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  • 69 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 22nd, 2024

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  • At first glance, this all sounds positive, especially for users without an affinity for AI.

    However, time will tell whether the program will become less appealing if it turns out that the majority of Affinity users are not persuaded to sign up for a Canvas subscription for AI editing.

    Either certain tools and functions will disappear behind a paywall, or compatibility will be restricted by no longer allowing free import and export to certain file formats.


  • I believe it did happen more than once. The reason why life on Earth has developed into such complexity is that the primordial soup, where life developed out of, has been cooking undisturbed from events like supernovae and such that would have wiped out everyhing (Earth istself as well as the whole solar system) nearby. Life could develop over several billion years, and cosmic events like asteroid impacts didn’t wipe out all of life. Remaining life startet over again.

    If life developed on another planet with similar features like earth, it could have been wiped out by a nearby supernova, by a collision between two planets and similar events, before it got any more complex.




  • I started learning the language in school (5th to 10th grade). I had a teacher who insisted very much on grammar which sucked while being a student, but in hindsight it turned out to be a good foundation.

    With upcoming internet English became more and more a part of every day life, as there is more content in English availiabe than in my native language. In order to build up a proper vocabulary and to understand figures of speech and play on words I started to watch cartoons in English - first easy-to-understand-ones, like The Simpsons, because I knew the plot of the episodes already since they were aired dubbed on television. In the beginning I found South Park very hard to understand because they speak rather fast, but meanwhile I understand everything now.

    Today I am able to speak fluenty.





  • Yes, all these email services want you to pay up for them. I think this is the price tag for privacy.

    I have switched to Mailbox org a couple of years ago. I had a freemail provider before that. Unfortunately, this providers’ data got leaked, and therefore I got pwned, luckily only resulting into a tsunami of spam. The entry-tier with Mailbox is 1 € per month (= 12 € per year) which is compareably cheap in my opinion. Of course, it depends on what features you desire - more features cost more money. They also offer a free trial for 30 days (but it is wise to start the free trial at the begin of a month, as far as I recall).

    The process of switching the email provider took me at least 6 months, where both the old and the new email adress have to exist simulatiously.

    If you need to register quickly to an online service, i can recommend Temp-Mail org. Its free, but you need to have the tab opened for the registration process, as all data (including the free temporary email adress) will be deleted once the tab is closed. I used this service to register with my home instance, because back then I didn’t want to expose my real email adress.



  • This is and was the current workaround. On my old phone I had to install an app for that because they decided that there is an up and down which didn’t allow for a 180° rotation.

    When held upside down the buttons on the side are misaligned to where the fingers and the thumb are placed. Thus, the volume up-and-down buttons are swapped, which is rather unintuitive.

    Before a smartphone holder for my car was handed down to me (I never bothered to buy one for myself) I placed my phone inside the cup holder located at where the shifter is. When the phone needed to be charged, it was not possible to have the phone oriented in the “normal” direction, as the phone would have stood on the charging cable resulting in damaging of the cable. For that reason I made use of the app that allowed me to rotate the phone, so that the charging port would have been on the upper side.


  • A phone with the charging port on the upper side instead of the bottom. This makes using the phone easier when it is being charged. Also, recessed camera lenses. Why do they have to stick out? When placing the phone on a surface, the camera lens cover will get scratches over time. If the phone was just one milimeter thicker, the cameras on the back wouldn’t stick out and one wouldn’t need a phone case, that adds to thickness anyway. It also would be nice if phone manufacturors would still have smaller screen sizes (max. 6") in their portfolio, as it is inconvenient to carry a larger phone in a pocket.






  • Don’t get me wrong - I’m all in favor of the EU Directive that states that all such devices must have the same charging port from now on. I think that this should have been introduced way earlier.

    I also realize that this law doesn’t apply to Apple exclusively, but you don’t find the Lightning port on any other non-Apple devices. If the Lightning port didn’t exist at all, Apple devices probably would have been equipped with USB C ports instead.

    But one thing that affects all kind of devices is that they will be outdated at least software-wise mostly deliberately, no matter what charging port they are euqipped with. This even happens with Android-based phones, as there is a wide range of phones that can’t be fixed with alternative software (ie. Graphene, LinageOS and similar).

    In my opinon it should be law that manufacturors should allow for end-of-service-devices to be opened up and upgraded with an alternative OS/ software, to extend liftime and to avoid being discarded. This affects mobile phones as well as smart lightbulbs, headphones, or vacuum robots and many more. This indeed has nothing to do with the EU Directive for charging ports, but it could have been another step towards keeping devices longer in the life cycle and thus avoiding landfill.

    Too many devices are being bricked by manufacturers deliberatly, and there are barely any ways to repair such devices, because manufacturers do not let it happen.