dual_sport_dork

dual_sport_dork , 1 day ago to Technology in Google Chrome’s plan to limit ad blocking extensions kicks off next week

Somebody's going to need to write a web site with a very, very compelling function to make me give enough of a shit to not just click away if it is deliberately coded to not work with Firefox/adblockers. Like, gives me a million dollars per page load functionality.

dual_sport_dork , 3 days ago to Technology in Amazon execs may be personally liable for tricking users into Prime sign-ups

Try it if you've been locked out due to too many PIN attempts.

dual_sport_dork , 3 days ago to Technology in Amazon execs may be personally liable for tricking users into Prime sign-ups

That's not what qualified immunity means.

Qualified immunity protects the police (or other state actors) from civil suits arising from their conduct while lawfully performing their duties. It does not shield them from criminal prosecution.

dual_sport_dork , 3 days ago to Technology in Amazon execs may be personally liable for tricking users into Prime sign-ups

Apple loves to do that kind of shit.

For instance, you can't factory reset an iPhone without connecting it to either an OSX computer, or a PC running their special program. Don't ask me what's wrong with just holding down power and volume up, or whatever. Like every other phone on Earth can do.

dual_sport_dork , 8 days ago to Technology in EcoFlow’s $200 PowerStream is so clever, you might buy a $4,000 solar generator

If one of these were made for the US market it would obviously be configured to work at the US mains voltage and frequency. (Europe is 50hz, US is 60).

Your home's power input is also 240 volts in the US, regardless of being split into two 120 volt rails at the breaker box. It would be trivial to hook up a 240 volt system if you really wanted to, albeit not through one of your regular 5-15/5-20 outlets. You'd have to do it via a dryer outlet or something.

Watts are watts. If the unit is capable of feeding 800 watts into your home's electrical system, the voltage is irrelevant provided it can supply sufficient amps. A normal US household circuit is 15 amps, so a hypothetical US version of this thing would have to supply ~6-2/3 amps at 120v rather than ~3-1/3 amps at 240v. No big deal. It's not even close to maxing out a single residential circuit on either continent.

dual_sport_dork , 9 days ago to linuxmemes in toxic help forum

See, this is exactly my point in my other comment above. I could do this in about five seconds with Corel PhotoPaint.

1. Make a new document that's arbitrarily large.
2. Import both (or all 3, or all 10, or however many) images. (Images can be batch imported.)
3. Snap the first one to the top left corner.
4. Snap the others below it. Their corners and edges will click together if you have alignment guides enabled.
   4a. Optionally resize any of the images by just typing in the value you need in pixels, in the toolbar when it's selected. If you need to know the size of any other image, just click it and it'll tell you. It's not even in a menu.
5. Crop tool (D) to knock the oversized canvas down to whatever size you need. Again, you can just type this in, in pixels, and it's not even buried in a menu.
6. Export, post, accumulate lulz.

Export to a flat format (.jpeg, .png, .gif, whatever) and your output will be flattened. You don't need to think about layers or merging or layers being bigger than the canvas or not. There is no, "Be careful not to XYZ." What you see in the preview is what the output will look like. Period. You can even apply your monitor's color calibration to it or the color profile of any other output device (printer, a different monitor, etc.) on the fly if you are a big enough nerd.

You can do this in an even simpler dumber way in CorelDRAW!

1. Import the images. Images can still be batch imported.
2. Arrange them however you want, snap them together, whatever.
3. Lasso them all and export.

That's... literally it. You don't have to crop, you don't have to trim, or layer, or anything. You can specify the dimensions of the output file in the export window before you hit save if you want it to be different than the original. Your arrangement doesn't even have to be rectangular and it will still work.

dual_sport_dork , 9 days ago to linuxmemes in toxic help forum

"And if I do give you a solution, we'll be sure not to share it with anyone else."

dual_sport_dork , 9 days ago to linuxmemes in toxic help forum

No, GIMP does suck.

It has the same problem as most FOSS packages that are too wide in breadth and have multiple contributors with their own hobby horses pulling in all different directions, and to this day does not actually provide a feature-complete whole, nor an interface that actually makes sense. And it's not a matter of the workflow just being different -- it categorically fails to replicate functionality that is core to its commercial competitors. Numerous other "big" productivity packages have the same problem including FreeCAD (boy does it ever), LibreOffice, etc. I say this as a staunch supporter of FreeCAD, by the way. It's the only CAD software I use even though it's a pain in my ass.

The shining exception to this I see is Inkscape, but it is still significantly less powerful than even early versions of CorelDraw.

For 2D graphics work these days, I hold my nose and just use Corel. I use it for work. Like, actual commercial work. That I get paid for. It is at least a lesser evil than doing business with Adobe.

And if you want to stick it to the man, it is easily pirated.

dual_sport_dork , 10 days ago to Technology in Samsung’s smart fridges mistakenly warned users its free TV service was ending

LG all the way. I have not had much in the way of positive results from GE since their acquisition by Haier. Their build quality took an immediate and noticeable nosedive. I have seen DOA, damaged, and defective units of all stripes from all brands over the years. But I have never seen any units arrive from the factory not fully assembled, but still packed up in a box and shipped in that state, except from GE. Multiple times.

I received a PFE28 refrigerator with no ice maker mechanism, just a hole in the door where it should have been installed. I also received a CGS700 range with the oven light door switch not installed, just rolling around in the bottom of the oven cavity where it was subsequently baked by the customer. I also received one CXE22 refrigerator with no face panel on the center drawer. There are other examples but those are just the recent ones I can remember off the top of my head.

Haier's management philosophy seems to be in lockstep with the Chinese Manufacturing Way, which is to steal whatever tech you can, do a slapdash job of making it, lie about everything, and when pressed about it just lie some more.

Honestly Whirlpool is not doing great these days, either, but they're better than Samsung or GE. Whirlpool has seemingly devolved into mostly competing with itself with all of its various sub-marquees: Amana, Maytag, KitchenAid, Gladiator, Jenn-Air, Roper, Affresh, etc. A better strategy might be to compete with their, you know, competitors. Whirlpool's warranty service network has also essentially evaporated over the last few years, so if you don't already know a repairman who is Whirlpool factory authorized to do warranty work you may as well just open a Youtube tab and figure that shit out yourself. Otherwise you'll just be told "there are no servicers or service dates in your area and the system only lets us look two weeks in advance" over and over again until your warranty runs out.

The less we say about Samsung the better. At one point we were experiencing a roughly 50/50 first-week failure rate of their laundry machines and dishwashers. A coin flip. That's worse odds than a first run XBox 360 not red ringing itself to put it into perspective. Don't buy a Samsung appliance no matter how shiny it is or how big of a touch screen it's got.

dual_sport_dork , 10 days ago to Technology in Samsung’s smart fridges mistakenly warned users its free TV service was ending

The Samsung FamilyHub fridge does indeed basically have an overgrown tablet duct taped to the door. It runs Samsung's Tizen operating system, which you may recall was at one point going to be the Next Big Thing and a competitor to Android and iOS. Obviously that didn't happen, so now it's relegated to refrigerators.

Honestly, my theory is that Samsung is just pulling a sunk cost fallacy move and was desperate to put Tizen in something -- anything -- to justify its development.

It's terrible. All the hardware is also located inside the upper right door, and it dumps all of its waste heat out the back of the door into the refrigerator compartment. The design is breathtakingly stupid.

dual_sport_dork , 11 days ago to Comic Strips in Elders [Alex Krokus]

You'll never pin a single thing on me, copper.

dual_sport_dork , 11 days ago to Comic Strips in Wait what, you don't have a COVEN?

There is such a thing as a coven of wizards, but it's typically referred to as an argument.

dual_sport_dork , 11 days ago to Comic Strips in Elders [Alex Krokus]

I had an x201 that I sold on to pay for my now "current" (ha) OG Thinkpad Yoga. Sometimes I do miss that old brick.

Sure, it only had two point touch instead of 10... But it got 11 hours of battery life with the extended (swappable!) pack, a daylight readable display, built in GPS, a fingerprint reader that actually worked, and if anyone tried to steal your laptop you could just hit them with it.

dual_sport_dork , 11 days ago to Comic Strips in Elders [Alex Krokus]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBqhIVyfsRg

dual_sport_dork , 11 days ago to Comic Strips in Elders [Alex Krokus]

Running an OS significantly newer than original on a computer gets filed under "expectations." Nobody bitches their Amiga can't run Windows 98, either. If it is 10 years old, its original OS was Windows 8, updates for which ended in 2016 (or last year, for Windows 8.1). No new bloat after that!

But even so, unless the computer in question is a netbook or something it'll be fine. For reference, I have a ThinkPad laptop that was manufactured in 2012 and I still use it daily. It runs Windows 10 just fine. Updates and all. The latest Corel suite, modern browsers, video editing, no problem. PC performance reached a bit of plateau coincidentally... about 10 years ago.

The MTBF of even a middling consumer hard drive is, if we are being extremely uncharitable, 300,000 hours. That's 32 and a quarter years of continuous usage and there are vintage hard drives in circulation in perfect working order that are much, much older than that. The main thing this laptop is going to need help with is its battery, which probably is degraded a bit by now.