time so who knows?:-P

OpenStars , 6 days ago to Technology in The Internet Archive is under a DDoS attack

Not "clearly" at all. It could be as simple as someone new to coding doing it accidentally, probably using masking of their request origins (granted, this does not seem very likely at all...:-D).

Also, it forces the archive to expend resources that they could have allocated elsewhere - which would have longer-term consequences far beyond the short-term duration of the attack. Enough attacks like these could cause the archive to deprioritize something else that they had wanted to do, or drop something they used to support but won't be able to continue to do so in that case.

Or, why does a bully hit someone? That too offers purely short-term pain, until the next attack. Yet they do it anyway, and often it works to cow the victim into submission so that future attacks aren't even necessary, and instead the mere threat of one may be sufficient for the bully to get their way.

Also, does the entire rest of the world submit funding to the internet archive? I don't know anything about their finances, but compared to those of e.g. Russian disinformation sources or corporate profit-seeking, surely they are tiny in comparison?

The only thing "clear" here is that the attacker seems to be using the Might Is Right principle, as they are stepping outside the bounds of society to take on this vigilante effort by themselves.