• Activity
  • Votes
  • Comments
  • New
  • All activity
    1. NFTs, why do people hate them?

      I was just thinking and wondering why people are so incredibly anti NFT. I recently posted about my art here and someone was compelled to post an angry comment about NFTs. I have come to expect...

      I was just thinking and wondering why people are so incredibly anti NFT. I recently posted about my art here and someone was compelled to post an angry comment about NFTs. I have come to expect this and just wonder why?

      It is a strange thing to collect digital items, I get that. Personally I find it hard to understand most of what people do including collecting stuff. I'm try to get rid of stuff.

      We know some crypto is bad for the environment. This is why I didn't buy bitcoin in the first place, it seemed like a huge waste of energy for nothing. Many companies support this now though. If you invest in Tesla, you invest in bitcoin. You may not even know or care that your 401k hedge fund is investing in crypto.

      But some crypto like Tezos (which is what I use) is in line with energy use you would expect from credit cards and the like.

      The other thing is that some people are making huge sums of money from crypto and maybe there is jealousy involved. I've felt it too! Then I remind myself what life is all about, that I am happy where I am, and that fame would not help me create better art, in fact it would likely work against it. Money is much so much easier to make then art, it's not even close.

      Thoughts?

      19 votes
    2. Email forwarding services

      Hello everyone. The other day, Firefox Monitor warned me that my personal e-mail was found on a data leak from Gravatar (belongs to Automattic; WordPress's parent company). Funnily, I don't have...

      Hello everyone.

      The other day, Firefox Monitor warned me that my personal e-mail was found on a data leak from Gravatar (belongs to Automattic; WordPress's parent company). Funnily, I don't have any account (and never had) with them, but nevertheless, I tried to log in, and it failed. I tried to recover my password, and it said "no e-mail found". Maybe a false positive from Firefox's side?

      Anyway, that situation got me thinking that I should never use my personal email except on super important websites. For example, with Christmas gift buying, I've used my personal e-mail on multiple online websites (I usually try to avoid Amazon) and I shouldn't have done that.

      Of course, Firefox recommended their own service Firefox Relay, which it does look interesting. Afterwards, I've searched on HackerNews to see what other people recommended.

      These were the recommendations (apart from FF Relay):


      A few questions:

      1. Do you use any of these three services?
      2. How happy are you with the service that you use?
      3. Is there something better?

      I actually like Firefox's implementation because it is actually quite cheap (€12 per year), it is an easier way to support Firefox's development (instead of donation to the Mozilla Corporation) and I trust Firefox more on the security side of things. Nevertheless, the other two services seem more feature complete and I actually do not like that FF Relay "forces" you to use a domain like "alias@mozmail.com" or a custom domain like "alias@mydomain.mozmail.com". My goal would actually be "alias@mydomain.com" for my own contact with other people. On website registrations, @mozmail.com is okay, I guess.

      I already have my own domain that I've bought from Namecheap and I think instead of associating an e-mail to my domain, I actually would prefer to use one of these services. The reason is that my website/e-mail domain could be reused if I stop paying. Some websites and/or people could have this e-mail and someone could impersonate me. With an e-mail forwarding service, I can easily and quickly delete/disable/change the alias. I'm not sure if I'm putting too much expectation on a forwarding service, but, I would like to know what do you think. 🙂

      14 votes
    3. What Arduino-like kit do you recommend to get started with children?

      Hi Tildes, I'm looking to introduce my children (aged 10 or so) to simple electronics (blinking lights, simple sensors, ...). I've played with Arduino in the past, but I see that there are now...

      Hi Tildes,

      I'm looking to introduce my children (aged 10 or so) to simple electronics (blinking lights, simple sensors, ...). I've played with Arduino in the past, but I see that there are now many competing options: Arduino, cheap rip-offs, RPi zero, adafruit, ESP32, ... It's easy to get lost!

      Which do you recommend? Ideally, I'd like something cross-platform and open-source, easy to set up (ideally a kit with everything included), and of course not insanely expensive.

      Edit: thanks everyone for the good advice! There are so many good options...

      12 votes