Accessibility doesn't only mean easing access to your application to people with disabilities. Accessibility makes it also easier for people with temporary or situational impairment to use your software. A simple example that comes to mind is single finger zooming on map applications, where you tap once and then hold-swipe up/down to zoom in/out, which makes it easy to be used with one hand. I know it's difficult to relate to people with permanent disabilities, but we can definitely relate to situational ones where we wish something was easier to use with one hand because the other was busy. Now imagine if it's the only way you can ever use it :-)

Ultimately, it leaves out no one and benefits everyone.

Regarding alternative VPS providers, Infomaniak in Switzerland have decent prices on their Lite range [0]. I'll stick with Hetzner but if I move some day, I might try them out.

[0] https://www.infomaniak.com/en/hosting/vps-lite

[0] https://actu.epfl.ch/news/using-bluetooth-to-track-crowds-at...

I asked them for 1/4th of that amount to buy hardware and do it myself. My philosophy when designing it, is that everything that is "smart" should have a non-smart backup. You can trigger the lights via an app or the tablet, but the switch on the wall also works. The garage can be opened remotely and automatically when the car approaches, but there's a physical radio remote that still does the job independently of the smart home system. You can set the blinds exactly at the level you want from the app, but the remote is always around if you need it. And so on.

The idea was that if the system goes down, everything should still work. But it also made me realise that the convenience of having both options is what my parents love the most. They mostly interact with things using the non-smart controls, but love to know that they can monitor and interact with these same things from anywhere.

Within a year, the USB port wore out. Contacted the support as the phone was under warranty and was given two options: Order the replacement part online and get reimbursed for it. Or send the entire phone back, but it would get wiped clean.

I had some data that wasn't backed up and didn't want to loose, and because I couldn't charge it, I decided to go for the first option. It's supposed to be easily reparable, why go through the hassle of sending it back? Well the problem was that the part was unavailable on their store for months. I even looked at third party stores, that specific part couldn't be found anywhere in Europe. After three months of having a "repairable" paperweight on my desk, the part was finally available and I could change it (replacing it took seconds and I've done it while sitting at a café, gotta give credit to Fairphone for that).

Meanwhile, I see my friends with their iPhones getting them repaired within a few days or even the same day! Battery change, charging port replacement, screen change, etc. All could be easily and quickly done by a local repair shop.

In the end I realised it's not about how easy it is to repair your phone, it's about the availability of spare parts. iPhones, especially a few years ago, make it difficult to be repaired. Yet, they are the easiest to get repaired. Fairphone's spare parts are specific to their phones, and even specific to some models. Using generic parts or having some compatible across models would create more need for them = more parts available.

I'm still willing to take the risk because Pebble smartwatches are the only ones I like and wear. I managed to give my OG Steel another life by replacing the battery. Unfortunately that seems to be harder with the Round 2 as there won't be any screws. I'm still a bit split on whether to change my Time 2 pre-order for a Round 2.

[0] https://bsky.app/profile/ericmigi.com/post/3maubss6mqc25

Multi Theft Auto (another GTA multiplayer mod, still alive today) allowed for similar things. And so did the source games (Counter Strike, HL2: DM, Day of Defeat, etc.).

Props to Core and Rebble for making Pebble what it is today and casting a bright future for theses watches. Been happily wearing my Pebble Steel for the past month after replacing its battery, looking forward to the PT2!

I also use the same machine for dev work and everything works amazingly well.

JetBrains Rider is excellent and runs on Windows, Mac and Linux. It has a few Windows only features but nothing important for me, it's the best IDE for C#/.NET you can get on non-Windows platforms imo. And it's free for non commercial use.

The context with this article is different but the similarities are with how lawmakers misunderstand VPNs. They are an essential tool for workers and there are many other ways to circumvent censorship without VPNs anyway. The irony of this ban is that Zanzibar also wants to attract digital nomads, and the most important tool for them is an unrestricted and reliable internet connection.

A few months ago, I switched my aunt (70+ as well) to Linux Mint after repeated issues with Windows 10 and now 11. The last straw was the printer stopped working one day out of the blue. Tired to re-install it for over an hour, impossible! When I installed Mint and looked to add the printer, it was already there and ready to work. And for the user experience, I just sat her in front of the computer and asker her to do various tasks that she would normally do on Windows without any explanation, and she just did them intuitively. She even sent me a message a few days ago to thank me for installing Linux on her machine!

Microsoft keep shooting themselves in the foot with Windows, it's like they don't even care about consumer operating systems anymore. Most popular Linux distros are stable and easy to use, for an average computer user it's perfect. I also daily drive Linux (Bazzite, based on Fedora Silverblue) and it does everything I need - coding, browsing, games, it's all there. I'm never going back to Windows.

I know it would take time for packages to adopt this but it could be implemented as parameters when installing a new dependency, like `npm i ping --allow-net`. I wouldn't give a library like chalk access to I/O, processes or network.

Countless times I landed on websites I use relatively frequently in foreign countries to see them in a language I don't understand, having to rely on my browser's translation functionality to find the language switcher. My operating system + browser are set to English, yet I still get served the one in the language I don't understand.

The worst offenders in my opinion are the ones assuming language based on IP for multi-lingual countries like Switzerland. People living in the French or Italian parts almost always get served the German content. It's bad UX.

Heating isn't really an issue in the part I lived (warm all year round, even in the night) and the smell of burned plastic is quite distinguishable, even at higher altitudes.