Aussie living in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Coding since 1998.
.NET Foundation member. C# fan
https://d.sb/
Mastodon: @dan@d.sb

  • 7 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • It’d drain the batteries quickly. Wifi uses a relatively large amount of power, and low-power wifi variants like HaLow aren’t widespread yet. Bluetooth has a low energy mode for low-power devices that works well for this use case. I guess it could have a power cord, but then why use wifi when it could just plug into the phone instead?


  • You should try the Bowers and Wilkins system in the BMW iX some time. In the USA it’s a $3,400 upgrade compared to their mid-range Harmon Kardon system (which itself is an upgrade from the base system), but it sounds amazing. 30 speakers including one in every head rest, two subwoofers under the floor, and 4 bass shakers in the front seats. 1615 watts total. Sounds better than some home cinema setups I’ve heard.




  • Australia: Consumer protection laws are better than most other countries, even European countries. For example:

    • Products must last as long as a “reasonable consumer” would expect them to last, regardless of the warranty period. For example, at least 5-10 years for large appliances.
    • If there’s a “major failure” any time during that period (a big problem with the product, if it stops working, if it differs from the description, is missing advertised features, or you wouldn’t have bought it if you knew about the problem beforehand), the customer has a choice of whether they want to have the item repaired, replaced, or return it and get a refund. Customers can also ask for a partial refund based on loss of value.
    • The store you bought the item from must accept returns and warranty claims. They can’t tell you to go to the manufacturer.
    • For repairs, returns and replacements of large items (like appliances), the company must pick it up and drop it off for free.
    • It’s illegal for a store to not offer refunds (unless the items are second-hand).
    • Products must match descriptions in advertising, including what a sales person tells you. If a sales person tells you the product does something but it actually doesn’t, you can get a refund.
    • Businesses get fined for breaking these rules. A chain of computer stores had to pay a $200,000 fine for showing an illegal “no refunds” sign and forcing people to go to the manufacturer for warranty claims, and were later fined $750,000 for doing it again: https://www.accc.gov.au/media-release/msy-technology-ordered-to-pay-penalties-of-750000-for-consumer-guarantee-misrepresentations

    This applies for digital goods, too. As far as I know, Australia is the only country where you can get a refund from Steam for a major bug in a game regardless of how long you’ve owned the game for or how many hours you’ve played. Valve tried to avoid doing this and was fined $3 million: https://www.cnet.com/culture/entertainment/valve-to-pay-3-million-fine-for-misleading-australian-gamers/










  • Verizon deliberately conflates the term unlocked to mean not locked to a carrier (can use a non-Verizon SIM)

    This is what “unlocked” usually means to the general population though. If you search your favourite search engine for “how to unlock phone”, most (if not all) results will be either about carrier locks or about getting into the phone if you forget your PIN/password.

    Someone knowledgeable enough to even know about the bootloader would usually explicitly say “unlocked bootloader” to avoid the ambiguity.




  • Working fine for me on Fedora 40 with a 6.12 kernel. You need to ensure your desktop environment is modern and supports explicit sync. KDE added support in Plasma 6.1, so Plasma 6.1 and Nvidia driver 560 or above should have no issues. I don’t use GNOME but they added support in 46.1 as far as I know.

    One of my favourite underrated things about Wayland is that I could finally disable pasting when clicking the mousewheel. That’s so ingrained into XFree86/X11 that it’s impossible to disable.
    (disabling it only affects apps that use Wayland)


  • On Linux, AMD GPUs work significantly better than Nvidia ones. If you have a choice, choose an AMD. Nvidia is mostly fine though. Even Wayland works well on Nvidia now (after the 560 driver release).

    Sometimes you’ll hit issues with memory management if you have <=8GB VRAM, since the Nvidia driver doesn’t support swapping infrequently accessed parts of VRAM into regular system RAM, like it does on Windows and like AMD does on both Windows and Linux. It’s a long-standing issue.

    You may also need to manually reinstall the driver after kernel updates. In theory, it’s improving as Nvidia are moving most of the driver logic into the firmware, and making the driver thinner with the new open-source out-of-tree driver (https://github.com/NVIDIA/open-gpu-kernel-modules).

    For CPU, I’d definitely go with AMD instead of Intel. Intel aren’t having such a good time at the moment.