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Joined 8 months ago
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Cake day: June 3rd, 2025

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  • The fundamental problem with using torrents to share small files (which old ROMs are), is that content is only shared while seeding or leeching.

    A torrents health works best, when people are actively leeching. You’re not going to get that for 1 MB files.

    You’ll basically need to force people to seed and not just seed two copies (the default), but like 10:1, which means forcing all the users to chance their settings - which I’m doubtful of this happening on a large enough scale.

    … and the pdfs proposed solution is:

    3.2. The Retro Rush Event Torrents will rely on a community of active players and archivists. To prevent obscure games from having slow download speeds or freezing, a weekly community event will be announced and shown to encourage preservation efforts from the community.

    Goal: The community unites to seed their favourite or obscure titles. This creates a predictable time where download speeds skyrocket, ensuring that even the rarest games remain available.

    I don’t think a rally of specific games is going to be enough to keep these torrents alive.

    You’d basically need to run this as a private torrent, with upload/download credits and credit “boosts” for struggling torrents.

    Or, as was rejected in the pdf, you use tor and create an “anonymous service” and host these small files, but the pdf is right in that tor is not the best tool for multi-MB files.

    Anyway, I share your concern regarding the archiving of old games, but I’m doubtful this will help in a meaningful way.



  • Moonreader Pro. It’s an ebook readers for Android. The Pro/paid version has any feature you could ask for:

    • reads just about any file format (epub/mobi/pdf/etc)
    • has text-to-speech (everything can now be an audio book)
    • you can add annotations/notes/bookmarks (and color code them)
    • the annotations/notes/etc will sync to a remote server (Dropbox, your own self-hosted webdav, etc)
    • it can pull/fetch books from your own remote server
    • where you are in the book is also synced to the remote server, meaning you can read on your phone, but switch to a tablet and immediately continue.

    Any feature, I wish an ebook reader would have - moon reader delivered (but finding these features is not intuitive).






  • … because I can’t find the tab I opened 2 days ago, so it’s faster open it again… which just creates a negative feedback loop of having too many tabs and not able to find anything.

    Case and point: I’m in IT and we use github. Some code requires reviews (which needs “more time” to complete), then often I’m looking at other 3rd party repos’ for documentation/examples/etc. Some might be useful, some are related to my current problem. Oh, I get a ping - I need to finish that PR review: “which tab is it? They ALL say github!” … and I’m too impatient to hover over them. So, it’s faster to just type the URL in and go.

    I loved browser plugin, Vimperator. It was fantastic, I could (at anytime) type “:b <pattern>” and it would search through my open tabs. But I’ve tried a bunch of the “successor”, but universally they seem to get “stuck” when it comes to inputting text - either into text fields (like on a normal email form) or as input into the browser extension.

    Recently, I found an extension that would group tabs based on your rules (so, I could separate the company github tabs from the OSS). It’s far from perfect… but it’s endurable.

    … but what I really wish for is a Firefox plugin that’ll allow me to type parts of the tabs domain or title and it’ll filter the results.



  • You have a good point… and I’ve worked on both sides of the fence. Currently, I’m at the “healthy culture” camp, but it wasn’t always that way.

    While I was working at companies that had a not-so healthy culture, there were things I did to “bring visibility” to these non-work tasks. However, I should add that at these types of companies didn’t really offer a lot of financial compensation for this non-work, but at no-time did anyone challenge my productivity.

    Basically, I’d suggest:

    1. Be (technically) opinioned and make it visible. Often, it’s not your boss you need to impress (as they see your work every day), it’s your boss’ boss. If you have a reputation within the company as a guru in something, it’s easier for your boss’ boss to “see” that you’re bringing “value” outside of you day-to-day tasks.
    2. Bring visibility to these (side quest) discussions. At one company, I created a chat room to use as a sort of “technical self-help”(for all Engineers) and any DMs I got, I would ask them to funnel the discussion into the chat room. I asked them to do it “so others can find the answers to similar questions” and more importantly “to bring visibility to these discussions”. You, your boss, your boss’ boss can see how much time you invest in these topics and they can see that this help does not come for free.
    3. If your not meeting your goals (or are stressed out) , due to these side-quests - tell your boss. Explain (as early as possible) that project X will slip if you keep focusing on unblocking others and let them decide what to do. If you followed-up with Point 2, you’ve got concrete evidence to justify where your time is being spent.
    4. When people ask you “what are you doing?” (like during your Stand Up). Do not answer “nothing” or “supporting others”. Be detailed, mention the actual technical topics (and if you’ve got this chat room, reminding yourself is much easier).
    5. Last bit, which might not be helpful. If it’s the same questions or some fundamental misunderstandings that your often answering: maybe offer a Dogo/training for anyone who’s interested. When you offer it, shout it from the highest tree top - it’ll go far in establishing yourself, in the company’s eyes, as a guru (even to those who don’t understand the topic) and it’ll (helpfully) reduce the amount of questions in that topic.

  • But from the companies perspective this is a net-gain.

    You’ve just unblocked 10 people so they can continue to work… and even if their weekly individual productivity is 25% of yours, combined they’re doing more than twice the amount of work you’re doing and it only cost the company a week of your time.

    Yeah, at times it’s frustrating and distracting, but hopefully you’re getting compensated for the knowledge you bring inaddition to the work you deliver.





  • OP, what bluGill said is exactly your problem (assuming your DMARC and friends are setup correctly).

    The concept is referred to as “email (or domain) reputation”. The implementation details are closely guarded secrets, unique for each email receiver.

    One of the metrics for establishing a positive email reputation the “How much email does your mail server sends?” : the more the better**

    If you’re a large company, it’s fine… but if it’s just a personal domain with < 20 per week, you’re not going to establish a reputation and (depending on the receiver) you’re email might just get dropped.

    The other (frequent) metric is: “Of the emails that are sent, how many are read, and how many are flagged as spam?” In order, for these crowd sourced spam filters to work, they need you to send large amounts of email. Receivers like Gmail/Google are pretty forgiving. However, Outlook/Microsoft are very aggressive, meaning if enough outlook users flag your email as Spam, then future emails sent to outlook from your domain will probably automatically be marked as spam. Obviously, these are all black boxes, so I can only offer my personal observations (take it worth a grain of salt).

    As bluGill mentioned, there is a solution, but it involves moving your custom domain to a larger (re: paid) email provider. If you were to move to Google (for example), it doesn’t matter if your custom domain sends 5 emails per week. Those 5 emails are being sent from Google mail servers (using your custom domain) , which means they’re gaining the “reputation” of google and you can be certain that your emails will arrive, even if it’s (non-obvious) spam. Because, the email receiver assumes that Google will shut you down, if you’re a spammer.

    It’s a sad state that one of the original “pillars of the internet” (email) has degraded to feed only the big tech companies… but unfortunately this has been the case for many years.


  • How do you think this technology would be abused?

    If the device included full audio and video surveillance - I’d totally agree. However, the device does not include video (and it would be a real hard sell to include that).

    If all parties are aware that monitoring will occur (maybe include a sign in the door), I’d argue that minors are aware of what this means.

    Perhaps, it would mean that students “finish up” faster, rather than loitering and vaping (or bullying, etc)… and if that’s the case, I guess the device has fulfilled it’s purpose.

    The article did mention how a hacked device could be used to “play sounds” or trigger false calls for “help”, or gunshots. But I’d argue this would be the modern day equivalent of falsely pulling the fire alarm.


  • An interesting article and tbh, I’d actually support the device (… and I’m usually very privacy focused).

    According to the article the purpose of the microphone is to listen for certain keywords (ie: “help”, “call 911”, gunshots, etc) and to detect when people are vaping, etc.

    I mean, I would never install one in my home, due to privacy and security concerns. But if you’re in a public place, like a school such features make sense.

    If you’re being bullied or need help, having a facility member “hanging out” in the schools public bathroom would be weird, creepy, and more of an invasion of privacy than a mic in a smoke detector.

    That said, students and facility should be aware of what this device is doing and why. However, this article does a very good job of summarizing that.

    Yes, the devices security is rubbish, but was patched. It’s not the first IoT device to do that and it won’t be the last (unfortunately).

    Thanks for sharing the article OP.