🎼is/can/should be/do🎶
—Frank Sinatra

Just kind of a simple “how it’s made” but no explanation of the why

I wasn’t thinking about it in this way, but that makes sense. When I was a teenager I was going to a dermatologist for acne treatment. When I started college for whatever reason I wound up with appointments on Mondays a few times. This was probably around 2005 and while computerized calendars were a thing, mobile calendars were not widespread except with PDAs like Palm Pilot and I wasn’t using them, nor did I use a paper calendar to organize my schedule. In retrospect this was a bad idea with my then-undiagnosed ADHD. Anyway, the doctor’s office had this helpful automated phone reminder system that would call you the day before your appointment so if you needed to cancel/reschedule you could do it enough in advance that there wasn’t a penalty for late cancellation. The only problem was it didn’t take into account the weekends, so if your appointment was on a Monday it would call you on Sunday and if you canceled no one from the office would know until Monday morning and you’d get hit with a late cancellation fee. I think I actually did that 3 times and they sent me a letter saying they were dropping me as a patient. I felt that was unfair because their system should’ve been smart enough to call on Friday, but also I wasn’t really doing the prescribed acne treatments much at that point and I think I was getting old enough it kind of went away on its own around then anyways, so I didn’t mind not paying for the visits and medicine anymore. I’m still annoyed as an adult in my 40s, though, because I think that practice is supposed to have some of the better doctors in the area for skin cancer and I’m not sure if they’d still remember and not let me come if I ever needed treatment or screening for that.

Does PeerTube offer RSS feeds?

That’s a neat solution

Mario Kart can be fun depending on how your partner is with video games in general and how you are as a couple competitively. Overcooked can also be a good franchise as a coop game but I’ve also heard in some languages it’s referred to as “divorce kitchen” so your mileage may vary.

I think your last point also applies to Valve. Limiting the number of models simplifies things for Valve; effectively they only have two models to support right now between the LCD and OLED models. From a software perspective I assume they’re extremely similar except at a very low level, mainly with the display panel difference. From a hardware perspective that’s only 2 main SKU families (looks like maybe 6 total with 3 of each?) and still probably a lot of parts overlap except with the panel and I’d assume two variants of the mainboard to accommodate different connections for each panel. Even making the OLED variants complicated things I’m sure, but it should be manageable.

We learned within the past year that Valve is still an astonishingly small company compared to how much revenue it has; I think they were only around 450 employees. That’s pretty doable with software, but dealing with hardware starts to force that level up and would start cutting into the incredible profitability per employee that they’re accustomed to.

Of course they’ve made plays in the hardware space before, but I don’t think anything’s been near the volume the Steam Deck has. Even assuming that they’re outsourcing the manufacturing, and maybe fulfillment, and maybe even warranty repairs, that still means they need employees to manage and support those programs. They need employees trained to support those products. They need to store spare parts and plan to have enough to legal requirements beyond the final sale date. They need to test software updates against every hardware variant prior to release for as long as the product is supported. Keeping the number of SKUs small makes the rest of that manageable and hopefully keeps profitability high and quality of service good. If they start adding too many SKUs then they need more employees, giving lower profitability and they start cutting quality and service until we end up with the bad products and support we see from so many big PC companies.

It seems like they’re working towards opening Steam OS up where other companies can make their own devices. Let other companies handle the incremental updates and making the software work with their hardware. Let Valve keep focusing on just making a few things but making them really good.

Offhand I think AV1 is supposed to be a bit better than H265, but I think the improvement would be pretty marginal. Also, that’s a newer codec with less support everywhere, so you might find yourself slowing down a lot doing live transcoding to a format with better support like H265 or H264, depending on your devices. Add in all the time transcoding your current files from H265 to AV1 and it might just be worth adding more storage space.

I’d like to get a Steam Deck but was wondering if it’s getting close to a newer, better version coming soon. This makes me feel more comfortable, not that I have the budget for one right now anyway.

This looks fun but also like it would be too stressful for me to play often, but for that price probably worth picking up!

I’ve assumed they don’t necessarily all have the same mods, and are usually much smaller, niche communities that on Reddit at least wouldn’t see much traffic and wouldn’t necessarily have to worry about spam the way the fediverse does. And I could be making up a distinction between sister/partner communities that doesn’t actually exist just going from my own assumptions.

I don’t think there’s any official distinction but what seemed to be an informal convention I noticed on Reddit was that sister communities were related topics (probably with some coordination/agreement among the communities’ mods) whereas partner communities tended to be related topics that had the same mod(s). Usually the latter might be something where any individual community would be less active so it would be easier for someone to moderate multiple communities.

For an example using music styles, maybe c/ClassicRock might list c/ClassicPunk, c/PsychedelicRock, and c/Prog as sister communities. If someone modded c/PinkFloyd, c/TheWho, and c/DeepPurple they might be listed as partner communities.

I’ve never heard of professional third-party review of open source code. That’s a service people offer?

Chromecast did get better once they added a remote, and they finally got YouTube TV to work well with switching family accounts. I’ll have to try that launcher because I’m unimpressed with trying to find the different apps.

I still find Roku to be one of the simplest to use, but they do seem like they’re starting to turn more evil.

I have never enjoyed the experience with any Amazon Fire TV and they’ve always seemed laggy.

Apple TV is of course the most expensive but seems to do less selling of user data. Everyone else’s devices seem to sell at cost and then make up the difference on subscription sales and seeing user data. The remote is not great, though. My wife is always struggling with it and hitting the wrong thing. I’m more comfortable with it, but still find the touchpad jumping me to the wrong thing at times. I have seen third-party remotes that aim to eliminate the trackpad problem. I’ve considered buying one hoping it will make it easier for my wife, but paying another $20 for a remote for a system that’s already 3x the competition is annoying. Of course, if you have an iPhone you can also use that as a remote.

If you have a gaming console, especially Xbox or PlayStation, it can fill the role of streaming device. You can buy remote controls that are more user-friendly than the game controller when watching media. Of course, buying a console just to watch content is massive overkill.

I’d suggest not connecting your TV to the Internet and using a separate box for content given how much TV makers want to spy. Streaming boxes might not be much better, though.

This looks like a fun twist on a breakout clone; claimed!

It could be used for identity theft in the pre-Internet days, but it was a lot more work to do (though also a good bit harder to catch)

This is also a good reason to use an actual password manager

I read stories from older university alumni from back when SSN served as student IDs where someone who issued gym uniforms or something like that would wow students by telling them where they were born when they’d tell him their SSN.

It did take forever. Rotary phones work by sending clicks down the phone line that automation equipment listens to. If clicks came too fast the equipment wouldn’t understand it correctly. This was one of the big improvements the touch tone phone brought: it was much faster to dial. Instead of clicks each button generated a tone at a specific frequency and the automated switching equipment could interpret it much faster. At least some of the early phones had a switch to make them send clicks instead, in case the local phone company didn’t support tones yet.

You also need to keep in mind that there were not nearly as many phone numbers back then. While today a family of 4 might have a cell phone for each person (especially by the time the kids are teenagers), in the 20th century most families just had one number for the whole household (and the earlier you go there might have even been just one actual phone in the house).