Weight & Diet Trackers

I’m not going to be detailed with this section because it was honestly the worst one to gather info on

I feel this. I use Waistline. Or I should say I would use Waistline if it wasn’t such a drag, but in reality I haven’t launched it in months. It was the closest drop-in replacement I could find for MyFitnessPal (which is proprietary and extraordinarily bloated), letting me search a database of foods either by type or barcode. But MyFitnessPal was a much smoother experience. I still recommend Waistline because AFAIK it’s the best out there, but the bar is pretty low.

Both have a problem with redundant and contradictory items in the database, because they are at least partly crowdsourced. Lots of entries have weird or meaningless units.

That was the my first distro. Getting it to run off a FireWire drive was an interesting introduction to Linux.

Fun fact: yum stands for Yellow dog Update Manager. I know it’s been replaced by dnf but I still think that’s cool.

Jerboa is solid, but it’s not feature-rich. Not great for media browsing. It’s still my main client since I use Lemmy mostly for text, not images or videos.

Eternity and Voyager are worth looking at, too.

I’ve seen multiple new users drag Macintosh HD or Documents to Trash in literally the first minute of using a computer. It was perhaps the most common first action I witnessed. Fortunately, none of them located the “Empty Trash” command before I stepped in.

It never crashed the system, but this was in the 90s when we were already on System 7 or even OS 8, so I’m not sure how the older versions handled it. Dragging a disk icon to the Trash on the classic Mac OS ejected the disk, so I wouldn’t be surprised. Simply dragging the System Folder shouldn’t cause an instant crash, but it would fail to boot if you restarted for sure. So the story could be mostly accurate but just missing a step.

Yes, thanks! I did indeed mean Termux. I’ll edit my post.

Okay, you just blew my mind. How does one download installers for DRM-free games on Steam? How do you even tell which games are DRM-free? I was not able to find answers with some quick searching, just community-maintained lists of games that are ostensibly DRM-free in one way or another. But how do I verify that? How do I archive installers?

There are some free, open-source command line tools that can do this.

First off, there’s exiftool. It’s the go-to utility to read and write metadata in a wide variety of file types, like mp3, jpg, and you guessed it, pdf. It’s very easy to use:

To read all the metadata in a file: exiftool -a -All (where is the path to your pdf).

To erase all the metadata in a file: exiftool -a -All="" (that’s two double-quotes, to indicate a blank string). Please note that this will overwrite your file in-place! If you want to save the output as a new file, use exiftool -a -All="" -o .

exiftool is likely all you need for your use case, but if you need more advanced PDF manipulation, with a truly dizzying array of options, there’s Ghostscript. Ghostscript can read, write, and convert PDFs, and provides hooks to apply any PostScript commands and options.

To simply print out information on a PDF file: gs -dPDFINFO -dBATCH . This will show you the metadata, such as author, title, etc.

I’m…not going to give you an example of how to use Ghostscript to edit metadata because I’m not confident I’d get it right. The gist is that you use PostScript commands with the -c flag. It is truly arcane but extraordinarily powerful.

If you’re on Linux, you can likely get both of these with your distro’s default package manager. On Mac, use Homebrew or MacPorts. On Windows, you can download prebuilt binaries from their web sites. I think you can even run them on Android using Tmux Termux.

Good point. I can never keep my USB 3 naming schemes straight.

The faster nvme-based sticks can even exceed 3.0’s 5gbps!

Thanks! I checked and actually, dark mode was already on. Huh. I guess I haven’t tried since…I don’t even know. Maybe I didn’t have qt6 installed last time?

annakournikova

Definitely look for portable SSDs rather than flash drives. Different technology, usually significantly larger (physically). Easily saturates a USB 2.0 connection, so look for USB 3.0.

Back when Microsoft supported Windows To Go, they had a short list of verified drives to use. Surely outdated now but might be a good starting point.

FWIW I used to run Windows 10 off a Samsung T5. It worked fine, except that it would always shut down when I tried to suspend. Still works as far as I know, I just haven’t used it in a long time.

The most effective regulation here is from payment handlers.

Not sure what eventually became of this, but MasterCard shitcanned PornHub a few years ago. See https://www.bbc.com/news/world-52543508

I also see a statement from 2022 reinforcing that decision. https://www.mastercard.com/news/press/2022/august/mastercard-statement-reinforcing-adult-content-standards/

I guess even that’s not very effective since PornHub is obviously still in business. I wonder what their numbers looked like before and after.

Under the settlement terms [PDF] spotted by The Verge, people who bought a Vizio TV in California after April 30, 2014, can file a claim. They’ll receive $17 or up to $50 if the fund allows it. The individual payout may also be under $17 if the claims exceed the $3 million fund. Vizio will also pay attorney fees. People have until March 30 to submit their claims. The final approval hearing is scheduled for June 20.

These class-actions are always peanuts in the end.

It’s good for new games too! With Lutris I can even install Windows games with Proton on Linux, or choose my own Wine setup. I think Heroic Game Launcher does the same.

Best of all, no internet connection is required once a game is downloaded, unless the game specifically demands it. You can save your installers locally and keep them forever, never needing to phone home. If push comes to shove, install a VM of an old OS, and it’ll run just the same. Connecting old OSes to the internet is potentially a security risk. And, as we see here, Steam ain’t gonna work on old OSes anyway. You’re going to need to pirate the games you already bought if you want to play them again in 20 years.

How do you get dark mode in Strawberry under KDE? I remember trying to follow some guides and not having much luck. But that was a long time ago at this point. Does this “just work” now?

If this has any effect at all, it will just be to funnel users into shadier and shadier sites. At least PornHub is not actively distributing malware.

android can do this

How so? You mean running a full Linux VM or something? Android doesn’t run any desktop apps natively.

if you mean the tablet UI mode, yeah, that’s an easy thing for Apple to implement. I think they already have, more or less. iPadOS already has mouse support.

Honestly, I’m not 100% sure how to set it up, because I let Spiral Linux handle this for me. Spiral Linux is basically a Debian spin, not a full distro. It installs Debian and preconfigures some reasonable defaults, like BTRFS, backported kernels, virtualization support, and some other niceties. The end result is a pure Debian system, operating solely on Debian repos.

If you’re already running Debian, or want to install from stock Debian media, there are instructions from various places. The gist is that the snapper package automatically sets this up, though you might need to manually configure some subvolumes. Here is a very detailed guide that starts from zero. It is mildly opinionated so it’s a little hard to tell what the minimal config would be: https://medium.com/@inatagan/installing-debian-with-btrfs-snapper-backups-and-grub-btrfs-27212644175f

Search for the part where they mention apt.conf.d.

Apple’s been moving toward unifying their OSes for over a decade now. They’re playing the long game. They probably still have another decade (or two) to go.

Apple’s stance now is clear: developers need to make universal apps if they want them to run on both platforms, using tools and frameworks that are common to both. It’s much easier to make an iPad app run well on a Mac than vice-versa. I use some Mac apps that were ported from iPad, and the experience ranges from “okay” to “perfect”, depending on how much care the devs put into it. This is obviously the future of Mac software development, but it would require rewriting many apps almost from scratch. Apple’s not going to pull that rug out from under us anytime soon.

The next natural step would be to allow iPads to use the “desktop” UI of universal apps when connected to a keyboard and mouse. But I don’t think we’ll ever see iPads running arbitrary Mac apps. When I think of the Mac-only apps I use, I just don’t see how they’d run on iPad. How am I gonna run BBEdit on an iPad when there are hundreds of menu items, and a ton of UI elements that are like 8 pixels square? Never mind the lack of a real file system.

Microsoft tried this with Windows 8. It went poorly. The experience of using desktop apps with a touch screen sucks, and trying to make desktop UIs touchscreen-friendly across the board just handicapped desktop users. Apple has a better strategy here. They’re slowly molding the software ecosystem to make this Not Suck.

I slept on BTRFS for years, until getting it by default in OpenSuse. I’m never going back. Snapshots and dedupes are killer features.

I’m on Debian now, and I get an automatic before and after snapshot with every apt install.