• 0 Posts
  • 49 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 14th, 2023

help-circle
  • It was a few years back, but after it hit ChromeOS EOL I’m pretty sure it just got some KDE distro; I don’t think I even used LXDE. Didn’t need to do much.

    I was mostly using it for web browsing, forums, spreadsheets, documentation etc. Nothing particularly strenuous.

    I did have one really fun time of modifying PDF engineering drawings by opening them in Libre Office Draw which it handled kinda OK.

    It did get a 240GB SSD but everything else was soldered.










  • HDMI and DP do not carry their signals in the same way. HDMI/DVI use a pixel clock and one wire pair per colour, whereas DP is packet-based.

    “DisplayPort++” is the branding for a DP port that can pretend to be an HDMI or DVI port, so an adapter or cable can convert between the two just by rearranging the pins.

    To go from pure DisplayPort to HDMI, or to go from an HDMI source to a DP monitor, you need an ‘active’ adapter, which decodes and re-encodes the signal. These are bigger and sometimes require external power.



  • It’s pretty common to own a domain but not actually host the email server; doing on-premises email is a security PITA and most providers simply blacklist large swathes of residential and leasable (e.g. VPS) IPs.

    Unfortunately, if you get someone else to host your email, they often charge by the account, not by the domain. Setting up a new mailbox is therefore irritatingly expensive.

    A catch-all email works well, though, and is free from most of the hosting providers. Downside is you get spam…

    Jane@JaneDoe certainly seems more common than mail@JaneDoe.





  • You definitely would have legal issues redistributing the ad-free version.

    Sponsor block works partly because it simply automates something the user is already allowed to do - it’s legally very safe. No modification or distribution of the source file is necessary, only some metadata.

    It’s an approach that works against the one-off sponsorships read by the actual performers, but isn’t effective against ads dynamically inserted by the download server.

    One option could be to crowdsource a database of signatures of audio ads, Shazam style. This could then be used by software controlled by the user (c.f. SB browser extension) to detect the ads and skip them, or have the software cut the ads out of files the user had legitimately downloaded, regardless of which podcast or where the ads appear.

    Sponsorships by the actual content producers could then be handled in the same way as SB: check the podcast ID and total track length is right (to ensure no ads were missed) then flag and skip certain timestamps.