jcarax

joined 3 years ago
[–] jcarax@beehaw.org 2 points 2 weeks ago

Falk Culinair Copper Coeur

I haven't switched to induction yet, but these things are spectacular in evenness of heat and ergonomics.

[–] jcarax@beehaw.org 3 points 1 month ago

I think it's a good show with an excellent format, which makes it punch well above it's weight. It doesn't play games with cliff hangers, or episodic drivel. Each season is essentially four movies worth of contained story.

[–] jcarax@beehaw.org 9 points 1 month ago

What do you mean "have to?" These companies are making money hand over fist, not paying a large portion of their employees a livable wage, and choose to spy on us for extra profit.

[–] jcarax@beehaw.org 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Arch is absolutely easy to break. But it's also easy to not break.

I've been using it for years, only reinstall when I get a new computer (could image, but meh) or when I'm changing desktop environments. This last time when I switched to KDE, I installed Cachy. It's fine, but it's a bit less control that I'd rather have. So when I switch back to Cosmic, Lab WC, or XFCE I'll go back to Arch.

And to be clear, the loss of control isn't entirely loss of control. It's defaults that I don't like, built up by someone else. It puts me into subtractive mode to remove and replace, whereas with Arch proper it's more fully additive, installing and configuring what I want on a very very streamlined base.

[–] jcarax@beehaw.org 2 points 2 months ago

Yeah, it's never sat very well with me. I've gone through cycles where I'll use a good bit of AUR, to none at all. I had been using a handful of things, but realized that almost all of it was Python stuff that I could more safely install with pip or uv, so I've migrated all of that. The one thing left is Manuskript, and it hardly gets updates anyway.

[–] jcarax@beehaw.org 5 points 3 months ago (1 children)

What’s the word that could happen?

The bird, probably.

[–] jcarax@beehaw.org 3 points 3 months ago

Yeah, I have almost no apps on my phone now. Breezy Weather, Firefox Focus, Comaps, Stratum for MFA, Signal, and a few other things. I rarely use any of it, except I check Breezy Weather once a day (better than anything I've found on the web). Signal seems to finally be removing the phone requirement, and I could move MFA to my password manager. I rarely turn on mobile data, and I get 6-8 days battery on my Pixel 9a running Graphene.

But, it's really nice to have if I get lost when I'm in town. I can go from ruining my day, which being autistic, tends to snowball into a week or so, to pulling out my phone and getting everything back on track.

That said, I used to constantly have my face in a reddit app, have YNAB and all my banking apps, and rely on it for just about everything. I don't need all that. I take my receipts home, I bank from my laptop, I bought a DAP for my music, Pocketbook for reading, etc.

That said, I'd like to move music back to it once I get a phone with an SD card that will run an OS I'm happy with. I'm optimistic for the Motorola phone with Graphene support. And I'd like to use it to control MPD or Navidrome at home, start getting some Home Assistant stuff running with it for control, and spin up an open source alternative to YNAB that I can run an app for.

It took me years to get to this point where I feel like I can start using it for actually useful stuff, and not be tempted to have it take over my life. Of course, now RAM and disk are too expensive for me to build the little hyperconverged cluster I want to run those services.

[–] jcarax@beehaw.org 1 points 3 months ago

I actually like Gnome's paradigm. But I also used CDE-style desktops for quite a long time, so I'm not really locked to the Windows ways. I would say Gnome is CDE inspired, but with the weird activities fuckery.

Ultimately, Gnome is just too lacking in customization. No panel, no notification area, window switching behavior... I have to install extensions for basic functionality. Which is fine at first glance, but then I have to be careful with updates when a new version is released, until the extensions update. Then I have to chase new extensions for the ones that are really lagging or cease development. Which happens a lot, because most people seem to get sick of dealing with that shit and stop using Gnome at some point.

Honestly, if Gnome would let me show the panel when docked and banish it to activities when undocked, I could probably live with all the rest. Also, have they fixed reversal of swipe gestures when you reverse scroll direction? That's just absurdly bad UX, which is actually out of character. We might disagree with a lot of UX decisions from the Gnome project, but they're usually refined and precise. The swipe gesture issues are just plain broken, or were, it's been a couple years since I've used it.

KDE is just too much, and there's quirky stuff I'm really not fond of. I'm using it now, have been for about 6 months now, which is by far the longest I have going back to trying it occasionally starting back in the late 90's.

I'm excited for Cosmic, I used that for a good stretch, and it might be time to give it another try soon. I'm also excited for my old friend XFCE, and some other mid-weight DEs, finally finding their way to Wayland.

[–] jcarax@beehaw.org 2 points 3 months ago

This whole damned division is just trying to hang on for dear life.

[–] jcarax@beehaw.org 2 points 4 months ago

I thought I was the only one, it's just so easy to use it as your base working folder. Things get organized out as whatever it is moves forward to some arbitrary point.

[–] jcarax@beehaw.org 4 points 5 months ago (2 children)

I absolutely adore being able to click into and between genres and artists to get to albums and songs instantly. I want to ultimately move back to MPD, maybe Navidrome or Subsonic, but... I just love Quod Libet.

[–] jcarax@beehaw.org 2 points 5 months ago

Unfortunately there seems to be a lot of proprietary crap going on between Google/Apple and carriers. Maybe instead of dangerous age verification logs, our law makers could focus on untangling these messes into extensions of existing standards. Maybe throw a few new ones in, like for casting to car screens.

 

In honor of the current state of affairs in the US.

 

Is anyone using Pipewire's AES67 support? I'm looking to implement some form of whole home audio for an MPD or some other music server. I've played with a combined airplay sink and a couple Sonos speakers, but it's problematic and cuts out intermittently for a split second.

I'm only really able to use wifi at this point though, and don't want to run cables until I buy a house in the next few months. Though I will run some wired tests over coming months before that, and develop a plan. I've also looked into Snapcast, which is probably preferable to a combined Airplay sink.

And that's because I'm wary of planning to use an open source implementation to a very proprietary protocol long term. When I bought some Genelec speakers for my desk earlier this year, I stumbled across their networked speakers that support POE and AES67. I see Pipewire has AES67 support in the RTP sink, but there's not much out there about people trying to use this.

Has anyone around here gotten a chance to play around with it? How does it work? Any pain points?

 

I got the 21K5001JUS, which has the R7 Pro 7840u, 64GB LPDDR5x 6400, and OLED 2880x1800. Ordered it August 20th, shipped expedited on September 1st, and arrived in the upper Midwest this afternoon, September 5th.

I updated to the latest Windows 11 Pro patches, no Lenovo updates in the Vantage software. My first impressions were:

  1. The fan spins up and gets quite loud when installing Windows updates, but not nearly as loud as my P52s. Substantially louder than my T14s gen 1 AMD. Unfortunately I don't have my T14s gen 3 AMD just yet, I'm not sure of an ETA on that yet.
  2. The OLED scaled to 1.5x really doesn't bother me. I think it's well worth the absence of backlight quality issues, and IPS glow. We'll see once I get into assessing battery life, especially coming from an M1 MBA for personal use.

It feels a little less premium than the T14s gen 1, with a little bit of flex in the lid and wrist rest. But it's crazy how far we've come since my T450s, which is like a workstation by today's size and weight standards.

Running Prime 95 with 8 cores and SMT, the fan can get a good bit louder than I would prefer, and than I would expect the T14s gen 4 will. But running GeekBench on Best Performance profile in Windows, the fan does spin up but is nearly silent.

In my experience of years with Thinkpads, especially the P52s, I expect the fan noise to be much less aggressive in Linux. I'll be assessing that next in Fedora 38, with and without a Windows VM running. Then, before truly assessing if I'm going to keep this or trade it in for a T14s gen 4 AMD with less RAM (opting against the VM workload), I'll do the same in Arch with the latest kernel and such.

Here are my GeekBench scores:

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