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    1. Questions about graphics card failures

      TL;DR: How long should a graphics card last? What can I do to make them last longer? This is perhaps an odd question to ask, but I've been a console gamer for most of my life and have only been...

      TL;DR: How long should a graphics card last? What can I do to make them last longer?

      This is perhaps an odd question to ask, but I've been a console gamer for most of my life and have only been all-in on PC gaming for maybe 1-2 years and I think I may be missing something.

      So there has been about three times when I have spent money on a half-decent graphics card, and each time they have failed me. The first one was a genuine hardware failure, probably a memory failure judging from the artifacting. The second one failed for reasons I have been unable to figure out. It didn't appear to be overheating, but I was getting driver errors that suggested it were; reinstalling from scratch did nothing to fix it.

      The last, most current one is the one that bugs me the most. I'm getting the same problems; driver crashes just like overheating, except this one has better temperature monitoring and I can see that isn't happening.

      I previously thought that the reason why my graphics cards would always crap out on me was because those were cheaper cards from less reputable manufacturers, but this last one is really bugging me because it's relatively high end and from a reputable manufacturer - it's a Gigabyte Radeon RX 5700, complete with the giant AMD reference cooler. I'm getting it RMAed, but since I didn't keep the receipt I am still going to have to pay to fix it even though it should theoretically be under warranty.

      I've done a ton of searching to find out how I can possibly solve this myself, but I am frankly astounded by how little information the drivers give out on Windows. I'm seeing that the device is being reported as unavailable but nothing whatsoever as to why.

      To make matters worse, it seems like this isn't actually common for other people. Most people seem to be replacing their graphics card because they are obsolete, not because they physically fail.

      So basically what I am asking is, how long is a graphics card actually supposed to last for? Do I just have astonishingly bad luck?

      10 votes
    2. password, the typing game, is about to receive mobile support

      I've been working on the mobile version of password for a while now, mostly lending to the fact that much of the infrastructure of the game required expansion to accomodate for that. Plus, this...

      I've been working on the mobile version of password for a while now, mostly lending to the fact that much of the infrastructure of the game required expansion to accomodate for that. Plus, this sort of gameplay on mobile is a new territory for me, which makes it both worrisome and exciting.

      Long story short, you can preview the mobile gameplay of password with the same link:

      Play the game.

      The gameplay is different from the desktop version. Here, you have to tap the keys in the order of their number: 1, then 2, then 3, and so on until the last key. Tapping keys out of order (4, then 6) results in a foul, which takes away a bit of time. Tapping all keys in the correct order means you win the round and get awarded the score. Other instructions are on screen.

      It is NOT the final version. It's playable but contains some visual bugs. I'm gonna work on fixing those in the coming weeks. Right now, I'm looking for feedback:

      • How does the mobile gameplay feel?
      • How does the sizing of the score looks?
      • Are there any problems with swiping or tapping?
      • How does the timer bar look on smaller screens? (Think smaller than iPhone X.)
      • How does the timer look on devices that have a notch?
      • Does it load the correct version at all? (If you're on a mobile device – smartphones and tablets – you should not see keyboard references. If you do, it didn't load the correct version of gameplay.)

      Desktop gameplay has only received visual updates. You can still play it with the same link.

      Let me know if you encounter issues. You can post here, or you can open an issue in the GitHub repo. If you do, make sure to provide what information you can on the issue, like what sort of a device you're using (maker, model, OS version, browser etc.): this helps figure out the problem easier and quicker.

      I know of these issues so far, and am working on resolving them:

      • after pressing the last key of the order (8 right now), the red border flashes, as if you've received a foul (you don't)
      • score has to fully animate towards the final value before it resizes to fit the screen
      • swiping distance may or may not be too short, so it may feel as though it doesn't register
      16 votes
    3. ?

      If you add 2 backticks to an empty space in a blockquote it makes a kind of hole. your Odd? Admittedly the subtlety is top notch.

      5 votes
    4. As a DM, I kinda hate Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition

      I hate that enemies have so low armor class. In earlier editions, you had to be tactical, use flanking manoeuvres and charge attacks, prepare the right support spells, maybe even pick the Weapon...

      I hate that enemies have so low armor class. In earlier editions, you had to be tactical, use flanking manoeuvres and charge attacks, prepare the right support spells, maybe even pick the Weapon Specialization feat for your favourite weapon. In 5e, no need; just stand wherever, roll an attack, you'll probably hit. In addition to removing much of the tactics from the game, this makes it basically impossible for enemy spellcasters to use duration spells. Good luck succeeding on 4 concentration checks per turn.

      I hate that enemies' proficiency bonus is based on their challenge rating. No high-attack low-damage monsters here. Don't worry; the tank in your party will never need healing, any level-appropriate monster needs to roll ridiculously high on the dice to hit them! Everyone else just stay in the back and lob your bloody cantrips, and the battle will be over in 3 turns.

      I hate that attack cantrips do as much damage as a weapon attack (or more). Why even have weapons at all, when your cantrips do more damage than a longsword, with better range than a crossbow.

      I hate that cantrips scale with character level. No need to learn anything new for the rest of the game, your trusty Eldritch Blast will be your most powerful attack throughout. Especially when you get access to Greater Invisibility and don't need to rely on your bloody familiar for advantage on attack rolls.

      I hate that familiars can do help actions in combat. Advantage every turn! And since they're no longer a class feature but a spell, they're also available to fighters and rogues, no multi-classing necessary. And unlike in earlier editions there are no real consequences of losing your familiar. All you lose is 10 gp worth of incense to get them back, a pittance at higher levels.

      I hate that a long rest fully restores hit points. No need to ever stay in one place for longer than 8 hours, no need to conserve spell slots to do end-of-the-day healing, heck; no need for a healer at all really! And it gets worse when they reach 3rd level and get access to Leomund's Tiny Hut, and don't even need to find a safe spot to camp.

      I hate that wild shape is basically useless in combat, due to challenge rating restrictions and the lousy selection of beasts in the Monster Manual.

      I hate that the only logical combat use of Polymorph is turning into a dinosaur. Prepare for the inevitable discussion around the table: Can my character turn into a tyrannosaurus rex, even if they've never seen one? No? But, uuuuuh, they saw a picture of one in a book at the library!

      I hate that you can use Counterspell to counterspell someone else's attempt at counterspelling your own spell.

      I hate that any character can use any skill. No need for a rogue, just hand those Thieves' Tools to the character with the highest Dexterity, they'll get that door open.

      The worst thing is that this game went through lots and lots of play-testing before it was released. The developers must have known about all of these issues and chosen not to change them, meaning that none of these are bugs; they're all features! This is how the developers intended the game to be!

      Did I forget any of your peeves about the game? Add them in the comments. Alternatively, comment with what you love about 5e, let's add some positivity to this rant.

      13 votes
    5. Looking for resources to create a Wilderness Survival/Camping 101 syllabus

      Hi everyone, Recently I became interested in learning about wilderness survival for the first time since I was a Cub Scout. I like to camp, but I'm the type of person who pours a can of fire...

      Hi everyone,

      Recently I became interested in learning about wilderness survival for the first time since I was a Cub Scout. I like to camp, but I'm the type of person who pours a can of fire starter on the camp fire after setting it up tipi style and then goes around bragging about how good I am at fire-starting. (I would be completely lost without a lighter and starter fluid.) I am planning on taking a camping trip with a friend of mine who has a great deal of wilderness survival training after COVID-19 restrictions are loosened, and I would like to come prepared.

      I have found outlines for several course syllabi on wilderness survival, but not resources for each of them. Here are two examples below:

      Example 1

      Lesson I: Introduction

      Lesson II: The Psychology of Survival

      Lesson III: Introduction to wilderness survival planning

      Lesson IV: Fire

      Lesson V: Clothing

      Lesson VI: Shelters

      Lesson VII: Sustenance (Food and Water)

      Lesson VIII: Introduction to Signaling

      Lesson IX: Introduction to map and compass

      Lesson X: Survival Kits

      Example 2

      Lesson 1: Introduction to Wilderness Safety and Survival

      Lesson 2: Survival Essentials for the Wilderness

      Lesson 3: Selecting the Right Gear

      Lesson 4: Health and Safety

      Lesson 5: Treating Illness, Bites, and Stings in the Wilderness

      Lesson 6: Traumatic Injuries and Environmental Illnesses

      Lesson 7: Environmental Illnesses and Their Treatments

      Lesson 8: Understanding the Importance of Your Clothing

      Lesson 9: Procuring and Purifying Water

      Lesson 10: Food and Nourishment: Plants, Fruits, and Bugs

      Lesson 11: Food and Nourishment: Crustaceans, Birds, and Fish

      Lesson 12: Food and Nourishment: Tracking and Acquiring Mammals

      Lesson 13: Food and Nourishment: Preparing and Cooking Game

      Lesson 14: Navigation

      Lesson 15: Signaling

      I was hoping that perhaps some Tilderinos could help me out in filling in the blanks with resources for wilderness survival topics, or even some anecdotes about learning wilderness survival yourselves.

      Thanks for any help!
      -gbbb

      7 votes
    6. When I press the right trigger on my game controller, my system's audio crashes. Probably the weirdest bug I've seen yet -- anyone feel like helping?

      due to the looming pandemic forcing everyone to stay inside, I've recently decided to get back into video games. I did a fresh install of windows 10 the other day, and tried to play a few games...

      due to the looming pandemic forcing everyone to stay inside, I've recently decided to get back into video games. I did a fresh install of windows 10 the other day, and tried to play a few games with my controller. I found that whenever I press the right trigger on my controller, my computer's audio cuts out system-wide immediately and does not come back on until I restart.

      The controller is a wired Afterglow for Xbox 360 PL-3702.

      Windows 10, version 1903.

      I see two audio devices under Sound, Video and Game Controllers in Device Manager: a AMD High Definition Audio Device and a Realtek Audio device.

      I've tried updating drivers for my controller and audio controllers.

      I've reproduced the issue and collected logs of it following the steps here. If you know how to read these I'd be happy to send you the trace.

      Now, I've tried to look at the trace of this in both Windows Performance Analyzer and Windows Media eXperience Analyzer to try and get a better sense of what's causing this. I see a pretty clear event where a bunch of stuff shows up in the visualizer, but I don't know what any of the stack traces that show up mean. This did not occur on my previous install of Windows on the same computer so I suspect it's related to something with some new Windows "gaming" feature I didn't have before.

      I'm really at a loss as to where to go from here. It's both perfectly clear and completely mystifying. Any ideas?

      11 votes
    7. Jailbreaking - How do you know if a tweak is safe?

      I've been jailbreaking for years now, and one of the things that have always puzzled me was how the jailbreak community determines whether or not a tweak has malicious code since they aren't...

      I've been jailbreaking for years now, and one of the things that have always puzzled me was how the jailbreak community determines whether or not a tweak has malicious code since they aren't always open-sourced. With the latest releases of checkra1n, and unc0ver, I've gotten back into jailbreaking since I wanted to jailbreak my 12.9" iPad Pro. From my understanding, the jailbreak itself (usually) is open-sourced, so it can generally be "vetted" that way. I typically stay away from using too many tweaks and try to stick with those from the "more well-known" developers, but I'm curious how others decide which developers/tweaks to trust and use? Do you strictly base it on "bug-reports" and a developer's reputation? What other factors come into play? There are tweaks like "Compatimark" that helps with compatibility information (but that's not really what I'm talking about).

      Edit: First time posting a topic here, so hopefully it isn't breaking any rules.

      9 votes
    8. What are some bugs/glitches/exploits that have actually made games better?

      Usually bugs, glitches, and exploits degrade the experience of a game, but occasionally they can actually work to a game's benefit. In some cases, they can become significant enough to become part...

      Usually bugs, glitches, and exploits degrade the experience of a game, but occasionally they can actually work to a game's benefit. In some cases, they can become significant enough to become part of a game's identity. In others, they make a broken game worth playing in the first place. Even without such legendary status, a given wrinkle in a game might simply make it more enjoyable or entertaining, or perhaps open up unexpected modes or paths of play.

      What are some examples of these, and how did they improve their associated games?

      29 votes
    9. Metadata missing on ~music listings?

      I just noticed today that in ~music, the "topic-info-source" metadata isn't visible in listings; it shows the author name instead. Clicking through to the post it's clear that it's been scraped,...

      I just noticed today that in ~music, the "topic-info-source" metadata isn't visible in listings; it shows the author name instead. Clicking through to the post it's clear that it's been scraped, it just doesn't get a site name or favicon.

      eg: Youtube link on ~movies versus Youtube link on ~music

      Is this intentional? It sorta makes it look like everything on ~music is a text post.

      3 votes
    10. A bunch of updates and fixes from open-source contributors

      Over the last week, a number of updates have been made by people other than me contributing code to Tildes through its open-source repository. I wanted to make a post to highlight some of these...

      Over the last week, a number of updates have been made by people other than me contributing code to Tildes through its open-source repository. I wanted to make a post to highlight some of these changes and let everyone know about them, since there are some great updates and fixes in here:

      @deing made it possible to create links that will pre-fill the subject and message for private messages. For example: https://tildes.net/user/Deimos/new_message?subject=Test+Message&message=Please+don't+actually+send+this+to+me

      @blitz saw me make an offhand comment about a rare bug when someone submits a link to an IP address, and got a development environment set up and fixed it right away.

      @Bauke has been on a tear, fixing a lot of long-outstanding issues and adding features. So far:

      • Added a way for users to view their two-factor authentication backup codes (previously you could only see them at the time you activated 2FA).
      • Added "View Markdown" for comments and text topics. This is inside a new "More" dropdown menu, and will show you the markdown that the poster used, so that you can check how they did some formatting or copy-paste if you want to use someone else's post as a template of sorts.
      • Added new settings (under "Site behavior settings" on the Settings page) to always open links to Tildes groups and users in new tabs.
      • Fixed a few issues with inconsistent interface elements and styling.

      There are multiple more merge requests still waiting for me to review, and I'll probably be making some other posts soon once some of those get merged in as well. Thanks, the contributions are greatly appreciated! If anyone else is interested in looking into contributing, the CONTRIBUTING file in the repo is probably the best place to start.

      And as usual, I've topped everyone back up to 10 invites, accessible on the invite page.

      53 votes
    11. The financials block not showing up?

      I might've missed something, but why did the Financials block disappear from the main page? And the numbers on the financials page are zero. Also, while we're at it, there should probably be a...

      I might've missed something, but why did the Financials block disappear from the main page? And the numbers on the financials page are zero.

      Also, while we're at it, there should probably be a “Financials” link in the footer.

      10 votes
    12. Announcing the alpha release of Intergrid

      Intergrid is an online outliner and note-taking app. It's inspired by – and in many ways replicates – Indigrid, except it's on the Web. It's free to use, and it's readily available right from the...

      Intergrid is an online outliner and note-taking app. It's inspired by – and in many ways replicates – Indigrid, except it's on the Web. It's free to use, and it's readily available right from the main page.

      Why Intergrid?

      The main goal of Intergrid is to help you focus on the notes.

      There are no settings. You can't pick the font. Theming is not an option. There's only content, and what you want to do with it.

      Plus, it looks cool.

      Is it feature-complete?

      Hell no. It's been in development for three months – which is to say, not very long. It still has ways to go.

      Which is why I'm keeping the initial release rather quiet: Tildes and a handful of friends are the only people to know about it so far.

      Are there bugs?

      Afraid so. There are some I know about, and there are probably some I couldn't even reach.

      Why release it, then?

      Because it works already. You can add, edit, and save your notes in-browser. As long as you have cookies enabled, it will serve you. (Intergrid doesn't use cookies, and has no tracking to speak of, but the permission for localStorage – the technology used to store and gather data about your notes – is adjacent, as far as browsers are concerned.)

      It would be of particular use to people on systems other than Windows. While the current version is focused on desktops, future versions may gain mobile support – all the more likely because, outside from a handful of hardcoded interactions and design considerations, there's nothing preventing mobile users from enjoying the app.

      There's also the pragmatic reason: something Jeff Atwood called "Always Be Shipping", all the way back in 2007. You can't get feedback on an app that has no public version. Your programming expertise and design sense will only get you so far. Getting it out there – and going forward with the feedback – is a generous part of the process.

      Where are you planning to take it?

      The first step would be the fix the bugs. There will be a list of known ones in the comments.

      Once those are fixed (or can be postponed without repercussions to being able to use the app), there are features I'm going to implement within the next couple of months. Most of them, at least initially, are going to be put in to keep up with Indigrid's feature set.

      • Views: open, move, and close columns, each hosting a different view on the notes, allowing you to gain perspective or edit multiple ideas simulatenously

      • Bookmarks: store views as separate named bookmarks, allowing you to traverse different mental spaces within the notes

      • Action History and Undo/Redo: record changes to the notes and time-travel between its different states, because sometimes, you want to be able to "go there" and not be weighted down by rock-solid commitment

      • Offline Use: work with your notes even when the Internet is down

      (Even though the code for columns is already in the development branch, I was unable to come up with a respectable way of handling it before New Year, which is when I promised to release the app.)

      In the long term, I'd like to make sure you could access your notes from any browser on any device. This plan also includes the ability to create and share read-only or editable partial copies of your notes – for example, as presentation or a basis for an online discussion. After finishing with shaping up the current, local-only version, this is where want to take the development. I reckon it would take me somewhere between 6 and 12 months to finish the codebase for this.

      Anything else I should know?

      Do keep in mind that this is an early release. There may be bugs – perhaps even the kind that will rid you of your notes. If you're uncomfortable about using software this early in development, please don't: your sanity is dearer to me than getting users.

      It will, however, get stable over time. If there's ever a breaking change on the horizon – the kind of change that will change an aspect of Intergrid radically – users will be notified about it at least two weeks ahead, so that at least they could backup their notes. I want to ensure the safety of mind for the users of Intergrid, so that they know their notes are in safe hands.

      That said, make regular backups anyway. The nodes are encoded/decoded as indented plain text, which means they can be transferred to and from a simple textfile with copy/paste. Any single whitespace character – space, tab etc. – is considered one level of indentation, so it doesn't matter how you indent your plain-text notes: they will be aligned as you'd expect. Intergrid and Indigrid both export tab-indented text.

      Can I help?

      From the coding and design perspective, I would appreciate open-source involvement. However, at this stage, even though there's a repository awaiting changes, I'm uncomfortable making it public just yet, because licensing is hard and I don't want to get into any sort of legal trouble without at least understanding what I'm dealing with.

      Once this and other aspects of open-sourcing the code are dealt with, I'm going to post another update.

      If you'd like to support the development financially, you could donate via PayPal.me. The first $5 or so will go to supporting the infrastructure: the monthly hosting payment and 1/12th of the yearly domain name price. (Even though the domain name has been paid for for the next two years, I'd like to be able to host the app reliably. The domain name is directly tied to the data saved – you can't access another website's saved data unless they're on the same main domain – which is why it's important to keep it.)

      Check out Intergrid

      19 votes
    13. Laptop review of Acer A315-42

      So I bought this laptop mainly for web browsing, document editing, note taking and programming with perhaps light gaming although that's not something I've tried yet. So, really just for school...

      So I bought this laptop mainly for web browsing, document editing, note taking and programming with perhaps light gaming although that's not something I've tried yet. So, really just for school work.

      Specifications

      Laptop Model : Acer Aspire 3 A315-42
      Laptop screen : 1080p IPS (with matte finish?)
      CPU : R5 3500U
      RAM : 8GB DDR4 (6GB available because of iGPU)
      Storage : 256GB SSD NVMe
      Wireless : Qualcomm Atheros QCA9377
      Wired : Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL8111/8168/8411 (According to lspci)
      2x USB 2.0, 1x USB 3.0, 1x HDMI port, Audio jack, 1x RJ45 Ethernet port
      Battery : 36.7Wh

      Linux compatibility

      Everything worked out of the box, gotta modify TLP to not kill the touchpad and webcam. The touchpad seems to have a mind of its own when it comes to being detected, It seems to be a kernel bug, unsure what I'll do about it concretely but rebooting a couple of times makes it work. Nothing to install thanks to AMD's open source mesa drivers. Might need a kernel higher than 5.3 because of general Ryzen 3000 issues but I've not tried, it was already higher than that.

      Operating system tested

      Basically never touched Windows, directly installed Fedora 31 Silverblue.

      My Silverblue configuration is :

      ● ostree://fedora:fedora/31/x86_64/silverblue
                         Version: 31.20191213.0 (2019-12-13T00:42:11Z)
                      BaseCommit: a5829371191d0a3e26d3cced9f075525d2ea73679bd255865fcf320bd2dca22a
                    GPGSignature: Valid signature by 7D22D5867F2A4236474BF7B850CB390B3C3359C4
             RemovedBasePackages: gnome-terminal-nautilus gnome-terminal 3.34.2-1.fc31
                 LayeredPackages: camorama cheese eog fedora-workstation-repositories gedit gnome-calendar gnome-font-viewer gnome-tweaks hw-probe libratbag-ratbagd lm_sensors nano neofetch
                                  powertop radeontop sysprof systemd-swap tilix tlp
      

      Kernel : 5.3.15
      Gnome : 3.34.1

      Body and Looks

      The screen back has metal, I believe it feels quite sturdy. The rest is reasonable feeling plastic. The material used just loves to imprint grease / fingers which kinda sucks - the keys being the exception thankfully. There was also stickers on the inside which well, are somewhat standard but I thought they were pretty obnoxious so I removed them.

      Typing experience

      It's nothing amazing but it's good enough. I'm not really knowledgeable on keyboards so that's as much as I can say on it, really.

      Performance

      Everything feels quite snappy but I don't game at all on this machine so I'm not pushing it too much other than while I'm compiling or doing other things. The temperature does go up to 75°C and the fans get a little loud but it's not that bad. It's mostly the bottom getting hot so it's not something you notice too much while typing. It also cold boots quite fast, in about 10-20seconds I want to say but I've not benchmarked that. It's my first computer with an SSD so there's that.

      Battery life

      I get about 5hours with tlp installed doing web browsing, some programming occasionally, listening to music on the speakers and chatting. Personally I was kind of expecting more from this considering it's an APU but it seems to be what other people are getting on similar setups so It'll do.

      Conclusion

      Overall, I'm pretty happy with this laptop considering how I bought it for 575$ on sale. I made this review mostly because I wasn't finding much information about this laptop on Linux and well, I don't know, I guess I felt like it. If you have any questions, ask up!

      11 votes
    14. Can't seem to play the games I want to play, considering a forced-march approach

      I was wondering if anybody had any tips for muscling through a game. I've got a few games I want to play or go back to, such as Stardew Valley (I completed it before the 1.3 update, wanna play...

      I was wondering if anybody had any tips for muscling through a game. I've got a few games I want to play or go back to, such as Stardew Valley (I completed it before the 1.3 update, wanna play 1.4), and Factorio (I bought in a fit of passion, haven't gotten an hour in). There are others, but these are the two I find myself going "I'm going to play this!" and I just never get to, and it's not for time.

      I like the concepts of these games, and I've got something like 135 hours on Stardew Valley, but seem to get bored after I've restarted it (I lost some key items and bugs caused me to never get them back, plus the mine completion bug fixed in 1.3). I started Slime Rancher after playing through it in early access, but can't seem to get back into it after it went gold a couple years ago.

      I realize I'm sort of asking for a way to force myself to play games, but has anybody done this? I'm thinking for a given game I can set smaller goals to strive for, and work on doing that, but was wondering if anybody has any ideas.

      9 votes
    15. Tag formatting inconsistencies

      I've been noticing a couple of weird formatting issues with tags on topics. For some posts, the first tag is shown before the metadata, then the rest of the tags are on a new line below. This...

      I've been noticing a couple of weird formatting issues with tags on topics. For some posts, the first tag is shown before the metadata, then the rest of the tags are on a new line below. This isn't always the case, and so far I can't find any rhyme or reason for whether it does or not. It's not like some CSS float issue or anything, it's actually creating two <ul>'s. — example

      The second issue I've noticed is sometimes the dangling part of a letter like lowercase "g" will be cut off by the footer. It seems like this is caused by .label {line-height: 1.2;}, but it's also inconsistent, and I haven't figured out why. In this example the "g" in "climate change" is not affected.

      Maybe it's just me, I dunno. Firefox 70 on linux. I'd create a gitlab issue, except I am very lazy.

      7 votes
    16. Death, Disrupted

      Original page is unencrypted so I'm posting the article here. Death, Disrupted Tamara Kneese Imagine your spouse dies after a protracted illness, but you are charged with maintaining their digital...

      Original page is unencrypted so I'm posting the article here.

      Death, Disrupted

      Tamara Kneese


      Imagine your spouse dies after a protracted illness, but you are charged with maintaining their digital avatar. They’re present when you’re making dinner and watching Netflix in bed. What happens if you plan to start dating again? Do you hide them in a corner of your basement? The infamous “Be Right Back” episode of the British science fiction series Black Mirror is an exaggerated version of this speculative scenario, but the future is in many ways already here.

      San Francisco-based entrepreneur Eugenia Kuyda’s best friend, Roman Mazurenko, died suddenly at a young age. As technologists who spent countless hours messaging each other over various apps and platforms, and because Roman was also a Singularity proponent, Kuyda decided the most fitting way to memorialize Roman would be to construct a postmortem chatbot based on an aggregate of his personal data. Kuyda quickly realized that, much like Weizenbaum’s ELIZA, Roman’s friends engaged in heartfelt, intimate conversations with the bot (Turkle 1984). Through her startup company called Luka, Kuyda built a prototype. Replika mimics your patterns of communication and learns more about you while you are still alive, acting as a confidante and friend as well as leaving a potential digital legacy behind.

      Eterni.me, funded by an MIT entrepreneurship fellowship, makes many of the same promises Marius Ursache, a technology entrepreneur, started the company as a way to create digital copies of the dead. He, too, suffered a personal tragedy that inspired the startup. In addition to answering personal questions posed by a chatbot, the Eterni.me avatar relies on additional data: "We collect geolocation, motion, activity, health app data, sleep data, photos, messages that users put in the app. We also collect Facebook data from external sources.” Skeptics have raised questions about surveillance, privacy, and data rights attached to the digital belongings and likenesses of dead individuals, as well as the healthfulness of continuing intense relationships with the dead through mediated channels. Life Naut purportedly uploads your mind file into your bio file, or at least will when technology is advanced enough. In this context, genetic and biometric information is potentially combined with personal data streams to simulate a human being. Terasem, a transhumanist organization, backs Life Naut. Martine Rothblatt, one of its founders, created a robot clone of her wife, Bina.

      Immortality potions have been around for millennia, promising long life while sometimes inadvertently poisoning their consumers. Beyond the hucksters and hoaxers, however, some wholeheartedly believe in the quest for a magical substance that will indefinitely prolong life and cheat death. Rather than relying on the alchemy of past centuries, such as the liquid elixir found in an Ancient Chinese tomb, today’s immortalists tend to work in the tech industry, pitching products built from recipes of code and financial speculation.

      In Silicon Valley, short-lived startups centered on radical life extension and digital immortality abound. While promising their users endless posterity, the companies themselves are dependent on the whims of venture capital. Not everyone’s a cynic, however, as some elite techies really do think they can escape the limits of their earthly fate, uploading their minds to become part of the cosmos or remaining young and virile for centuries through cryonics or biohacking. The apocryphal part is that wealthy technologists plan to live forever at the expense of ordinary users, who may only achieve immortality through their measly data.

      Data Ghosts

      Social networking services for the dead are emblematic of a fantasy regarding disembodied information and its capacity for thwarting physical decay and death (Hayles 1999, Ullman 2002, Braidotti 2013). With data-based selves, habitual, consumer-based, and affective patterns constitute a speculative form of currency and capture; to know the data is to know the person (Raley 2013, Cheney-Lippold 2017). Through harvesting data from a variety of sources, it is possible to predict dead individuals’ responses to conversational prompts or, employing resources like Amazon’s recommendation engine, what a dead individual would purchase if they were still alive. For the most part, companies don’t go so far as to claim that these captured patterns or glitchy avatars are the same exact thing as the person they represent, but they are still of social value. Perhaps in a world where many transactions and interactions happen through awkward interfaces—from virtual assistants on banking or travel websites to app-based healthcare or iPad ordering systems and the on-demand economy—a data double is close enough.

      This is why digital afterlife companies also exist on the more mundane side of the spectrum. Digital estate planning startups promise to protect your personal data forever, passing your accounts onto your loved ones after you die. After death, illness blogs and even email accounts may take on a new aura, as they are visited and kept by mourning kin members and broader social networks. Through an act of intergenerational exchange, ordinary Twitter and Instagram accounts can become treasured family heirlooms. This is obviously not what social media, with its focus on rapid, real-time responses, was intended to do. Death has disrupted social media. In the same way that you would want to care for your tangible property and keepsakes like houses, jewelry, and mutual funds, you might also want your descendants to take care of your Facebook profile and email accounts (Kneese 2019). Dead Social promises to help individuals organize their social media wills, bequeathing password information as well as goodbye videos and final status updates along with funeral instructions and organ donation information. In many ways, digital media have entered into serious existential concerns over life and death. Recent works by media scholars like John Durham Peters (2015), Amanda Lagerkvist (2015), and Yuk Hui (2016) underscore the ontological status of digital objects and the techno-social assemblages inherent to digital afterlives.

      Silicon Valley’s “fail fast, fail often” mantra is at odds with eternity: most digital legacy companies die out almost as quickly as they appear. Apocryphal life extension technologies are deeply rooted in the techno-utopianism and hubris of Silicon Valley culture and much older dreams of achieving immortality through technology. Immortality chatbots rely on venture capital and the short-term metrics of startup culture, as well as on the mountains of personal data ordinary people accumulate across everyday apps and platforms. There is an inherent temporal contradiction between the immediate purposes of digital media and their capacity to endure as living objects. Startups are, for the most part, intended to die early deaths; in Silicon Valley circles, failure itself is a badge of honor. Thus, the longevity of people’s digital legacies relies on the lifespans of corporate platforms, as well as a number of potentially ephemeral startups.

      Despite its techno-optimism, Silicon Valley is also a cynical place. Or at the very least, it’s full of bad ideas: many startups are built to fail. Failure comes so naturally to Silicon Valley that a San Francisco-based conference called FailCon launched in 2009. What does it mean to trust your personal data, your most intimate collection of digital objects, to ephemeral startups? Can they really help you live forever? And if so, what does digital immortality look and sound like? (Immortality chatbots are stilted conversationalists and would never pass the Turing test. Still, they purportedly preserve and store the essence of a human personality).

      Because digital estate planning companies are not lucrative, often providing free services, they tend to quickly fold and vanish. What seemed to be a promising enterprise in 2008 is mostly a dead end today. Over the course of my dissertation and book research, most of the startup founders I interviewed left the business and nearly all of the digital estate planning companies I researched have folded: Sites such as Legacy Locker, Perpetu, MyWebWill, 1,000 Memories, CirrusLegacy, Online Legacy, Entrustet, Lifestrand, Deathswitch, and E-Z Safe have all disappeared. Digital death is an underlying condition of digital posterity. It is ironic that such web-based companies promise to keep your data alive forever when digital estate planning startup companies are themselves highly erratic and subject to failure. Today, a younger generation of founders is hoping to disrupt digital death, often targeting millennials with their products. But digital estate planning and immortality chatbots do not address the overarching problem of platform ephemerality.

      Platforms and profiles change over time and may even disappear, so it is difficult to ensure that digital remains are preserved. For one, they are dependent on the particular corporate infrastructures on which they are built and the continued commercial viability of such companies. MySpace, Orkut, Friendster, LiveJournal, GeoCities, and other obsolete social networking platforms remind us that even the most successful tech giants may not live forever, or that their uses and users may change over time. It is hard to trust that a profile, blog post, digital photo album, or uploaded consciousness will survive in perpetuity.

      Immortality Hiccups

      Despite its intimate relationship with ephemerality, Silicon Valley is attempting to defeat death through movements like cryonics and transhumanism, as well as less fanciful enterprises like life extension through supplements, exercise, and nutrition. It is perhaps unsurprising that youth-obsessed Silicon Valley is disturbed by the notion of bodily decline. The wellness ideology associated with the Quantified Self movement and self-tracking through Fitbits and other wearable devices emanates from Silicon Valley culture itself, with its unique blend of New Age counter-culturalism and libertarian or neoliberal tendencies (Barbrook and Cameron 1996, Turner 2006). Failure itself is a feature, not a bug, of startup culture. The death of companies is an expected part of the culture, with failure baked into the very system of venture labor and the prominence of risk-taking (Neff 2012). But to actually die, to be a mere mortal and subject to the whims of time or the flesh, is less than ideal. Silicon Valley is in search of a techno-solution to death, both on a physiological level and in terms of the problems associated with digital inheritance.

      When it comes to dealing with death, startup culture attempts to apply to a techno-solutionist salve to something inherently messy. The logics of planning, charts, and neat lists don’t necessarily add up when a death happens. There is always the potential for a glitch. For instance, a British woman who died of cancer received a letter from PayPal claiming a breach of contract for her failure to keep paying. After her death, her husband had contacted PayPal with her death certificate and will, as requested, but PayPal’s system failed to register this and accidentally sent the letter anyway.

      Many digital immortality startups are in fact vaporware, or novelties that are more theoretical than utilitarian. But they are made material through the capital backing them and the valuable data their subscribers provide. At the same time, entrepreneurs often overestimate their possibility for success. A 1988 study showed that a majority of entrepreneurs believe they can prevent the death of their company. In a paper called “Living Forever: Entrepreneurial Overconfidence at Older Ages” (2013), Dutch economists found that entrepreneurs have a tendency to overestimate their actual life spans as well as the lifespans of their companies. This in part may explain the number of transhumanists in Silicon Valley. On a practical level, entrepreneurs must display a certain degree of optimism in order to ease the worries of accelerators and incubators who might be interested.

      Death is sometimes used as a metaphor in Silicon Valley discourses about failure. Many startups do not go bankrupt right away, but never attract a healthy customer base. Instead, their founders or other investors continue pouring money into them. According to one technologist, “We call them the walking dead…They don't necessarily die. They putter along.” (Carroll 2014). Software engineers may have to decide to abandon the startup shift and find more stable work, whereas founders have a hard time knowing when to pull the plug on their creations. Shikhar Ghosh, a lecturer at Harvard who has studied startup mortality, noted that “VCs bury their dead very quietly” (Carroll 2014).

      It is increasingly easy for startups to get funding, thanks to crowdfunding sites like Kickstarter and GoFundMe or IndieGoGo in addition to the standard angel investor route. Would-be entrepreneurs do not have to rely on venture capitalists. But this also means that a sea of unlikely startups has proliferated, while the vast majority of those companies will die early deaths. For anxious founders, the startup death clock can estimate when their ventures are about to run out of money. Much like individuals can leave goodbye messages on sites like Dead Social, dying startups often post final messages to their users before their websites become defunct. Startup death is a significant problem in Silicon Valley, so what does it mean to rely on precarious startups to broker long-term relationships with the dead?

      Wealthy VCs also fund life extension research. It’s not just the bearded weirdos like Aubrey de Grey. There is a much longer history of using new technologies and data tracking, along with changes in diet and exercise, to prolong the human lifespan and optimize the self (Bouk 2015, Wernimont 2019). For elites, that is. The Life Extension Institute of the early 20th century, for instance, found ways for wealthy white men to cheat death through diet and exercise regimes, publishing self-help books like How to Live while surveilling workers in factories according to eugenicist principles in order to maximize their productivity. Founded in 1913, the LEI was backed by members of the National Academy of Medicine, major insurance firms, and companies like Ford and GM alongside President Taft and Alexander Graham Bell; it was by no means a fringe movement.

      Echoing these historical connections, at a conference on radical life extension, Terasem’s Martine Rothblatt exclaimed, “It’s enormously gratifying to have the epitome of the establishment, the head of the National Academy of Medicine, say, ‘We, too, choose to make death optional!,” highlighting the ways that transhumanist visions are often tied to esteemed institutions. Consider Nectome, an MIT connected and federally funded startup that promised to scan human brains and turn them into digital simulations. Because it relied on fresh brains to work, it required subscribers to be euthanized first. This seems like a risky move, but investors like Sam Altman of Y Combinator immediately signed up. One of the founders said, “The user experience will be identical to physician-assisted suicide…Product-market fit is people believing that it works.” In other words, the founders don’t really care if it works or not: if people believe it does, the market will abide.

      Silicon Valley-centered narratives are typically focused on short-term gains, a few entrepreneurs, and innovation at all costs. But as the internet ages, social media platforms have been caught up in questions of posterity and even transcendence. For Silicon Valley startup culture to deal with death raises some interesting questions about future projections and risk. Instead of trusting religious entities with your immortal soul, you should put your faith in the tech industry. Rather than employing established banks and corporations to manage your digital assets, you, the ordinary user, are expected to outsource that labor to a host of new, web-based companies. By definition, startups attempt to “disrupt” industries they view as obsolete or clunky. Or as one of my research subjects put it: “investors say the most boring industries are the most lucrative.” There is an obvious disconnect between the companies that promise to organize your digital belongings for eternity and Silicon Valley’s cultural expectations around failure.

      There is historical and contemporary synergy between powerful Silicon Valley interests and transhumanist belief systems, as many noted futurists have prestigious positions in the tech industry. For instance, Ray Kurzweil, a well-known proponent of the Singularity, is also Google’s Director of Engineering. According to computer scientist and science fiction writer Vernor Vinge, humans’ technological capacities will accelerate. Eventually, superintelligent AI will self-replicate and evolve on an ever-increasing timescale, leading to humanity’s end. While Vinge sees the technological Singularity as a destructive force, Kurzweil and those of his ilk believe it has the ability to solve all of the earth’s problems, including climate change. The temporal patterns of the Singularity thus coincide with Silicon Valley’s race for the new, i.e. the planned obsolescence of Apple products, perpetual updates and upgrades for software packages, or the fetishization of the latest gadgets.

      It’s not always completely cynical, either. Ray Kurzweil is actively trying to resurrect his dead father, and many transhumanists have suffered personal losses that inspire them to find ways of mitigating death. For some, transhumanism is a form of spiritual practice or belief system (Boenig-Liptsin and Hurlbut 2016, Bialecki 2017, Singler 2017, Farman 2019). The truth is that no matter how far-fetched some of these technologies may seem, they are already starting to affect how people interact with the dead and conceive of their own postmortem legacies. But for those who can’t afford the treatments and elixirs, digital immortality might be the only available route to living forever. There is a chasm between those who can afford actual life extension technologies (in the US, this includes things like basic healthcare) and those who can train free digital chatbots to act in their stead.

      When it comes to the history of life extension technologies, as well as modern genres of transhumanism and digital afterlife startups, people are actively working to engineer these items. They are not abstract fantasies, but connected to real money, speculative investment, and sites of extreme wealth and power. While their technologies are apocryphal, they rely on logic and cold rationality to justify their vision of the future, which they are actively building. Their science fiction tinged narratives are not speculative, but roadmaps for the future.

      On a rapidly warming planet where tech billionaires fantasize about escaping to the far corners of the earth in their bunkers, or even to Mars, immortality technologies are undeniably apocryphal. Freezing your head, perfecting your body so it lives for centuries, or uploading your consciousness to a magical server won’t help you if the whole earth burns. But for those with immense wealth and power, and a fervent belief in the salvific potential of technology, immortality is still a goal. Even if the Silicon Valley transhumanists eventually figure it out, only a select few will have access to their life-sustaining wares.

      References

      Barbrook, Richard, and Andy Cameron. 1996. “The Californian Ideology.” Science as Culture 6(1): 44-72.

      Bialecki, Jon. 2017. “After, and Before, Anthropos.” Platypus, April 6. http://blog.castac.org/2017/04/after-and-before-anthropos/.

      Boenig-Liptsin, Margarita, and J. Benjamin Hurlbut. 2016. “Technologies of Transcendence and the Singularity University.” In Perfecting Human Futures: Transhuman Visions and Technological Imaginations, edited by J. B. Hurlbut and H. Tirosh-Samuelson, 239-268. Dordrecht: Springer.

      Bouk, Dan. 2015. How Our Days Became Numbered: Risk and the Rise of the Statistical Individual. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

      Braidotti, Rosi. 2013. The Posthuman. London: Polity.

      Carroll, Rory. 2014. “Silicon Valley’s Culture of Failure and the ‘Walking Dead’ it Leaves Behind.” The Guardian, June 28. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jun/28/silicon-valley-startup-failure-culture-success-myth.

      Cheney-Lippold, John. 2017. We Are Data: Algorithms and the Making of Our Digital Selves. New York: New York University Press.

      Farman, Abou. 2019. “Mind out of Place: Transhuman Spirituality.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 87(1): 57-80.

      Hayles, N. Katherine. 1999. How We Became Posthuman. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

      Hui, Yuk. 2016. On the Existence of Digital Objects. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

      Kneese, Tamara. 2019. “Networked Heirlooms: The Affective and Financial Logics of Digital Estate Planning.” Cultural Studies 33(2): 297-324.

      Lagerkvist, Amanda. 2017. “Existential Media: Toward a Theorization of Digital Thrownness.” New Media & Society 19(1): 96-110.

      Neff, Gina. 2012. Venture Labor: Work and the Burden of Risk in Innovative Industries. Cambridge: MIT Press.

      O’Gieblyn, Meghan. 2017. “Ghost in the Cloud: Transhumanism’s Simulation Theology.” N+1 28. https://nplusonemag.com/issue-28/essays/ghost-in-the-cloud/.

      Peters, John Durham. 2015. The Marvelous Clouds: Towards a Philosophy of Elemental Media. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

      Raley, Rita. 2013. “Dataveillance and Countervailance.” In Raw Data is an Oxymoron, edited by Lisa Gitelman, 121-146. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

      Singler, Beth. 2017. “Why is the Language of Transhumanists and Religion So Similar?,” Aeon, June 13. https://aeon.co/essays/why-is-the-language-of-transhumanists-and-religion-so-similar.

      Turkle, Sherry. 1984. The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit. New York: Simon and Shuster.

      Turner, Fred. 2006. From Counterculture to Cyberculture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

      Ullman, Ellen. 2002. “Programming the Post-Human: Computer Science Redefines ‘Life.’” Harper’s Magazine, October. http://harpers.org/archive/2002/10/programming-the-posthuman/.

      Wernimont, Jacqueline. 2019. Numbered Lives: Life and Death in Quantum Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

      Creative Commons Attribution 3.0

      3 votes
    17. boats. (or, Kintsugi Bitch.)

      I was a kintsugi bitch A dull, forgotten, broken pot And then you fixed me up . You lined me with your own dweomercrafted brand of gold Lac, Mel, et Saccharum . And when you’d starve me for...

      I was a kintsugi bitch

      A dull, forgotten, broken pot

      And then you fixed me up

      .

      You lined me with your own

      dweomercrafted brand of gold

      Lac, Mel, et Saccharum

      .

      And when you’d starve me for attention,

      Fed me more from your breast

      Til you filled me up

      .

      And then I’d look you in the eyes

      Sugar broiling in the stomach

      Am I pretty now

      ..

      Lost, full, and quite ignored

      When you had leapt onto the floor

      And said we’ve got to go

      .

      I grabbed your hand and followed blind

      My stomach churned I lagged behind

      You were the love I know

      .

      You said we’re going to the sea

      My dear you’ll spend a life with me

      We’ll make the waves a home

      .

      And I smiled ear to ear

      Cheeks were blushing like a deer

      Am I pretty now

      ..

      And then we made it to the bay

      quickly climbed into a boat

      They never have to know

      .

      We headed south for centuries

      They cannot take the memories

      I never hunger now

      .

      And after weeks of solitude

      A stranger came into the view

      There was another boat

      .

      My stomach burned, concerned,

      Not a soul had stood astern

      You produced a rope

      ..

      You gave a gentle kiss

      And slid the twine across my wrists

      And tied them into knots

      Dipped my legs into the water

      Either hand tied either helm

      Stretched into a cross

      I looked up at you in fear

      Just to see you’ve disappeared

      I started crying out.

      My stomach burned under the water

      And the sun was getting hotter

      And I’m all alone.

      I pleased come to feed me

      Don’t leave me weak, depleting

      I got no response.

      The fish were getting curious

      Flies buzzed something furious

      They knew what I did not

      That if you leave out milk and honey

      In the heat, in weather sunny,

      It’ll start to rot.

      .

      Months had passed in sickly motion

      Head leaned back, my eyes were open

      I died long ago.

      The bugs ate at my open mouth

      My skin was yellow, wrought with drought

      My throat housed a mold

      The waters smelled of sulfate

      As the serpents ate my stomach ache

      My blood has washed away

      The rope gave up on hope and

      Threw my purple, molten corpse into the ocean

      Am I pretty now?

      .

      .

      .

      5 votes
    18. I think formatting is broken inside expandable "<details>" sections

      UPDATE: It is actually NOT broken, but it seems that a blank line is required after the <summary> tags for it to work. Therefore, this does not work: > Interstellar - just watch it I like this...

      UPDATE:

      It is actually NOT broken, but it seems that a blank line is required after the <summary> tags for it to work.

      • Therefore, this does not work:

         > Interstellar - just watch it
        
         I like this movie a lot. BUT, it bothers me that
        
         <details>
         <summary>spoiler</summary>
         a story so grounded in hard science fiction chose an unjustified book
         metaphor to represent a dimension that would be, for us, absolutely
         unknowable. I much prefer the choice made by Kubrick in *2001, A Space
         Odyssey*: to represent one abstraction with another, preserving the
         alien character of an inhuman reality.
         </details>
        
      • But this does:

          > Interstellar - just watch it
        
          I like this movie a lot. BUT, it bothers me that
        
          <details>
          <summary>spoiler</summary>
        
          a story so grounded in hard science fiction chose an unjustified book
          metaphor to represent a dimension that would be, for us, absolutely
          unknowable. I much prefer the choice made by Kubrick in *2001, A Space
          Odyssey*: to represent one abstraction with another, preserving the
          alien character of an inhuman reality.
          </details>
        
      7 votes
    19. First release of my native Markdown notes app, Notementum (v0.1.0)

      Screenshot I posted a few days ago about a notes app I was working on called Notementum, and I'm happy to show you the first release (0.1.0). Installation instructions are available on the Github...

      Screenshot

      I posted a few days ago about a notes app I was working on called Notementum, and I'm happy to show you the first release (0.1.0). Installation instructions are available on the Github repo: https://github.com/IvanFon/notementum

      There's still lots of things I'd like to add, both big and small, and definitely a few bugs here and there, but I've been going for too long without sharing it, and I find it's best to release as early as you can to start getting feedback, and perfect it later.

      One things that's missing is documentation. I'd like to start on this soon, but I'm probably not going to share this anywhere other than Tildes just yet, so this comment will do for now :)

      Right now, the app only runs on Linux. I'd like to add Windows support, and it almost works, the problem is that WebKit2Gtk, the embedded web view I use to show note previews, doesn't support Windows. I'm going to explore some other options in the future, whether that's figuring out how to compile it, or allowing other preview methods (user's web browser, PDF, etc.).

      The app is also very much in alpha, so you shouldn't use this for anything important, there may be bugs that can cause you to lose some of your data. If you do use this for anything, make sure you backup your notes database.

      If you want to use it, here's a wall of text on usage:

      Usage

      The notes database is located at ~/.notes.db. When you launch the app, it'll load it, or automatically create it if it doesn't exist. I'd eventually like to allow choosing different locations, but it's hard coded for now.

      The interface is fairly simple. The leftmost sidebar displays a list of notebooks, and the "middlebar" displays a list of notes. Selecting a notebook will display the notes within it in the notes list. Selecting a note will open it in the editor, which is to the right.

      To create a new note, press Escape to focus on the searchbar above the notes list, and start typing a title. If no existing notes are found, press enter, and a note will be created with the title you entered.

      To rename a note, double-click on it in the notes list.

      The editor has a toolbar with 4 buttons, from left-to-right:

      • Toggle between editor and preview (shortcut: Ctrl+E)
      • Assign the current note's notebook
      • Add an attachment
      • Delete the current note

      The green circle all the way to the right turns into a loading indicator when you have unsaved changes. Once you stop typing for a few seconds, your changes will be saved, and it'll switch back into a green circle.

      Notebooks

      Notebooks aren't created directly, they're based on what notebooks your notes are assigned to. This means that, to create a notebook, assign it to a note. To delete a notebook, just delete all the notes contained within it, or assign them to a different notebook.

      Clicking on the notebook toolbar button brings up this dialog. To create a new notebook, double click on <New notebook> and type in a name.

      Attachments

      The notes database also stores attachments. This means that the entirety your notes can be contained in your database. Clicking on the attachment toolbar button brings up this dialog. The toolbar allows you to upload an attachment or delete it respectively. Pressing Insert Selected will insert the image at your cursor in the editor (![](image.png)).

      Theme

      The screenshots show the app with my desktop Gtk theme, Arc Dark. On your desktop, it'll use whatever your theme is. It should look good with any Gtk theme, but at some point I may bundle Arc Dark with it.

      The note preview currently has it's colours hard coded to look good with Arc Dark, so it may look a bit off on other themes. I'll try to sort that out at some point.

      Planned features
      • load/save database to/from different path
      • Windows support
      • note exports
      • database encryption
      • changing syntax highlighting theme
      • note tags
      • full-text search
      • proper documentation
      • more keyboard shortcuts
      • integrated sync
        • although you should already be able to use Git, Synthing, Dropbox, etc.
      • Vim mode for editor
        • maybe somehow embed a terminal to allow using vim/emacs/whatever
      Boring technical stuff

      The app was made with Python and Gtk+ 3. I've done this before and I really enjoy the development experience, especially with Glade to design the interface. There are still some Gtk features that I should really be using to make things simpler (GtkApplication, actions, and accelerators) that I'll be adding later.

      The database uses sqlite 3. This is convenient, as it allows for storing everything in one file, and will make fast searches easier in the future. Attachments are stored as base64 directly in the database. This makes it easy to have all your notes be contained entirely in the one database, but I may have to think about a more efficient method in the future.

      Markdown rendering is done using mistletoe, which has been great to use. Syntax highlighting and MathJax renderers were already available, so it was just a matter of combining both and adding custom image loading from the database, which was very easy. Mistletoe has a very easy to use API, so this was no problem.

      For LaTeX math rendering, I'm using MathJax. It supports pretty much everything, which is nice, but it can take a while to load. I'm currently loading it from a CDN in a <script> tag, so I'm hoping once I load it from a local file it'll be a bit faster. If not, I may have to find another solution.

      Like I said, the app still has a few bugs that need to be fixed. If you find any problems, it would be great if you could leave a comment here or open a Github issue (or if you have any feature requests).

      21 votes
    20. Accidentally Solving Access Point Roaming Issues.

      I'm sharing in case some of you are having a similar issue at work or at home, and to hear your opinion and/or similar stories! I've been using Ubiquiti access points in my home for a few years...

      I'm sharing in case some of you are having a similar issue at work or at home, and to hear your opinion and/or similar stories!

      I've been using Ubiquiti access points in my home for a few years now, and overall, they've worked very well. 3 APs giving near perfect 5GHz VHT80 coverage on DFS channels. LAN transfers are about 600-650mbit on laptops, which has proven to be plenty for wireless clients in my home. Keep in mind that this is a pretty basic setup... besides the APs, there's just the ISP provided GPON ONT which is also a typical all-in-one ISP solution (router, switch, AP, firewall, DHCP server...) with it's Wi-Fi turned off.

      As I said, I was pretty happy with the results, however there was one feature that I could never get to work just right; roaming. You could be walking around the house watching a live stream and the stream would pause for 5-8 seconds until the roaming transition was over. Strangely, with VoIP calls, roaming would be about 3-5 seconds. Even enabling fast roaming features (which I believe is simply 802.11r) on the AP's controller would not give the results I was looking for. After days of tweaking TX power settings, channel selection and trying to implement Minimum RSSI (which I ended up not using), I finally gave up and resigned myself to the 4-6 seconds (oh, the humanity) of roaming time.

      Fast forward to about two months ago and I added a new router to the setup (UBNT ER-4) and a switch (UBNT USW-24). Setup went smooth, already had some cat.6 cabling around the house, now it was time to actually use it. Had some fun setting up a guest Wi-Fi network on it's own VLAN, which was always a concern of mine; having "untrusted" devices connect to my network. The access points do client isolation on guest networks by default, but in my mind it wasn't enough as I have some file servers and time machines on the network.

      Anyways, a few days after doing the setup I'm walking around the house with a livestream on my mobile and suddenly realize that it's not losing the connection. I try with a VoIP call and it worked flawlessly. I start walking around faster and still, the phone is roaming without an issue. I was very excited!

      I'm thinking it must be the router that somehow solved the roaming issue. My first theory was that the DHCP server on the ER-4 was doing it's thing much faster than the ISP's device, allowing the wireless clients to actually roam faster. So I do a web search and I find some very relevant info. It was a thread on a forum and reddit thread with a sysadmin that was about to give up on the APs because of roaming issues. In both threads, there were replies about what switch were they using.

      Apparently, some switches (Cisco and HP were mentioned), have a "MAC aging" interval setting which is way too high by default, or they simply have bugged firmware that doesn't allow the switch to "re-learn" the MAC address of a device on a different switch port. I assume that ISP provided "el-cheapo" gear has similar issues.

      So, if you're having roaming issues with your wireless clients, check your switches!!!

      Anyways, just wanted to share this story. Thank you for reading. :-)

      10 votes
    21. I challenge you to use Epiphany for a week!

      When Edge died, I got worried about loosing competition to the Blink engine and as such, I went exploring other alternatives to realize.. there's not a whole lot, there's blink, gecko and webkit....

      When Edge died, I got worried about loosing competition to the Blink engine and as such, I went exploring other alternatives to realize.. there's not a whole lot, there's blink, gecko and webkit.

      So with that, I decided to try epiphany - Gnome's web browser. It uses Webkit which is what Blink was forked from so it's not terribly different in theory but the years apart has made that more apparent. It's fairly elegant in my opinion and it lacks some features, sure.


      Anyways, to get to what I wanted to do this week, well, I'd like to challenge you all to use it for a week, mostly for bug hunting purposes and possibly to throw ideas at the project. Worth mentioning, I'm not affiliated with the project, just a user.

      So to make sure we're all on the same page, we'll use the development Epiphany flatpak, this way we can be sure that the problem is in the current codebase. So, to install it :

      Let's install the gnome-nightly repos as per instructions here :

      flatpak remote-add --if-not-exists gnome-nightly https://sdk.gnome.org/gnome-nightly.flatpakrepo
      flatpak remote-add --if-not-exists gnome-apps-nightly --from https://sdk.gnome.org/gnome-apps-nightly.flatpakrepo
      

      Then, let's install the development version by doing so :

      flatpak install org.gnome.Epiphany.Devel
      

      Then just launch it and have fun with it!


      if you run into any bugs, look at the contribution guide here and report the bugs in the repo after checking that the bug is not already present of course!

      12 votes