(US) My Fitbit Charge 2 is on her last legs. I'm torn between looking at a smart watch, a smarter fitness tracker, or something at relatively the same level. I have a Pixel and don't use the Apple ecosystem but really don't know what route to go.

Mostly I like the reminder to move, step tracking, and the simple notifications on the Charge 2. I don't need to answer my phone on my watch, I think, but seeing that it's my partner calling is a big deal. But I also could be that person desperately waiting to discover smart watches and fall in love with them, I suppose.

Longer battery life would be preferable as remembering to charge things is a less than fun side-quest. And I doubt I'd be using GPS on it. But again, maybe I would? Open to all suggestions.

I’m currently using ProtonMail, I’ve been with them since Indiegogo. I know calendar’s supposed to come out in beta this month, but I’m honestly fed up with the speed of their development and the quality of apps, and I think it’s too expensive.

I need custom domain support, and calendar. Nothing fancy.
Self-hosting email is out of the question in 2019.

What are you guys using for email these days?

Mods: I put this in Tech because Amazon is a tech company, if this is the wrong group I apologize.

For the last several purchases I have made through Amazon, not only has the advertised "expected delivery date" been wrong, Amazon hasn't even shipped the product by the delivery date. The day I expect an order to arrive, I get a notice from Amazon saying it's "running late" and the new expected delivery date is anywhere from 4 to 10 days away.

This is on top of the fact that I have Amazon Prime. Prime eligible meant "it would be delivered within two days" for the better part of a decade. They slowly transitioned away from that to "two days delivery after it ships," and now it seems like half of everything takes 5-8 days to deliver, even with Prime.

Anyway, the reason I reported them to the FTC because I believe they are advertising misleading or downright incorrect delivery times in hopes of winning your business over a competitor who is honest about their delivery times. If I want a monitor and Best Buy has it for $200 with 3-5 day shipping, and Amazon advertises it being delivered on day 3, I'm probably going to go with Amazon if I'm in urgent need of a monitor. But then the third day rolls around and Amazon indicates "oh, well, it's probably going to be 3-4 more days." If I had known that, I would have just gone with Best Buy, where I know it would have at least been delivered in 5 days; now I'm stuck waiting a week for Amazon.

I don't even know if this is something the FTC cares about. But it should. I encourage everyone to report this if they've encountered the same issue.

So, a friend of mine wants to become a Twitch streamer, commenting over movies. I never used Twitch. He showed me some channels over there that made me confused. There are dozens of channels entirely dedicated to people providing minimal commentary to entire movies, animes, and TV shows which are displayed in full, although not on full screen. And they seem to be monetized, otherwise why would anyone stream 5 to 10 hours a day? They have ads.

I have a few questions.

First, how is that legal? Why aren't copyright holders taking these channels down? Do people really care about a streamer that mumbles a single uninteresting word every few minutes, or it's all just an excuse to watch movies for free? Why the same content that will get your video taken down on YouTube is apparently okay on Twitch?

About a week ago i made A post asking people what their favorite BBS board is, so I'd be curious to see what people answer to his question. Personally the only one i remember is emptyclosets, a forum for queer people.
Edit: By drama/story, it doesn't have to be something someone did that pissed people off. You can also include something interesting that happened on there (e.g on a Nirvana forum that used to exist, theres a micro-famous story about a user who went to a prostitute and talked about it on there)

For the last few summers I've tried (and failed) to get a silent disco system working for a small group of friends. The requirements are

1. Anyone should be able to join (locally) with a phone and a pair of bluetooth headphones. With the absence of headphone jacks I've found most people rely on bluetooth headphones.
2. Low enough latency.
3. Decent enough audio fidelity.
4. No weird monetized apps you have to sign in to.

In a post covid age where we all had low latency video calls, it seems crazy there isn't an obvious way to have <10 people connected to one 128kbps audio stream. Here are the shortcomings

• Most silent disco systems (for events) use FM to broadcast to FM receivers. Broadcasting without a license is technically illegal, but easy enough to do. The lack of wired headphones means most phones no longer support receiving FM frequencies, as they used the headphone wire as an antenna. It's not ideal checking up on everyone's phone models to see whether or not they support FM ahead of time.

• Throughout covid we used Discord to listen to music together many miles apart. The trouble is bluetooth does not have enough bandwidth for speakers and a microphone. So - those with wired headphones it worked perfectly, but with bluetooth headphones the audio drops to landline phone quality, far below what's listenable. Discord supports 'Stage' calls where some participants are talking and others are only listening. Unfortunately this doesn't disable the microphone for the audience, and so the audio is still poor.

• Lastly is streaming. This solves everything above but the latency is too high. Using software called 'Stream What You Hear' allowed us to create a webpage with a stream running, but each person could be many seconds ahead or behind depending on when they loaded the stream. Attempts to sync everyone up would fail if someone accidentally locked their phone.

I'm wondering if the solution is going to have to be a bit more technically minded, which I'm open to investigating, but wondered if anyone here had any ideas to bounce.

Thanks in advance!

EDIT: I tried SnapCast as recommendation by @arch and it seems to do exactly what I was setting out to achieve, and FOSS software too! Thanks to everyone for their suggestions and help, I'm really excited to trial it.

I want to upgrade my gaming setup, but I want to move towards a desktop replacement laptop for the compact form factor to free up desk space or even get rid of a desk altogether. I also want to try out Pop!_OS since I know it has good Nvidia drivers and that most games are compatible with Linux nowadays.

Has anyone had any experience with switching to Pop!_OS from Windows? What is software compatibility like? Pros and cons?

Also is anyone here using an 18 inch gaming laptop? I'm interested in huge laptops since I'm not really planning on taking it on the go.

I tried finding other alternatives to reddit, which is what got me here. I still love the content of the subs that I followed and am not wanting to really step away. I'd like to as a matter of my own principles... but I still want it. So much knowledge has been amassed on that platform.

Do you guys still mess with reddit regularly? If not, how?

I'm in the market for a 3 monitor setup. I've got a huge desk and about $2k to spend. Ideally, I'd like three matching monitors, but here's the catch. I want the middle "main" monitor to be my gaming monitor (120-144hz) while the side monitors can be 60hz. It'd be awesome if there was a brand that sold the same form factor (same base, bezel, etc).

Thoughts?

So, in the past, I have been able to find new poems I enjoy by reading a critical essay about poetry and taking the referenced poem and author and typing the information into Google search. It used to be that that technique turned up a copy of the text of the poem and typically more poems by the author 95 percent of the time for me.

This year, when I try that same technique, Google gives me general reference articles about the life of the poet, or news about celebrities with similar names (not the same name at all), or just no search results. Does anyone know what happened? Can anyone help me use the internet to find new poems again?

Thanks very much

I've only had exposure to Beyond Compare and would like your opinion/suggestions on what's good.

mostly, I use it to compare two different versions of similar csv and potentially to merge them. Next use case is to compare two versions of simple scripts to see what's been updated.

Command line tools are a little too much for me, but if it seem to be very important to learn I supposed I could be encouraged to do so.