• 6 Posts
  • 52 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • you’re not mentioning which Pixel you’re getting for $200 and also that’s only twice the stated budget. anyhow, the cheapest Pixel 7 I have locally available is $310 (“lighty used”), which I think is the lowest rung; sixes are like three years old and that’s a no bueno for phones with fixed batteries. as an aside, if I’m buying something someone rubbed their face on, spat on, and rubbed all over, I’m paying half price max, not 15% less than NiB ($355 here).

    last week I bought a Poco F1 (SDM845/6GB) in not great condition for $60; excellent LineageOS and PostmarketOS support though and easily replaceable batteries. a month or so prior, a Mi 9T Pro (SDM855/6GB) for $80. those are on the high side, there’s a ton of LineageOS supported Xiaomi devices for $50 or less if you go down to SDM6xx/4GB, which is plenty for everyday use. they can be had on the cheap because their MIUI operating system is bloated and hella slow so people just upgrade, whereas unlocking the boot loader and flashing an alternative nets you a super useable device.

    I’m not saying any of those is as good as a modern Pixel device, but for my use cases they are more than enough.



  • although just a cursory look at the drama surrounding it is reason enough, my real reason is pretty simple: the hardware costs just way too much.

    a phone should cost like $100, max. that’s an easily breakable thief magnet and you should put in as much effort as possible to treat it as a fungible device. you break or lose one - no big deal, it’s encrypted, restore from backup and keep on truckin’.

    I can lose/break/gift like 6 or 7 competent devices (SDM680/845/etc, 6 GB RAM) before I even get close to the price of one used Pixel. hard, hard pass.



  • OK, so what this purports to do is use your email server as chat platform. kinda intriguing, could have several use cases, don’t know what it does with existing email or how the chat looks like in e.g. thunderbird…

    unfortunately, after installing it and being unsuccessful about having it login to my IMAP account (works fine with thunderbird), I’ve given up.

    so, the “onboarding” is less than stellar and the desktop app is electron, which I hate; haven’t tried the android app.

    edit: it works, the initial login process just takes super long; guess it’s trying different ports and stuff to be auto-magical. works fine for intra-server comms (accounts belonging to same domain), adding secondary device works (android, from f-droid). comms (encrypted) are stored in a separate IMAP folder that’s unreadable to “normal” mail clients, so it doesn’t disturb e.g. thunderbird. a fine array of customizations in the apps, will be testing it further.




  • I don’t understand the fascination of other commenters with mini-PCs, as the mini-ness was mentioned nowhere in the OP.

    any used and decomissioned old office PC, any i5/i7 is way more powerful than you’ll need for that setup. you get everything you need right in the box and you can cram it full with cheap RAM and hard disks. you get to repurpose something that’s useless as a desktop workstation and not buy more future e-waste.

    yes, the mini-PCs and the Rpis are more power efficient, but the operating costs of a $30-50 PC don’t come close to the price of buying one of these mini-things, not to mention - figuring out how to run large hard disks with it.


  • what they said but don’t go below T480; the performance jump is huge (quad vs dual-core) and the price difference is negligible while almost everything is interchangeable (screens, keyboards, cards, plastic parts, dock stations, etc.).

    T480 should be attainable around the $/€ 200 mark nowadays as they’re 5-6 gens behind and upgrading 'em to like 16 or 32 GB and 1TB NVMe or more is stupid cheap.




  • install something debian-like and then try jellyfin-mpv-shim and then add macast. you’re creating a sink that plays whatever you send it via your mobile device. so, no interface on the tv to navigate, you browse your jellyfin library from your phone and just send it to the player. you control the playback from the mobile app (play, stop, volume, change subs, etc). behind the scene it uses mpv to play the video.

    macast does the same for online videos e.g youtube, vimeo, etc. you send it a youtube video and it plays it in fullscreen. behind the scenes it uses yt-dl with mpv.


  • it’s completely random and incongruent with anything that is or isn’t happening. same game (Starcraft 2 and Far Cry 5 are currently in rotation) runs fine and then it just doesn’t. yesterday launched SC2, played it for a while, everything is butter smooth. left it open to go make dinner. started a new game after like 15 mins - choppy, drops to 15 fps, horrible. played a couple rounds this morning - everything back to normal. and so on.

    no huge temp spikes, no huge CPU loads, nothing I can pin down as correlated. both games are well within the capabilities of both CPU and GPU. I have C-states and Cool & Quiet disabled, so it’s nothing power-throttling related.

    I don’t like rebooting, got way too much stuff open all the time, I do that maybe once a month; the rest is just suspend in the evening and wake in the morning.



  • no experience with this game but performance drops happen frequently and randomly for me, Fedora, Lutris, AMD GPU. like, I play a game that I have 100+ hours played on the same hardware and software and everything is dandy - 60 FPS, butter smooth mouse and game play. next day, same game, same settings, no updates in the meantime, absolutely nothing changed - 25 FPS, mouse stutters, horror. next day everything is fine, and so on.