Hacker News: Tarball10

New comment by Tarball10 in "Oneplus phone update introduces hardware anti-rollback"

Tarball10 — Sun, 25 Jan 2026 22:22:27 +0000

Until they switch to eSIM...

New comment by Tarball10 in "2025 was a disaster for Windows 11"

Tarball10 — Wed, 31 Dec 2025 20:56:12 +0000

Apps need to adhere to some new conditions to contribute items to the Win 11 context menu. The 7-zip creator has been unable or unwilling to make these changes[1].

There are other open source projects which do display in the context menu, such as TortoiseGit and Notepad++. In fact there is a fork of 7-zip called NanaZip which supports the Win 11 context menu.

[1] https://sourceforge.net/p/sevenzip/discussion/45797/thread/1...

New comment by Tarball10 in "GOG is getting acquired by its original co-founder"

Tarball10 — Mon, 29 Dec 2025 21:16:43 +0000

Not paying full price is not a "lost sale". People unwilling to pay full price wait for a discount or price reduction. Look at how popular the seasonal Steam sales are. Pirating the game very likely means they never purchase it at any price, which _is_ a lost sale.

New comment by Tarball10 in "GOG is getting acquired by its original co-founder"

Tarball10 — Mon, 29 Dec 2025 21:09:37 +0000

Isn't that exactly what companies use as justification for DMCA and DRM protection?

Without those, you'd have sites full of pirated game downloads easily found through search engines. DMCA takedowns force those sites into shady corners of the internet, making them harder to find and riskier for the average user. And (effective) DRM makes users have to wait for a crack which may take weeks or months.

The result is that it's easier for the average person to just log into Steam/Epic/PSN/eShop and spend $60 to play immediately.

New comment by Tarball10 in "GOG is getting acquired by its original co-founder"

Tarball10 — Mon, 29 Dec 2025 20:59:10 +0000

They might spend $600 on 10 of those games, though. It's not all-or-nothing.

New comment by Tarball10 in "Don't throw away your old PC–it makes a better NAS than anything you can buy"

Tarball10 — Sun, 30 Nov 2025 18:27:04 +0000

If you're running a media server (like Plex or Jellyfin) you can do hardware accelerated transcoding on the GPU.

New comment by Tarball10 in "The Peach meme: On CRTs, pixels and signal quality (again)"

Tarball10 — Mon, 20 Oct 2025 20:58:24 +0000

There was a long period (15-20 years) where LCDs were quite a downgrade from CRTs. Poor contrast ratio (gray blacks), backlight bleed, low resolution, poor color gamut (they're still putting 45% NTSC screens in budget laptops!), stuck at 60Hz refresh rates.

Those gaps have finally started closing in the last few years, now that 4K 240Hz 99% DCI-P3 OLED monitors are readily available and relatively affordable.

New comment by Tarball10 in "Primer on FedEx's Distribution Network (2024)"

Tarball10 — Mon, 29 Sep 2025 03:58:32 +0000

Might depend on location but I've always had Express packages delivered by a dedicated Express truck. Which feels wasteful sometimes when both a Ground and Express truck come down my street within the same hour.

New comment by Tarball10 in "PayPal to support Ethereum and Bitcoin"

Tarball10 — Mon, 15 Sep 2025 15:29:01 +0000

Good point. I should have clarified that I'm referring specifically to PayPal in the US, which themselves state that "PayPal is not a bank, does not take deposits and is not FDIC insured".

https://www.paypal.com/us/legalhub/paypal/program-banks-tnc

New comment by Tarball10 in "PayPal to support Ethereum and Bitcoin"

Tarball10 — Mon, 15 Sep 2025 15:22:52 +0000

Fair enough, maybe "outsourced" would be a better way to put it. Basically they want support to cost them as little as possible and do not particularly care whether it actually offers any useful help to customers.

More specifically, their support cannot actually do anything to resolve problems. They read off what their computer screen is telling them. They can't take any actions to fix things.

New comment by Tarball10 in "PayPal to support Ethereum and Bitcoin"

Tarball10 — Mon, 15 Sep 2025 15:09:05 +0000

Holding money (or crypto) in PayPal is a terrible idea. They are not a bank, they do not abide by banking regulations. They can lock you out of your account and your money at any time and leave you going in circles with their offshore support.

Yes, they are somewhat of a necessary evil if you do any online peer-to-peer buying/selling, since they are the only money transfer service that provides some level of "buyer protection", but you want to do the bare minimum with PayPal to avoid unnecessary risk.

Link one bank account (not your primary) to PayPal to receive money, and transfer received money immediately. Link one credit card for purchases. Nothing else. Do not link debit cards, do not sign up for their "balance account" where money is held in PayPal (no matter how hard they push it with UI dark patterns in their app), do not sign up for their crypto account.

New comment by Tarball10 in "When DEF CON partners with the U.S. Army"

Tarball10 — Wed, 13 Aug 2025 15:52:26 +0000

>Most Americans continue to express positive views of the military: 60% say it has a positive effect, while 36% say its effect is negative.

https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2024/02/01/the-u-s-mili...

New comment by Tarball10 in "Cloudflare 1.1.1.1 Incident on July 14, 2025"

Tarball10 — Wed, 16 Jul 2025 15:57:54 +0000

For a limited set of DoH providers. It does not let you enter a custom DoH URL, only a DoT hostname.

New comment by Tarball10 in "FEMA to end coverage for North Carolina recovery efforts"

Tarball10 — Mon, 14 Apr 2025 18:35:04 +0000

The governor is a Democrat, though. I imagine this is punishment/retribution similar to cutting Maine's federal school funding after its Democrat governor publicly confronted Trump.

New comment by Tarball10 in "Launching RDAP; sunsetting WHOIS"

Tarball10 — Mon, 17 Mar 2025 01:40:18 +0000

This is about sunsetting the WHOIS protocol in favor of RDAP, not doing away with domain owner registration data.

New comment by Tarball10 in "MacBook Air M4"

Tarball10 — Thu, 06 Mar 2025 16:07:07 +0000

Also false, you can build a custom configuration of the gen12 with the 165U cpu and 64 GB of ram.

New comment by Tarball10 in "MacBook Air M4"

Tarball10 — Thu, 06 Mar 2025 00:24:42 +0000

120Hz on Snapdragon/Mediatek Android phones works great with little impact to battery life. Pixels are hobbled by the poor power efficiency of their Tensor chips.

New comment by Tarball10 in "Microsoft begins turning off uBlock Origin and other extensions in Edge"

Tarball10 — Fri, 28 Feb 2025 20:29:26 +0000

Check out the Auto Tab Discard extension for Firefox. It removes the contents of tabs from memory after a period of time, but keeps the tab icon/title around. Next time you click the tab, it acts like a bookmark and reloads the page it was on. As a tab hoarder, I've found it very helpful to keep CPU/memory usage down.

New comment by Tarball10 in "Ads chew through half of mobile data"

Tarball10 — Sun, 05 Jan 2025 21:05:53 +0000

OP was suggesting an outright block of traffic from ad providers. I don't believe any US ISPs have gone to that extreme, at least not yet. They allowed peering points to become congested which affected Netflix traffic, but weren't blocking it.

New comment by Tarball10 in "Ads chew through half of mobile data"

Tarball10 — Sun, 05 Jan 2025 20:14:21 +0000

That sets a terrible precedent. You do not want ISPs picking and choosing what content to deliver, or forcing content providers to pay extra to deliver content to their customers.