A person with way too many hobbies, but I still continue to learn new things.

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

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  • Seems like a good opportunity to remind folks about the Kiwix project, which allows you to download local private copies of select information such as Wikipedia. It was originally created to provide offline access to content for countries that were otherwise blocked, but events like this have sparked some recent discussion about archiving older files to preserve history.



  • It’s weird to see T-mobile taking this stance. I switched to them years ago because they were one of the few that supported unlocked phones, and even offered them for sale. Their policies might have changed on this, but I just bought an unlocked phone off Ebay this Summer and all I needed to do was pop my sim card into the new device. Hell I had to specifically install the visual voicemail app because there wasn’t any bloatware on the phone when I got it. So I guess I’m not following what their complaint is about?



  • Most of us can’t afford the sort of disk capacity they use, but it would be really cool if there were a project to give volunteers pieces of the archive so that information was spread out. Then volunteers could specify if they want to contribute a few gigabytes to multiple terabytes of drive space towards the project and the software could send out packets any time the content changes. Hmm this description sounds familiar but I can’t think of what else might be doing something similar – anyone know of anything like that that could be applied to the archive?




  • I’ve been reading some discussions this week about fake polls claiming Republicans are winning to make Dems think there’s no point in voting. Apparently it was a technique used in a previous recent election? It would explain all the results I’ve seen in the last few days showing them with a strong lead, where a week or two ago other polls showed an even race. Doesn’t really matter though, everyone should remember that the only thing that counts is getting out and casting your vote no matter what the polls might suggest.




  • Did you know that, by default, your email sends information to mailing list platforms about your reading activity? The platform gets to know if you opened the message, and often how far along you’ve read in it.

    What is this shitty email program they’re talking about? Sure, they can embed a 1-pixel tracking image to see when you opened the email (if you allow auto-loading images), but how would they know how much you’ve read unless some incredibly horrible email program actively sends out that data?




  • Seems like that would be an easy problem to solve… require all edits to have a peer review by someone with a minimum credibility before they go live. I can understand when Wikipedia was new, allowing anyone to post edits or new content helped them get going. But now? Why do they still allow any random person to post edits without a minimal amount of verification? Sure it self-corrects given enough time, but meanwhile what happens to all the people looking for factual information and finding trash?