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InitialsDiceBearhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/„Initials” (https://github.com/dicebear/dicebear) by „DiceBear”, licensed under „CC0 1.0” (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)GE
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2 yr. ago

  • Hmm. According to Wikipedia you are correct, and the original SEQUEL was simply renamed to SQL. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SQL#History

    I'm not sure how much that original SEQUEL/SQL has in common with later publicly-available SQL implementations. I never personally worked with SEQUEL but I was under the impression it was more of a spiritual predecessor to SQL than a direct ancestor. But I trust Wikipedia more than I trust my my memory here, so I guess I was wrong.

  • SQL is not traditionally pronounced like "sequel". Sequel was a whole different language.

    Official pronunciation for MySQL, SQLite, and PostgreSQL all pronounce each letter.

    But "sequel" is probably more common at this point and some of them include it as an alternate pronunciation now.

  • The only use I ever found for it was setting alarms and starting timers. That was reliable, and faster than opening the app, navigating to an alarm, and manually setting it.

    I disabled my assistant entirely though. Setting alarms a little faster is not enough to justify it.

  • Google Wallet (or whatever they call it these days) doesn't work, even if you install Google Play Services. So NFC payments are simply not possible for me. I've heard that some banks have NFC payments built into their apps, but I have never seen a list. I'd switch banks if it meant I could get this to work.

    There's currently no NLP (network location provider) support, so if you don't have an actual GPS satellite signal, you will not have active location unless you use Google's location services. There's been some talk of including a new NLP service in the future but I don't know of any timeline.

    Even when using Google Location Services, accuracy is worse than on the stock Pixel OS. I'm not sure why, but I get tons of drift indoors (whether Wi-Fi is enabled or not), whereas on PixelOS it was almost always stable. It also means navigation apps will sometimes think I magically hopped off a bridge and onto the side street below or something like that.

    There's no "extreme battery saver" mode like on Google's Pixel OS. When I switched, I didn't realize that was a Google feature rather than an Android/AOSP feature.

    If you rely on Google backups for app data, I'm not sure if there's any reasonable way to get that into GOS since it can only happen during initial setup. Might be solutions to this, but personally I didn't spend time on it because there was nothing I cared too much about. Check your apps to see if they have settings import/export functions. A lot of open-source apps (like Lemmy clients) do.

    GOS has an open-source backup system called Seedvault, but of course if you ever want to switch back to a stock Android OS, you won't be able to bring those backups with you since apps simply can't get that level of access on any stock Android OS. You're stuck on GOS or other third-party OSes that support Seedvault, or maybe rooting if that's possible.

    If you use WhatsApp (ew), be aware that it only supports backup via Google Drive. And you can't manually download and restore that backup without adding Google Play Services and logging in.

    Lawnchair and other third-party home screens seem to work worse on GOS than stock Pixel OS when it comes to the app switcher animation bug. I've seen some GOS forum threads about this so I know I'm not alone.

  • I used that briefly 10+ years ago when I got a Fire Stick for like $5. I even installed it on one of my phones back then, since they had a lot of app giveaways and I was dumb.

    It was basically "Google Play but worse". Like the Epic Games Store is to Steam.

  • DNS over HTTPS. It allows encrypted DNS lookup with a URL, which allows for url-based customizations not possible with traditional DNS lookups (e.g. the server could have /ads or /trackers endpoints so you can choose what to block).

    DNS Over TLS (DoT) is similar, but it doesn't use URLs, just IP addresses like generic DNS. Both are encrypted.

  • And that's the #1 reason to use Mint over Ubuntu!

    Snaps make a little more sense in servers since you can package CLI stuff in snaps, but not in flatpaks. For GUI apps, it's "fine" but it doesn't solve new problems, and the way Canonical has migrated apt packages to snaps is aggressive and error-prone.

  • Honestly, that sounds great.

    My biggest problem with Flatpak is that Flathub has all sorts of weird crap, and depending on your UI it's not always easy to tell what's official and what's just from some rando. I don't want a repo full of "unverified" packages to be a first-class citizen in my distro.

    Distros can and should curate packages. That's half the point of a distro.

    And yes, the idea of packaging dependencies in their own isolated container per-app comes with real downsides: I can't simply patch a library once at the system level.

    I'm running a Fedora derivative and I wasn't even aware of this option. I'm going to look into it now because it sounds better than Flathub.

  • The experience of installing and updating GPU drivers can be very different across different distros. Especially if you use secure boot. This was such a pain point for me on Tumbleweed that I just pinned my kernel.

  • The only possible silver lining to all this is that perhaps "normal" people will finally start to care about the problems techies have been screaming about for 20+ years now.

    It was inevitable that a bad actor would gain access eventually, because there is no such a thing as an organization that you can trust in perpetuity. That obviously doesn't excuse the actual bad actors that now have access.

  • Once users have given up on comfortable single-handed use, the only limiting factor is pocket size.

    For me, that means once it passes about 65mm in width, I might as well jump to ~80mm in width, which is huge even by today's standards. 70mm wide phones are just the worst of both worlds to me.

    I want a small phone, but there hasn't been a serious option in over 10 years. The Xperia Z3 Compact was the last good "small" Android phone that was actually small enough to justify its existence. That was 2014.

    Edit: Also, I suspect with bezels being so small now, the frame would need to be even smaller to avoid accidental edge presses with one-handed operation.

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  • In my experience, this is more a problem if you are fully running your own mail servers, not so much if you are using an established email service. My MX record reflects my email provider, and my outgoing mail goes through their servers. So I'm as trusted as they are, in general. Your mail provider should have instructions on how to set up DNS for verification.

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  • If you're willing to pay money for it, you can get your own domain for $2-$15 per year, then use it with pretty much any commercial email service. That way you can change email providers without changing your address.

    This is my plan going forward. I'm going to suffer the inconvenience of changing my address, but only one more time, not every time I want to change providers.

  • Kids these days and their "Plasma". BACK IN MY DAY it was just KDE!

    I'm not sure why this feels new to me. Perhaps it's because I spent a lot of time on other DEs after 2009.

    But also, from that link:

    We will use "KDE" exclusively in two meanings:

    • KDE, the community, which creates free software for end users
    • As an umbrella brand for the technology created by the KDE community

    So I don't feel like it's wrong to just call it KDE, just imprecise.