• 2 Posts
  • 158 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: January 21st, 2021

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  • Because to implement this you need to negotiate with individual credit card issuers. Basically how this works is that your phone is being issued a virtual card with the keys locked inside the phone’s HSM. Then it can be used to make NFC payments just like any physical card. So you need 1. contracts with many card providers, 2. card issuance processes with these providers 3. huge amounts of compliance bureaucracy. At the end of the day it isn’t really worth it unless you are a huge company and expect to have tons of users or see it as an essential feature of your phone OS.



  • If you just need to intercept the keypresses in webpages then you can inject a content script and handle these. However there is no way with the new WebExtensions API to intercept browser chrome events.

    Additionally there is no way to delay events. So if you want to suppress both shift presses you will struggle to do that. If you are ok to let the first one go through suppressing the second one is trivial.



  • This is worse that USB-C connectors. They did launch Lightning first and it wasn’t significantly worse that USB-C for a long time. Sure, they dragged their feet for longer than they probably should have (I think the iPad switched at a relatively reasonable time) but making their users switch connectors is a big change and it made sense to make sure that USB-C was here to stay and whatnot.

    This is just 100% user hostile. They are doing more work to keep features from their users. Features that the user can just not use if they don’t want them.


  • Yeah, just jump in.

    To get started it is best to keep Windows around, then if you need to get something done urgently you can go back to what you know then figure out how to do it in Linux later. Dual-booting is probably the best option if you are gaming as GPU passthrough can be difficult to get great performance. That is the approach I took a long time ago and then at some point I realized that I hadn’t booted into Windows for months and just deleted the partition.





  • I also had a bad experience where I had a test website under a megabyte in a storage bucket. It was under the free tier and sat there for a few years. Then one month they sent me a bill (it was small, a handful of cents). Contact support saying that this use is under the free tier. They said that data was added then removed from the bucket. I hadn’t logged into the account, no living API keys. They wouldn’t forgive the charge.

    Luckily my credit card had expired so they just locked my account.




  • I would try to avoid VP9. Hardware support is spotty and I suspect that new hardware is going to relatively quickly phase it out. AV1 is better in most circumstances except for a few devices that have hardware VP9 support but not AV1 (a few years of Android phones mostly). So unless you need a specific device you currently own to have hardware decoding support (only really matters if you are on battery for <=1080p content) just skip VP8.



  • My short opinion:

    Video

    h264 is the best option for compatibility. There have been free software encoders and decoders forever and IIRC all patents have expired. Basically every device you will encounter and every software system can play h264 videos and the encoders are fairly good.

    AV1 is the best option for quality. It is completely free and is becoming widely supported. It will likely be supported for a long time as it is the first widely available high quality free codec. It is significantly better quality than h264 so will result in smaller files for the same quality or better quality for the same file size. Hardware decoding support has only really become common in devices that hit the market in the last few years. But most new devices will have hardware decoding.

    Both of these are web-compatible as well which is nice.

    Audio

    Opus for lossy and FLAC for lossless are both some of the best codecs in their class, completely free and widely available. There are also both web-compatible.



  • If you haven’t used any configuration management before it would definitely be valuable to learn.

    However I would also recommend trying Nix and NixOS. The provide much better reproducibility. For example using Ansible-like tools I would always have issues where I create a file, then remove the code to create the file but the file still exists or the server is still running. I wrote a post going into more detail about the difference a while ago https://kevincox.ca/2015/12/13/nixos-managed-system/. However this is more involved. If you already have a running server it will be a big shift, instead of just slowly starting to manage things via Ansible.

    But I would definitely consider using something. Having configuration managed and versioned with history is super valuable.