Been using Vimium for years too and it's great, but it's really not the same. The late, great Vimperator extension was more comparable to QuteBrowser but it stopped functioning (on Firefox) when they switched from XUL to web extensions.

Vimium mainly gives you keyboard navigation, but QuteBrowser removes the address, tab and bookmark bars and instead gives you keyboard access to everything via the very Vim-like status bar at the bottom. Incidentally this also frees up quite a bit of vertical screen real estate, which is a big deal to me. Browser settings, scripts, etc. are also all accessible via the keyboard — Vim style.

Edit: The lack of a solid Bitwarden integration in QuteBrowser is kind of hurting though.

Many password managers allow you to set up emergency access (as it's named in Bitwarden) that'll let a contact access your vault by request after a certain wait time during which you can either manually accept or decline the request.

I got a set of Fairbuds XL at work because it made sense to buy something that could last a long time and be repaired and I really wanted to support Fairphone's basic premise — repairable gadgets with long support. Here's my experience with them that nobody asked for.

First of all, the sound is fine. Nothing exceptional but certainly not bad. I'd say they compare pretty well to my Beyerdynamic DT 770 Pro (80 Ohm) or my old Sennheiser Urbanite XL. They also sit pretty well on my head for extended periods of time, which is nice, but will obviously vary from person to person. They don't have any fancy Teams-integration, which is a plus for me but a deal-breaker to others. They hold battery very well. I haven't tested it in depth but I've used them for maybe 3 full workdays without charging them, so maybe around 24 hours of active use and they still had some juice left.

But the firmware... What a disappointment. The headphones have 3 settings, ANC, ambient and "normal". I personally prefer "normal" but the headphones don't remember the setting across restarts, so every time I turn them on I have to sit through the boot sound (because system sounds can't be interrupted), wait for the audio feedback to finish saying "connected", and if a second device is connected, "second device connected", then click a physical button, wait for it to finish saying "ambient sounds", and finally click a third time to hear it say: "noise cancelling off", and _then_ I can start using them. It's OK the first 5-10 times but then it just gets really, really annoying.

I went to their forums about a year ago to suggest it as a feature but learned that Fairphone actually don't interact with the forums, it's just user-to-user interaction, so suggestions don't really make it further from there. That's fair, so I contacted their support about it instead. They suggested that I contact the store that my workplace bought the headphones from. (I didn't think that was really going to solve the issue, so I chose to just ignore that.) They've released 2 firmware updates since then, but no storing mode across reboots. They did however manage to glitch out the boot sound in one firmware update, so it played 2/3 of the audio only to interrupt itself and play the second half of the sound again. The last firmware update fixed that at least.

And before someone suggests that there might be no place to store aforementioned setting, they can store bluetooth pairings and EQ presets on the headphones. The noise cancellation preference could be stored in less than a byte. Unfortunately the firmware isn't OSS so I can't even fix it myself.

/rant

Wait, the firmware isn't OSS? Did they ever mention why? I completely understand that they can't open source stuff like a phone's modem firmware, but I don't get it here. Was it written in house or did they use some off the shelf solution (would explain why they can't open source it).

I mean, I know that fairphone doesn't market themselves as OSS centric (like purism does for example), but you'd think that it would fit their ewaste reduction goal in this case.

I agree. Making it OSS would definitely fit the spirit of their business, IMO, but the best we can do for now is to suggest that they open source it and hope.

I'm currently reading Kyle Chayka's Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture, and even though "algorithm" means something slightly different in the two ("actual algorithm" vs "algorithm-meaning-AI"), it almost feels like Naomi Kritzer's short story is the optimistic (but fictional) version of the more capitalist-driven, bland, and less human- and culture-focused reality described by Kyle Chayka.

According to Harold McGee's On Food and Cooking, rice turns bad pretty fast at room temperature. Here's from "Keeping Rice Safe" (p. 475):

"Cooked rice turns out to be a potential source of food poisoning. Raw rice almost always carries dormant spores of the bacterium Bacillus cereus, which produces powerful gastrointestinal toxins. The spores can tolerate high temperatures, and some survive cooking. If cooked rice is left for a few hours at room temperature, the spores germinate, bacteria multiply and toxins accumulate. Ordinary cooked rice should therefore be served promptly, and leftovers refrigerated or frozen to prevent bacterial growth."

I've always taken that to mean that it's fine to reheat rice as long as it hasn't been standing around for too long before refrigerating the first time around.

This is a great idea. Bram has made a huge positive impact on the world, even if most people aren't aware of it. I'd love to help make it even bigger.

Edit: Hmm... PayPal seems to throw error after error at me when I try to donate. I'll keep trying.

Yay, PayPal let me through. I just had to turn off uBlock Origin and Privacy Badger... But for Bram, I'm ok with it.

I would imagine that a normal visit generates more backend traffic, given that it needs to fetch posts, thumbnails, etc. whereas a visit to a private sub wouldn't need to check more than authorization.

I could easily be wrong though, I haven't done web development for years.

They use a microservice architecture. Some services could scale well in servicing all those assets. What handles checking access to private subs may not.

You can’t treat the scaling as a binary feature, that it does or doesn’t

Sure, but that type of traffic is expected and they can handle it with things like caching and autoscaling. I'm suggesting that a part of the system that usually doesn't get a lot of requests wasn't designed to handle a huge influx of requests.

All that other stuff's easy to cache. Authorization's cacheable, too, kinda, with some trade-offs, but they may not have bothered if it'd never been a problem before. Or this particular check my have been bypassing that caching, and it'd never cause a problem before because there weren't that many of those checks happening.

You start getting a lot more DB queries than usual, bypassing cache, the DB's remote, it's clustered or whatever, now you've got a ton more internal network traffic and open sockets, latency goes up, resources start to get exhausted...

Even though the phrase "the godfather of ..." suggests otherwise, it's really not a competition or an attempt to determine the exact origin of "close-up card magic", it's just acknowledging the fact that Juan Tamariz has contributed a lot to the art form.

That, however, doesn't diminish Dai Vernon's or Erdnase's contributions, but yeah, not a competition.

If we're going with "contributed a lot", then there are a tons of great card magicians to mention: H.N. Hofzinser (the real father of card magic), Richard Turner, Cardini, Charlie Miller, Jimmy Grippo, Rene Lavand, Bill Malone, Juliana Chen, Michael Vincent, and Shin Lim (off the top of my head -- I'm sure I'm missing someone)

Sure, but rattling off a bunch of names doesn't really say anything about what they've contributed and what impact it had. This piece is specifically celebrating Juan Tamariz and his contributions to close-up card magic.

I don't see why we can't celebrate someone for doing something without having to mention everyone else who's also done something. No one is diminishing their contributions but they're not the topic of the article. If you want to write an article about them, I'm sure someone would be happy to publish it.

Is Ruby Gems a first party thing now? I remember, back in the day, being tangentially involved with creating a Ruby package manager before Gems had become the de facto standard.

This kind of reminds me of the Travel Mode of 1Password: https://support.1password.com/travel-mode/ and I imagine it'd be most useful in similar situations.

Obviously the usefulness of measures like this is likely pretty low if your dealing with tech-savvy adversaries, but if some random border guard or police officer forces you to log into your computer and — I don't know, I'm not very well-versed in these scenarios — show your Facebook messages or your password vault, you could use your duress password to clear cookies and other stuff to show that you don't have a Facebook account or a password manager ... or whatever, you get the general idea.

Or you could use it to not change anything but simply log in and additionally alert your work place that you're under duress and they can cut off your access to critical systems. Provided that you have some sort of internet access of course...

I married into an American family recently. We plan on doing a road trip through America to visit said family. I will not be taking my phone or my laptop. I will just buy something cheap over there and then donate it to charity before I leave.