I’m a technical kinda guy, doing technical kinda stuff.

  • 3 Posts
  • 476 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: September 27th, 2023

help-circle



  • Why the fuck isn’t there just a simple status LED that is on the same circuit as the camera?

    Because cameras aren’t simple on-off devices powered by a single wire, that’s why. It’s always got power, and it’s turned “on” (send image data over the data bus) and “off” (do not send data) by software commands over the same data bus.

    So the most convenient solution is then have the camera IC have an output that can drive an indicator light. And as camera ICs are basically full computers in their own right, they can be reprogrammed so that they don’t turn on that output.

    End result is that you are much better off either having a physical cover over the camera lens, or having a USB camera that you can unplug.



  • $80k was a good salary 10 years ago. I don’t know how you could raise a family on it, today. And half of Australia is making less than that!

    You can do it, but:

    • You can’t live within 1.5 hours of capital cities or major regional cities.
    • You can’t live in a mining town.
    • You can’t live in a tourist town.

    Unfortunately all the left over places have shit job opportunities, shit services, and are generally classified as shit areas as a result.

    So until you advance enough in a career that you can pull a tree change to somewhere less pricey and still keep your income, you’re screwed.


  • , couldn’t the brokers just filter the period when i started clickning everything?

    They don’t care about the quality of an individual profile, it’s the quality of the aggregate data that’s important to them. If anything, your profile might be identified as an outlier compared to the average and simply discarded. They’re not going to look any further than that and try and “rescue” your data, they’ve got a million other profiles to sell to advertisers.


  • Named after Robert Towns. 150 years before the airing of a children’s television show that provokes the same tired comments from overseas posters every time the word “Townsville” appears in the news.

    “Robert Towns (10 November 1794 – 11 April 1873) was a British master mariner who settled in Australia as a businessman, sandalwood merchant, colonist, shipowner, pastoralist, politician, whaler and civic leader. He was the founder of Townsville, Queensland and named it after himself.”


  • Dave.toCasual Conversation @lemm.eeThe closest that I've been in a relationship
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    12
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    edit-2
    9 days ago

    Well, it’s been twenty years since your closest brush with a relationship and you’re still alive, so there is some amount of success going on in the taking care of yourself department.

    I won’t patronise you with the standard “find your people, hang in there!” comment. If it’s really eating you up inside, you’re going to have to take a few tiny steps towards society, because society won’t make the first move. Otherwise just do whatever you want to do and quit looking into the past.



  • The more we automate, the less people can do, so they don’t have jobs and no income, not able to survive…

    Most solutions to this issue usually involve some variant of a universal basic income. However, that gets politically boiled down to “MOAR TAXES GOVERNMENT IS STIFLING THIS COUNTRY!1!1”, so in countries like the US that want to keep the freedom of being able to be homeless and starving, it’s not going to be possible.




  • And still not a customer in sight for this useless POS.

    Their primary customer is Starlink, and a big chunk of ship development is being paid for by Starlink revenue.

    The internal video of the payload bay shows part of the mechanism that will be used for them. Probably a few more launches and splashdowns and then it will be carrying Starlink sats as test payloads.

    To maintain the full Starlink constellation they need to launch about a thousand satellites a year. There’s your customer for “this useless POS” right there, and they didn’t even have to look outside their own organisation.





  • You’ve got the motive back to front.

    yah, let’s get rid of these cheap, easily manufactured and implemented dials and knobs

    In modern cars those buttons are an input to a body computer which then sends commands over the vehicle data bus to another module that performs the appropriate function. The touchscreen option is much cheaper once you have more than a few buttons to deal with.

    Buttons have different physical shapes, the little decal for the button on each one has to be printed and put on top, each one needs to be connected to power, each one needs to be slotted into the dash somewhere , each one needs to be backlit so you can use it at night, and the signal for each one has to be routed somewhere through increasingly bulky harnesses, etc etc.

    A touchscreen sits on the vehicle data bus and with a bit of software, sends whatever command is needed.

    Is it a great user experience to press fiddly buttons on a touchscreen while driving down a bumpy road? Fuck no. But it is definitely cheaper and less complicated for the manufacturer.


  • Effective advertising has a clear and simple visual language, and this is what UIs should strive for.

    Interfaces can be needlessly complex regardless of being flat or skeuomorphic.

    But flat interfaces still require mental effort to parse. Especially when the interface is complex and/or crowded and you’re trying to pick out active UI elements amongst decorations like group boxes/panels.

    Essentially, flat interfaces are currently popular because of touchscreen devices. Touchscreen devices have limited space and thus need simplistic UI elements that can be prodded by a fat finger on a small screen.

    But I don’t need a flat touchscreen-friendly interface on my non-touch dual 24" monitors with acres of screen real estate. I need an interface that nicely separates usable UI elements from the rest of the application window. That means 3D hints on a 2D screen, which allows my monkey-brain with five million years of evolved 3D vision the opportunity to run my “click the button” mental command as a background process.


  • Is there any sort of way to get the best of both worlds? to have the PC be able to go from power button to jellyfin server started and still have some measure of security?

    Windows with auto login? Not really. That is, anyone with a mouse + keyboard locally can get in there.

    You can set up jellyfin to run as a windows service and then it should auto start and run as a particular user without you having to log in. Have a look in the “advanced” section in the jellyfin docs.