But I don't think a high cost of sending a letter is much of a hindrance if you pay it for social contacts. If you look at having a pen pal as a socializing event, then it's hard to beat how much it costs to go to a bar, concert or sports game etc.

Not all Germans do it, but I'd say a fair share. I think, because the German "Entschuldigung" is four syllables long :D But that would work the same way and for example in the pub situations you can shout it much better: "Ent-shool-dee-goong?"

I wasn't aware this is something that doesn't work in all English-speaking countries. I may have overused the equivalent of the word in other languages, too. Scusi about that.

Absolutely. Improving this would be a great boost in usability.

I love OsmAnd and I've been using it ever since I've been using phones that can navigate. That's why I've acquired a lot of arcane knowledge on how to find places in the search function. But I could never explain to anyone what I am doing there.

It starts by the mere fact that entering a street name will always search around the current location, which is usually not where you are but the city where you last ran a lookup.

If you want to change the city, there is a tab for that. But consider using postal because sometimes the place's name may be different from what people call it. Sometimes, the same postal code appears multiple times with subsets of streets of the place. So you'll have to go for each one and look for your street. That just happened to be for Avignon (postal code 84000).

Another fun OsmAnd-introduced activity is semi-leaving German Autobahn main tracks onto the side tracks that can be used to drive off but also lead back onto the main track but with more crossing traffic. It just loves to do that.

None of such disadvantages outweigh the level of detail and possibilities in OsmAnd and further in OSM. I love knowing that I could use the same app if I once had to use a wheelchair. I love being able to add notes to a place and getting an E-Mail update months later that someone fixed an issue that I've reported.

And when I use Google Maps every once in a full moon, I run into weird little glitches that surprise me a lot because the one thing I'd expect from this marvel of our monopolistic dystopia is that it "just works" - but it really doesn't. Don't ask me what issues I ran into last time. I forgot and they've probably been replaced by more confusing ones by now :)

I've never used anything but OpenOffice / LibreOffice for writing academic texts in the humanities and never missed anything. The "catch" whenever I tried Microsoft Word was the menu that had the most important functions (for me) hidden away much deeper than in OO and LO.

I've never been a big user of Spreadsheets but I've heard only good of Excel and trust the widespread opinion that it is unchallenged in its domain. In sociology you wouldn't use it because you've got specialized statistics software such as R and SPSS (PSPP being an attempt at an Open Source Alternative to SPSS).

Looking at administration, Excel ist probably quite important but when you get rid of it, not one but various solutions might take its place, depending on who uses it. If you want something like a browseable database in a colorful table for office clerks, LO Calc might be enough. But the things Excel gets praised for a lot (I never know what exactly people mean) would probably have to be tackled another way.

Governments going down that need to invest into finding those solutions by providing staff that is qualified to find them or even develop them. The state of Schleswig-Holstein considered in its Open Source initiative strategy that it may be challenged by a future legislation and put a focus on the reasons for acceptance of Open Source solutions. I wonder if that is put into action well to find solutions with the least "catch" that may even excel over Microsoft products depending on their context :)

Netsurf isn't fun on many websites but it should be enough for rendering HTML content from RSS, no? Terminal emulators and lynx/elinks/links/w3c work, too. And terminal RSS readers. HTML rendering is also possible with KOreader which runs well on rM2, come to think about it.

Here is the repo for netsurf https://github.com/alex0809/netsurf-reMarkable

I've had my rM2 since 2020 and enjoyed the hacking community a lot. I've since lost track - at some point I updated the firmware because I wanted the automatic shapes feature from upstream and couldn't use the framebuffer anymore.

You've summed up a lot of findings that I've made again and again trying to pick up where I left but it's become very confusing.

Looking forward to your next update! No pressure, though :)

I've just remembered: Check out KOreader if you haven't. I think it doesn't rely on QT and it runs on rM2 tablets with recent firmware if you launch it via ssh after stopping xochitl.

And Taylor Swift actually is invested in data security, so it's a compliment :) That's no reason against filing a lawsuit but much less for filing one.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SwiftOnSecurity

(Definitely adding this to my list)

Frogpad: German language one handed keyboard. Unfortunately discontinued http://frogpad.com/

Mirrorboard (my favorite): Intruiging mirror solution that builds upon the assumption that it is easier to access muscle memory from the other hand when you've learned it before https://blog.xkcd.com/2007/08/14/mirrorboard-a-one-handed-ke...

Mistel Barocco fully split Keyboard: Can (and unfortunately must) be programmed without software. Right half is the main keyboard. Left side connects to it, works also in standalone mode but is not programmable then. https://mistelkeyboard.com/products/bd20945a731491407807e80d...

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45290561

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

A time traveller's wiki that collects casual knowledge for different times (and different places).

Such as: "Buying a train ticket in Paris in 1972".

But it was a shower thought and it's pretty hard to imagine how this knowledge should be collected and especially presented.

In a way, wikipedia is already doing this by keeping records of articles as they change over the years :)

The article about train tickets wasn't so good as an example but "computer monitor" from 2004 is kind of fun to read :)

Unfortunately, "casual knowledge" is often omitted when writing informative articles. In this example, there is no mention that power buttons are often located somewhere in the back of the monitor, which was good to know in 2004. Also, some monitors are drawing power from the computer, thus they won't power up before the computer will. And speaking of that: You may want to turn of your computer after shutdown!

Edit: This would probably be useful for novelists and filmmakers (in addition to the casual time traveller)

A German 90s/2000s rapper (Textor, MC of Kinderzimmer Productions) produced a radio feature about facts and how hard it can be to prove them.

One personal example he added was about his Wikipedia Article that stated that his mother used to be a famous jazz singer in her birth country Sweden. Except she never was. The story had been added to an Album recension in a rap magazine years before the article was written. Textor explains that this is part of 'realness' in rap, which has little to do with facts and more with attitude.

When they approached Wikipedia Germany, it was very difficult to change this 'fact' about the biography of his mother. There was published information about her in a newspaper and she could not immediately prove who she was. Unfortunately, Textor didn't finish the story and moved on to the next topic in the radio feature.

Obviously, buying a device and using it as it is will always be the easiest path and I would have recommended Apple to anyone looking for this until this week, when Apple pulled the E2E feature from British phones.

So GrapheneOS is the only reasonable option left that I know of.

Installing sandboxed Google Play (no sideloading needed) from the Graphene App Store is a breeze by the way. It's right there after installing the OS.

And Pixel devices don't try to keep you from replacing the stock rom, you don't lose your warranty doing it. And there is a browser-based installer that gets rid of the need of using command lines.

Klickibunti, as German GUI-defiers would say.

LLMs are always an additional cost, never more efficient because they add to the calculation, if you look at it that way.

When I run into a website that it doesn't work with, I sometimes use the report function and set it myself.

However, most websites with a cookie banner that's too obstrusive for Consent-o-matic turn out to be useless clickbait LLM spam that's not worth the effort. So most of the time I just go somewhere better and leave the obnoxious cookie wall to itself.

I think it all turned out fine (for the time being) thanks to cookie walls :)

Well, we can also speak of Wernher von Braun or even contemporary figures that way. It's only more likely that someone comes along and points out that we shouldn't forget about the context.

When we speak of ancient history, the context is already forgotten beyond what has been documented. There are no living witnesses nor people who directly related to them. (Of course, archaeological and historical research can find more evidence.)

However we do speak of them passionately anyway, even if the discussion is less emotional. You bringing up the examples that you brought up is a perfect example. People immediately understand what you mean. Anyone who agrees with you will have to feel passionately about these long past events.

We all know about the cruelties that came with the Ceasars etc. because people documented them and didn't let it go. We don't need to point it out because it is common knowledge. Do go to a history conference and claim that Julius Caesar was a totally fine and nice guy and you'll see that people can get passionate very quickly.

Discussions get stirred up more quickly for contemporary figures whose power to let information disappear or fade away can sometimes extend beyond their own deaths - for as long as there are people alive who may be affected by the image created.

This will cause a fallback to FIDO/U2F where possible and your browser will appear to not support FIDO2. I've observed this with the default Keycloak flow for Security Tokens. May be a bug, too...

I don't know if this works with Google but if you try it, let me know :)

This needs no restart of Firefox, so you can use it to quickly disable it instead of fully disabling it on your Hardwaretoken.