alin23 (u/alin23) - Readit News

alin23 commented on How to Build a Smartwatch: Picking a Chip ericmigi.com/blog/how-to-... · Posted by u/rcarmo

MrAlex94 · 3 months ago

Would Withings[1] watches not fit the bill? I have a ScanWatch and the battery life lasts almost a month.

alin23 · 3 months ago

The Scanwatch Light seems to be very close to what I need. While they're priced reasonably for what they offer, they're crazy expensive for what I would need. I'm really not interested in fitness or sleep tracking these days anymore.

I'm also a bit scared of the many "charging issues" some people seem to have with them after a few months, but I guess every batch has a few bad devices so I could hopefully return it.

Thanks for the recommendation! I might try one soon.

alin23 commented on How to Build a Smartwatch: Picking a Chip ericmigi.com/blog/how-to-... · Posted by u/rcarmo

alin23 · 3 months ago

Glad to finaly see someone in the low-power chip industry going in the open source direction. Thanks for the insight!

When I saw rePebble be announced, I signed up for it right away. Only later I realized I actually don't want a smartwatch, I want a dumb watch with vibration notifications.

I know I'm in the minority, but it's a niche that has a few very interested people in it [0] [1] [2]

After wearing the Casio F105 for the past 2 years, I can't go back to something larger, heavier or thicker than this. I could accept weekly battery charging for the benefit of having some bluetooth functionality.

So nowadays I'm looking for a super small bluetooth chip that can power a small vibration motor, which can receive all notifications from my iPhone. I would like to glue that chip, motor and a small lithium battery between the two straps of my F105, because in my tests it seems I don't notice if I add a small weight there.

I still remember when I first used my first Mi Band 1, a forgotten fitness band that had no display, just 3 RGB LEDs that could even get specific colors based on the app that sent the notification. I could know right away when I got a blue Messenger chat that I needed to answer now, or a yellow Google Keep reminder that I could ignore until I got back to my computer.

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/pebble/comments/9xw2j2/im_looking_f...

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/smartwatch/comments/174hq9x/need_a_...

[2] https://tildes.net/~tech/18nf/smartwatch_primarily_for_notif...

alin23 commented on My deleted Twitter account was instantly taken over by crypto scammers · Posted by u/alin23

BLKNSLVR · 5 months ago

So, after deactivation and the expiry time, it doesn't reset the account or require and kind of verification to prove you were the prior owner, it just keeps everything as it was before?

alin23 · 5 months ago

It doesn't keep everything as before, it's a new profile that started with no image, no description, 0 followers etc.

This is clearly malicious if they recreated my account exactly as before, and it's also clearly premeditated if they kept track of my profile info.

alin23 commented on My deleted Twitter account was instantly taken over by crypto scammers · Posted by u/alin23

mkgiga · 5 months ago

Since twitter shafted their REST api, does that mean that these bots just scrape the site 24/7 and constantly check for when users deactivate?

alin23 · 5 months ago

It's probably more likely taken into a troll farm where an employee of that organization is doing these posts using an AI prompt for each profile.

alin23 commented on Using uv as your shebang line akrabat.com/using-uv-as-y... · Posted by u/Einenlum

alin23 · 7 months ago

I recently learned about swift-sh [1] which is the same thing as “uv run —script” but for swift files.

I’ve been having a blast automating some macOS annoyances with small scripts that can use native macOS APIs directly, no more pyobjc.

I also wrote an app to bring the startup folder functionality from Windows to the Mac to help me run these scripts at startup more easily [2]

[1] https://github.com/mxcl/swift-sh

[2] https://github.com/FuzzyIdeas/StartupFolder

alin23 commented on I Switched to Firefox and Never Looked Back howtogeek.com/why-i-switc... · Posted by u/Vinnl

markjgx · 7 months ago

> It's been flawless, more battery and memory efficient than Chrome

Is that actually true?

alin23 · 7 months ago

It was true for me, specifically for my workflow, the websites I use and how I leave some specific tabs in the background.

I’ve used Chrome for many years before Firefox and it was always prioritizing JS responsiveness even when the app was in the background and not needed, so it consumed CPU cycles and battery power needlessly. I see now that Chrome enables a Low Power mode by default on battery and it’s unusable as scrolling gets janky. I don’t know if the overall experience has gotten better in the last year on Chrome.

Not sure what’s different about memory though, but Chrome always appeared like a memory hog when I tested both browser side by side on the same set of websites and same few extensions. Could be that it just caches more and that’s benefitting responsiveness

alin23 commented on I Switched to Firefox and Never Looked Back howtogeek.com/why-i-switc... · Posted by u/Vinnl

alin23 · 7 months ago

I've been on Firefox Dev Edition for Mac for the last 4 years I think, and I can't remember more than 1 or 2 websites that didn't work correctly on it. It's been flawless, more battery and memory efficient than Chrome, less finicky and problematic than Safari, and with all the extensions that I need.

I seriously don't see any disadvantage in picking Firefox over Chrome. I still have Chrome around if any website requires it specifically, but I haven't launched it in ages.

There were a few Chrome extensions that weren't there on Firefox [1] [2] but I fixed that _easily_ by getting the crx file, unpacking it, then adding the https://github.com/mozilla/webextension-polyfill to the extension to make it cross-browser.

It's easy enough to make an extension work on both Firefox and Chrome, I've done it myself with SideHN (https://github.com/alin23/sidehn), but I guess Firefox is not really in the mind of Chrome extension devs.

[1] https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/anchor-headings/lgg...

[2] https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/xpath-helper/hgimno...

alin23 commented on Self-Hostable Form Back End – OSS Alternative to Formspree github.com/FormBee/FormBe... · Posted by u/Oia20

alin23 · 8 months ago

In case others are looking for a cheaper alternative to Formspree, I've been using https://formspark.io/ for all my websites [1] [2] [3]

I paid $25 a few years ago (can't even remember when) and I still have 47k out of the 50k submission credits I bought.

But I love to see a self-hostable alternative available, especially one that's as easy to use as running a `docker-compose` command. Sometimes you just need that control.

For example in my case, I would get app support emails all day and night, and even if I had DND enabled, I would wake to 3-6 emails that accumulated over night and my mornings would get hectic instantly. I would forget to eat for a long time and my mood would be irritable all day.

I had to place my own small API in front of Formspark to delay the emails for specific times of the day to avoid this. Something like FormBee would allow me to alter this in the server code directly instead of building yet another API.

[1] https://lowtechguys.com/contact

[2] https://lunar.fyi/contact

[3] https://alinpanaitiu.com/contact