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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 20th, 2023

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  • Not all patents are good. But a patent system is good. It could be better but the general concept is not flawed like the person I was responding to suggests.

    The physical object isn’t what is patented in this case. It is the method to create the object that has a patent. One that can’t be reversed engineered as it isn’t part of the final product. You could only reverse engineer it if the process was not novel or not obvious to anyone knowledgeable in the field. If both of these conditions are true then the patent should not have been granted.

    Patents are not inherently bad. This is a bad patent. Patent laws don’t have to be changed, because this patent shouldn’t have been granted. The issue is ineffective patent reviews, not patents. Getting rid of patents is not a good idea. If you think it is you probably don’t have a good enough grasp on what a patent is.

    You can make something if you figure out how they did it because it was obvious. In this case the patent isn’t valid. If you have to develop a solution then the patent is probably valid. The patent is a reward for developing and sharing the solution publically.

    If you still don’t grasp why patents are useful. It may be helpful to think of it like open source software. The patent is the code base that is freely accessible to everyone. This preserves the knowledge and lets others build on it. However, to incentivise people to make their code open source you provide protections that stop others from selling the same code you developed.

    The incentive mechanism is why far more businesses produce patents than produce open source code.

    If you remove patents businesses stop funding internal r and d overnight. It increase the risk and reduces the reward.






  • It’s the most highly optimised software available for consumer computers. Much easier when you support a very limited set of devices which you have compete hardware control over.

    It is UNIX so very similar to using Linux when you use a terminal.

    The UI is very polished and very stable. MacOS has not changed how the UI works or feels in a long time, during which windows and Linux (gnome/kde) have changed a lot. Both becoming more like MacOS. macOS has changed a little mostly features and styling.

    It has wide support, including support for priority programs that Linux does not. Apple appears and feels like they respect user privacy much better than Windows. You feel like you paid for the product and you are the customer. Unlike windows, where you pay to be exploited for data harvesting to the real customer advertisers. Apple is in many ways in between windows and Linux. Not as free and open, but not as exploitive and limited as windows. It’s a common misconception that MacOS is somehow locked down or walled off, it’s less locked down and walled off than windows. But like Linux it requires some terminal know how.


  • It was very likely a designers decision. It forces the use the use case they wanted; wireless mice should be used wirelessly. I would bet they fought marketing and management to get this on the final product.

    Marketing would want the mouse they can advertise as being useable with and wireless. Female ports are easier to mount and manufacture with they have depth to set the socket. So a plug on the front is much cheaper and easier to manufacture.

    The fact the charging cable doesn’t get used in motion means it will last longer and you wouldn’t have people useing fraying cables on the front of their mouse.


  • The question wasn’t trying to assess your ability to analyse the picture accurately. It was testing your ability to determine the socially appropriate response. The ‘correct’ answer wasn’t relevant.

    You were unable to identify that the questioner only wanted and only required a short simple response. One that only indicated the key concept the image related to. Further more you got fustrated with the question not having the ‘correct’ answer and got obsessed with it.

    This type of question isn’t enough to diagnose someone, but it can be one of many indicators that may form a diagnosis.



  • A small computer, large capacity ssd and two WiFi interfaces (2x usb dongles, or dongle plus usb).

    Small computer could be anything: raspberry pi (or generic and), nuc mini pc or laptop. If you want to use it without a plug you’ll need to add a battery, usb c powered devices could be more convent to power from a battery.

    A ssd is better for this use case. Not because it’s faster, but they are more resilient to being knocked about and dropped. They are also much smaller, especially M.2, and aren’t fussy about how they are mounted.

    The two WiFi interfaces would allow you to create a WiFi bridge to access the internet through a WiFi network and access your media server. It would need some configuration, you may also need to have the computer act as a router if you want to use multiple devices without reconfiguring.

    It may be easier to have your device act as a WiFi hotspot and have the media centre automatically connect to it. This would make it difficult for multiple devices to use it simultaneously, and you could accidentally allow the media centre to do all its updating and downloading over your mobile connection.

    This type of thing is going to be expensive and troublesome to configure unless your already experienced with that sort of thing.

    I think a better solution, especially if you already have a media server. Is to set your media server for external access.

    To get media when you don’t have internet, buy a large capacity flash drive (or external ssd/hdd). When you have access to your media server download all the content you want on to the drive. I think iOS jellyfin can do this without much modification.

    Once out of range of your media server. Delete the content you’ve watched on your device (iPad) to free up space. Connect the external drive through the usb port on the iPad, copy over the next lot of content you want to watch. Disconnect and then watch the content.

    Jellyfin can download the content, but you may need another app to play it when you don’t have access to the media server.

    This approach lets multiple people access a much larger amount of media, effectively simultaneously. It doesn’t require a large amount of often expensive local device storage - you use cheap external storage. It much less expensive if it breaks or gets lost and has very little configuration -if you already have a media server running jellyfin.


  • No it doesn’t, or at least it didn’t for years if that has changed recently.

    No one that knew about this was talking about it or doing anything about it.

    The reality of the situation is only three organisations are capable of producing fully fledged browsers. Google, Apple and Firefox. Every variant, spin and de-whatever is nothing compared to developing a browser. All the chrome derivatives had this in them, arbitrarily execution of code from google. Code that wasn’t included in the binary when you downloaded or updated it. The sort of thing a virus would do. The sort of tool you would use to compromise the security of a system.

    If you want a de-googled chrome the only option is safari, it’s chrome before google got its hands on it. If you want properly open and accessible browsers you need to use something else entirely like Firefox.

    De-googled chrome is a myth.


  • For a home user, leaving beans in hoppers negates much of the improvement in coffee quality that higher end grinders may achieve.

    If you want a big hopper, you may as well save some money and get something like a encore or svart aroma.

    These grinders don’t have big hoppers because that’s an advantage. Smaller hoppers means you can single dose without beans bouncing about for too long. The people chasing cup quality that has them buying these more expensive coffee grinders will already be single dosing, and using fresh beans. Because that can have a disproportionate impact compared to the price difference of many grinders.