I'm trying to go beyond Reddit and Tildes when it comes to some particular interests. I dislike Federated websites due to their usability issues, but I also get the impression that they try to replicate or improve on Twitter. I never used or cared for Twitter in the first place.

I found TrekBBS which looks great, but I was wondering about similar forums for my other interests, such as science fiction literature, classic movies, etc.

So I am curious to know about everyone's favorite old-school forums that are still active and cool!

The websites are not required to be actually old, as long as they work similarly to traditional internet forums.

My iPhone 14 Pro has been at 84% battery health for almost a year now. Anecdotally the battery lasts significantly less time than it did previously, even when it was already at 84% health. I think it may just be a stale calculation, and my actual battery health is significantly lower. If I can get it to show as less than 80%, I can get AppleCare to replace it. Does anyone here know how to get the iPhone to recalculate this value?

I have Coconut batter on the Mac, and it can check the battery health for an iPhone attached with a cable. It uses a different formula, so it gives me a health of 87%. However it also shows history for when I have run it in the past, and when I tested it almost 100 charge cycles ago, it also read 87%. I don't know how any battery can go almost 100 charge cycles with zero degradation (537 to 617 cycles, so it's not like it's a fresh battery).

I currently have a Corsair Dark Core Pro SE that I like a lot. My scroll wheel is messed up though. I am kind of in the trenches (who isn't these days), and am looking for some good old retail therapy.
My big ticket items:

• works well on linux (openRGB if possible)
• has forward and back thumb buttons
• scroll wheel works (lol)
• has nice support for pinky (I really like this feature on my current mouse)(as I have big hands)

I am not opposed to just buying another of my current mouse, I can't tell if there is anything really comparable. I also don't really understand/care for my mouse being lightweight.

Deep cut question though is if anyone has any experience with trackballs, I kind of want to try it out but ultimately I don't really know what I am doing. I really just use my computer casually, and I don't play any competitive games just casual.

Any recs? Thanks, happy to answer any questions too.

I sometimes use chatGPT to proofread longer texts (like 1000+ words) I write in English. Although this is not my first language, I often find myself writing in English even outside of internet forums. That is because if I read or watch something in English, and that thing motivates me to write, my brain organically gravitates toward it.

My English is pretty good and I am reasonably confident communicating in that language, but it will never be the same as my native language. So I will often run my stuff through Grammarly and chatGPT. If you wanna say "This will teach you bad habits", please don't. Things like Grammarly and Google Translate taught me so much and improved my English so much, that I am a bit tired of that line of reasoning. I read most of my books in English. I'm not a beginner so I can and do check for all the changes, and vet them myself as I don't always agree with them.

With GPT, I usually just ask it to elaborate a critique rather than spit out a corrected version. Truth be told, when I did ask for a corrected version, it made plenty of sensible corrections that didn't really alter anything other than that. So I guess I just wanna know everyone's feelings about this. Suppose I write a bunch, have GPT correct it for me, compare it with the original and verify every correction. Is that something you would look at unfavorably?

Thanks!

The behavior of a bluetooth device when it reaches low battery is never advertised, and a lot of the time no one even mentions it in the reviews. My experience is that most devices give you an audio warning on repeat until you charge it, which is obviously bad design.

Can anyone recommend a bluetooth receiver that doesn't do this? I've heard that apple airpods only warn you once or twice, but my preference is for a battery-powered bluetooth receiver that lets me plug in wired headphones. I'm still interested in hearing about other bluetooth headphones though.

If there's nothing on the market, it might be interesting to try and build something. There must be bluetooth modules you can buy, but I wonder if they would have the same problem. Maybe you can modify the firmware? If anyone out there is hardware-hacking bluetooth devices, let me know.

I get that it’s supposed to make things more secure, but it feels like a constant chore every time I try to log in somewhere. Grab a code from my phone. Check my email. Open an authenticator app. Repeat this process for every single account, over and over.

I know there are tools like YubiKey that are supposed to make 2FA easier, but the reality is that most websites don’t even support them.

I already use a password manager, and all my passwords are long, randomized, and secure. Is there something I am missing that makes this easier, or is this just as infuriating for everyone else?

I've gone down the rabbit hole of self-hosting, and I'm wondering if I should try self-hosting my blog. The blog is currently on Netlify. I've left it there because I figure their infrastructure is much better than mine... but part of that is a CDN, and, despite the performance benefits, I'm not thrilled about the privacy implications of subjecting my users to that. I'm torn on that point.

That said, I'm on cable internet, so my upstream is abysmal. My site is mostly text and the site is low traffic, so maybe it's not a problem. What do you think? What are some of the implications of self-hosting the blog that I'm not considering?

Edit: Wanted to clarify a couple of things I realize weren't clear in my original posting. I'm already self-hosting a few dozen services from home on my own hardware. Port 80 and 443 both work, and I'm already running a Caddy reverse proxy to proxy to the other services. My question is less about whether self-hosting is a good idea and whether I should be keeping my blog on Netlify for the reasons above. My biggest concerns are the privacy implications of keeping with Netlify and their CDN vs. the performance implications of losing the CDN and serving via a ~30Mbps upstream connection.

Thank you for all the comments so far!

Its screen and touchpad work as well as they always have, even though it's largely been gathering dust beneath my desk for the past two years. It's obsolete and too slow for modern (read: under 7 years old) macOS, but it's not broken.

I could install Linux and set up a server, but my Pi has already filled that role.

This topic came to mind because a friend sent two truly broken laptops—including a MBP of similar vintage to the one discussed here—home with me to send to electronics recycling. Kicking about for other opinions before I add this computer to the pile.

I just finished reading I hate the new internet post, in which the OP stated:

Every social medium is just bots. The front page of Reddit is easily 35% easily detectable bots at least and who knows what the rest is comprised of.

Why couldn't we create a bot database, which I imagine would work similarly to uBlock for ads? There would be a number of signals to attempt to classify users of social media sites (likely human, likely bot, etc.) in addition to user-provided feedback ("I think this person is a bot" or "this account is me -- definitely not a bot").

An extension could then be attached to the database to provide visual changes to social media platforms ("WARNING! LIKELY BOT!") or simply hide bot posts/comments.

Off the top of my head, some bot signals:

• Posting known duplicate posts with political motivation (e.g. on Reddit you see the same exact post about how the tariffs will create a stronger America by different posters) [strong indicator]
• Usernames that follow the lazy bot format, e.g., Pretentious_Rabbit_2355 [weak indicator]
• Usage of AI-generated or ripped off profile pictures, post images, etc. [strong indicator]
• etc.

On the crowdsourced side, there would have to be some rules in place to prevent profile bombing, etc.

All in all, I could see something like this adding a bit of human value back to the various social media platforms AND I would think it would lead to higher advertisement click rates (bots will become less valuable over time on a given platform and decide to invest their resources elsewhere, while "human" user engagement increases at the same time).

If this concept already exists, I apologize. I only did a very quick google.

This topic is a part conversation starter, part request for help in finding.

For those that are attempting to keep up with the many weird and sometimes interesting products both announced and teased recently in the field of AR/XR glasses- what are your thoughts?

Examples, off the top of my head, include a number of devices revealed at CES 2024. The Asus AirVision M1- a pair of full-HD display-in-glasses form, similar in many ways to the Xreal lineup. The new Xreal Air 2 Ultra and Xreal One line. Snapdragon's new XR2+ Gen 2 chip for high efficiency portable computing and a successor to the chip used in the Meta Quest 3 headset. The Halliday glasses, which forego any form of waveguide or combining optic and opt to project directly into the eye using a monocular microled projector. And older devices, such as the "open source" Brilliant Labs glasses which have been previous discussed on Tildes.

Personally, I'm disappointed in most (if not all) of these options, but that might largely be because the industry and I have very different ideas of what smart glasses should be. The industry is focusing heavily on social media features- cameras, filters, translation- and even more heavily on AI. Why anybody would want an LLM strapped to their face I do not know. I feel that the goal of full augmented reality (rendering tips and visuals over the real-world) is a noble one, but also not one I am particularly interested in. My ideal device would be purely a heads-up display with a long battery life. The ability to cast notifications and information to a reasonably pretty display, but the freedom to decide what. No cameras, no data collection, no overcomplications- does anyone know of any options that fulfill these criteria?

Discuss.