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Joined 4 years ago
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Cake day: January 21st, 2021

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  • Robot vacuum cleaners aren’t great a cleaning, but they are very effective at keeping the dust down. You will still want to clean occasionally but with a robot vacuum running regularly you can do it much less often and the house feels cleaner in the meantime.

    I’m also lucky enough to be able to afford house cleaners now. It is such a nice gift to our family to not have to worry about doing these things. We can spend that time doing stuff together rather than cleaning and we don’t think about how dirty the house is and dread cleaning it nearly as often. If you can afford it I would highly recommend it. It definitely isn’t cheap but many people have more expensive habits that bring less joy IMHO.


  • kevincox@lemmy.mltoAsklemmy@lemmy.mlWhy are faucets so expensive?
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    2 months ago

    As with most of these things it is pricing based on value.

    • Contractor is often fixing or building and cares a lot about the price.
    • Most other purchases are during renovations so a luxury expense and relatively speaking the faucet will be a small part of that, so it is easy to milk these people for money.

    1. Launching Steam games outside of Steam can be very difficult. Some games outright won’t allow it.
    2. Steam provides native libraries such as the overlay, networking and matchmaking tools, achievements… You need to have Windows versions of these which wouldn’t be distributed by default in the Linux version of Steam.
    3. In the past Steam just didn’t run under Linux, so you had no other option.


  • It used to be common and useful. I did this even after Valve shipped a native Linux TF2 as at the beginning the Wine method gave better results on my hardware. But that time has long passed as Valve has integrated Wine (Proton) and in almost all cases the Linux native builds will outperform Wine (and Steam will let you use the Windows version via Proton if you want even if there is a native Linux build).

    So while I suspect that there are still a few people doing this out of momentum, habit or reading old tutorials I am not aware of any good reasons to do this anymore.




  • Yeah, I can’t believe how hard targeting other consoles is for basically no reason. I love this Godot page that accurately showcases the difference:

    https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/tutorials/platform/consoles.html

    Currently, the only console Godot officially supports is Steam Deck (through the official Linux export templates).

    The reason other consoles are not officially supported are:

    • To develop for consoles, one must be licensed as a company. As an open source project, Godot has no legal structure to provide console ports.
    • Console SDKs are secret and covered by non-disclosure agreements. Even if we could get access to them, we could not publish the platform-specific code under an open source license.

    Who at these console companies think that making it hard to develop software for them is beneficial? It’s not like the SDK APIs are actually technologically interesting in any way (maybe some early consoles were, the last “interesting” hardware is probably the PS2). Even if the APIs were open source (the signatures, not the implementation) every console has DRM to prevent running unsigned games, so it wouldn’t allow people to distribute games outside of the console marker’s control (other than modded systems).

    So to develop for the Steam Deck:

    1. Click export.
    2. Test a bit.

    To develop for Switch (or any other locked-down console):

    1. Select a third-party who maintains a Godot port.
    2. Negotiate a contract.
      • If this falls through go back to step 1.
    3. Integrate your code to their port.
    4. Click export.
    5. Test a bit.

    What it could be (after you register with Nintendo to get access to the SDK download):

    1. Download the SDK to whatever location Godot expects it.
    2. Click export.
    3. Test a bit.

    All they need to do is grant an open source license on the API headers. All the rest is done for them and magically they have more games on their platform.




  • There are some password managers where you need to either manually look up passwords and copy+paste or autotype them or select the correct password from a dropdown. Some of these will come with an optional browser extension which mitigates this but some don’t really tract domain metadata in a concrete way to do this linking.

    Some examples would be Pass which doesn’t have any standard metadata for domain/URL info (although some informal schemes are used by various tools including browser-integration extensions) and KeePass which has the metadata but doesn’t come with a browser extension by default.




  • Tips for being secure online:

    1. Use your browser’s password manager to generate random passwords.
    2. In the rare case you need to manually enter your password into a site or app be very suspicious and very careful.
    3. Never give personal information to someone who calls or emails you. If necessary look up the contact info of who called you yourself and call them back before divulging and details. Keep in mind that Caller ID and the From address of emails can be faked.
    4. Update software regularly. Security problems are regularly fixed.

    That’s really all you need. You don’t even need 2FA, it is nice extra security but if you use random passwords and don’t enter your passwords into phishing sites it is largely unnecessary.


  • I’m not an expert on modern alarm systems but it seems that it is very common and fairly inexpensive to have cellular data backup. Not every system has it, but many do. In that case cutting the main connection will likely result in someone appearing on site fairly quickly.

    Many cameras also have some form of local buffering. So even if you are gone before someone does show up you still may find yourself recorded.

    But at the end of the day just put a bag over your head and you can be gone by the time anyone shows up without leaving a meaningful trace. Other than the very top-end system security systems just keep the honest people honest.




  • Prom is fun. You get to hang out with all of your classmates, ask someone out. A subset of people are always going to go overboard, but keep in mind that you don’t see the “normal” cases. Most people just walk up to someone and ask them out. They find a date from the school or go alone.

    I’m from Canada so I don’t know if the US is wildly different, but here it is a bit of a big deal, but I think part of that is what makes it fun, you sort of build a bit of hype around what would otherwise be just another school dance.