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    1. Wearable sleep trackers - recommendations?

      Is there a good smartwatch/simile that monitors sleep and has excellent battery life (measured in weeks not hours)? I use the Withings (ex-Nokia) Steel HR, but it … kinda sucks. The bluetooth...

      Is there a good smartwatch/simile that monitors sleep and has excellent battery life (measured in weeks not hours)?

      I use the Withings (ex-Nokia) Steel HR, but it … kinda sucks. The bluetooth pairings very often lose sleep data, it's very inaccurate, the reporting sucks for non-24s, and the leather bracelet is of very poor quality, keeps breaking.

      I really don't care for the fitness/step tracking which, as someone else here put it, thinks typing on a keyboard or eating is a step.

      I also briefly tried an Oura (https://ouraring.com/), but I never got it to work and had to send it back.

      I also don't care much for any of those "sleep quality" trackers that try to detect if I snore and what not. I can do sleep studies in my own time, I just want to have accurate stats on whether and when I am asleep.

      6 votes
    2. Are there any personalized recommendation engines/sites that you trust?

      In the 2000s I used to use a service called last.fm (originally called Audioscrobbler) that would track the music I listened to and give me recommendations based on that. It was able to give me...

      In the 2000s I used to use a service called last.fm (originally called Audioscrobbler) that would track the music I listened to and give me recommendations based on that. It was able to give me some really great personalized suggestions, but that came at the expense of me handing over significant amounts of personal data.

      In prioritizing privacy, I feel like I've stepped away from a lot of the big recommendation engines because they're tied to data-hungry companies I am in the process of disengaging with (e.g. Goodreads is owned by Amazon). I can still find stuff I like, but it's often the result of manual searching that turns up popular recommendations that work for me, rather than less well-known or acutely relevant things. last.fm was good at giving me less "obvious" recommendations and would find music I was unlikely to find on my own. I want that, but for all of my media: books, movies, etc.

      There's a second concern in that I also feel like I can't trust platforms like Netflix, who seem to prioritize their content over that of other studios. Their recommendations feel weighted in their favor, not mine.

      What I want is an impartial recommendation engine that gives me high quality personalized suggestions without a huge privacy cost.1 Is this a pipe dream, or are there examples of this kind of thing out there?


      1. I don't mind handing over some of my specific interest data in order to get good recommendations for myself and help a site's algorithms cater to others, as I get that's how these things work. I just don't like the idea of my interests being even more data for a company that already has thousands of intimate data points on me.

      18 votes
    3. Australia's bushfire emergency is being exploited on social media, as misinformation is spread through cyberspace via hundreds of thousands of posts.

      News article: Fires misinformation being spread through social media This includes a prominent local billionaire, Andrew Forrest, who has pledged $70 million for bushfire relief: "I think there's...

      News article: Fires misinformation being spread through social media

      This includes a prominent local billionaire, Andrew Forrest, who has pledged $70 million for bushfire relief: "I think there's a multitude of reasons why the fire extent has bene so devastating. I think a warming planet would be part of that — [but] the biggest part of that is arsonists," he said.

      13 votes
    4. reCAPTCHA: Is there method in monotony?

      What started out as a little facetious in my own head leads me now to a serious question. Is there some meaningful reason why Google has to use a subsection of images for reCAPTCHA? I really...

      What started out as a little facetious in my own head leads me now to a serious question. Is there some meaningful reason why Google has to use a subsection of images for reCAPTCHA? I really dislike having to do this and at the very least would appreciate some variation.

      • Traffic Lights
      • Buses
      • Bicycles
      • Cars
      • Crosswalks

      Is there something special about these things in this context? Is the visual noise they're usually associated with what makes them good candidates? Are Google just really into urban planning? Who knows...I'm hoping some Tilder smarter than I can help me out.

      10 votes
    5. Anyone have any experience with eSIMs?

      I have ordered a phone with an eSim this week and I have been reading a bit into it. As far as I know so far, you just have to download an app and you can just book some extra data as needed - it...

      I have ordered a phone with an eSim this week and I have been reading a bit into it.
      As far as I know so far, you just have to download an app and you can just book some extra data as needed - it seems especially cool because you can just book a local plan when you're abroad instead of getting a local sim card. Which can be more or less a hassle - 2019 I went to South Africa where it was pretty easy to get a sim card at the airport, 2018 I went to India, where it was a hassle.
      I guess for people in the US this is not a problem? Some of my friends have global contracts, and I had that too when I was there via googles project fi. We don't really have an equivalent in Germany

      I found the following pages in case anyone also wants to look into it
      https://esimdb.com/ - this is an overview page about different esims
      https://www.airalo.com/ - this is one specific offer that seems to be the cheapest for Germany, which is where I would try it, since I live here haha

      6 votes
    6. [SOLVED] Friend's computer is cutting power randomly

      So my friend has a computer she put together, and after replacing what feels like every single part on the rig, multiple trips to the repair shop, and calling a priest wrestling the demons out of...

      So my friend has a computer she put together, and after replacing what feels like every single part on the rig, multiple trips to the repair shop, and calling a priest wrestling the demons out of it, it is randomly cutting power and we think the replacement power supply might be just as busted as the last one. Are there decent odds of that being an issue, or could it be something that we are overlooking?

      EDIT: So, I had a car issue pop up and I won't be able to to take a look at at it tonight. Will download the tools you all mentioned to a jump drive and will keep you posted.

      Was there, stayed up the whole time. Really thinking it might be a bad power switch that stuck, so it would turn off randomly. Thanks for all your help.

      FINAL EDIT: So I narrowed it down to the Graphics Card and/or the Cooling System. Running the Heaven Benchmark on Extreme pretty reliably cleans it's clock, especially turning it off and then turning it on again. This happens on the latest Windows Updates, with latest Nvidia Drivers. (RTX 2080) Pulling the card and running the benchmark anyway causes the same issue, and this time it powered on and then back off in a loop. CPU-Z stress caused it to crash, so I'm assuming it's the cooler. Thanks again.

      11 votes