The likes of Amazon and AliExpress have given us a false sense of how expensive things should be.

I think that’s a strong point, especially when you look at devices like smart speakers with voice assistants or TV steaming sticks. Those devices should not be $30. If you consider a 3x markup over the cost of parts to be a pretty standard rule of thumb to remain profitable for a consumer electronic product those devices should be a lot closer to $100. When they’re not it should be raising red flags about the company using information gathered from you to make their profits.

I suppose there’s no guarantee that Apple isn’t also collecting that data, but the pricing on those devices in a competitive market seems a lot more consistent with a company that needs a product to make a profit in a more traditional manner. Of course, they take a cut on subscriptions sold through the device, but I suspect that’s not as reliable per-device as a game console collecting a license fee for every device sold.

My immediate thought when I saw that headline elsewhere

I received a Quest 2 as a gift. It is fun playing games, but ends up being very much a solo activity. It used to be possible to use Chromecast functionality to share what the user is seeing with other people, but that hasn’t worked for me in a long time and that seems to be the case for others. That was useful when letting others try the device, but without that VR can be a pretty isolated activity. It would be interesting to try something with other people with headsets, but we’re not paying a couple hundred dollars for additional Quests, never mind thousands of dollars on a Vision Pro.

Is this the only game you’ve tried it with or do these settings seem to generally be a good starting point with Windows games?

Do you also have the Mac version of Steam installed on your computer? I’m wondering if having the two versions on the same account causes any issues, like if I should install the Whisky version under a different account on my Mac than the main account I use.

I’ve done that, but this is mostly an issue when I’m on my Mac and the links open in the AppStore and say it’s not compatible with my Mac.

Yes, I rarely look at the AppStore recommendations. Even if they’re not paid promotions, I think Apple is incentivized to feature apps that will generate revenue for them whether from their cut on ads, subscriptions, or outright sales. That’s not to say they’re necessarily all bad apps, but sometimes their incentives don’t align with what I’m looking for.

I’ve found a lot of them are on the AppStore, you just have to follow the link from the GitHub page or search for it on the AppStore. These apps just usually won’t be featured on the AppStore, I assume because they generally aren’t going to generate revenue for Apple.

As a side note, I find it really annoying that I can’t install an app remotely on my device. It’s been a little while since I used Android, but it was really convenient if I wasn’t on my phone but found an interesting app that I could authenticate into the Play Store, select which device I wanted to add the app to, and it would install remotely. It doesn’t seem like that can be done with the iPhone and it’s slowly becoming my leading complaint as they fix my other annoyances since switching from Android to iPhone.

Ehh, maybe too soon with two confirmed dead and four still missing, presumed dead. Those families are still in the peak of grieving.

Now that’s just fantasy talk

There are obviously big privacy concerns/implications with this and you’ll rarely see someone recommend it on Lemmy, but Google’s Location History/Timeline pretty much does exactly what you’re asking. It’s not perfect (for instance if you’re at a shopping center it might record a different store than where you went) but it will keep track of where you went, when you arrived, when you left, and even try to guess how you got there (car, walking, etc.). You can set it to delete this history after a certain number of months.

Another option would be to use a mileage tracker like someone would use to deduct the use of a vehicle on their taxes, such as MileIQ or Everlance. They’ll record when and where you traveled.

If you’re being really paranoid about someone falsely claiming you trashed a place you might also want to consider a Timestamp Camera. This app has a lot of options but not great documentation so you’ll want to play around with its settings. You can have it put street address, latitude/longitude, even a little map overlay directly on the image. Of course, location data and timestamp are automatically baked into the metadata of your pictures by default, but that metadata could be stripped or modified. Someone could claim your timestamps and data baked into the photos were added later or falsified, but these would certainly make a stronger case. I use this app when doing a side gig delivering food and someone selects “hand it to me” but then messages me to just leave it at their door. I’ll take a picture with this app and send it through the delivery app or text message when I drop the food off so they have a record of when and where it was left. I don’t think people have usually tried to scam me or the service, but I’ve read plenty of stories of people trying that and this at least makes it harder to make a false claim.

I got the second gen SE and thought it was great overall. Sometimes I still miss the fingerprint scanner.

I actually overall like the App Library, I just hate that the categories shift around seemingly at random. But I slowly keep removing more apps from the Home Screen; at some point my goal is to get down to one Home Screen with my most used apps and everything else is in the App Library.

You could only change certain applications, if they allowed it. But the general, default notification sound was decided by Apple and couldn’t be changed until 17.2.

You could change certain notification sounds, like for iMessage, the built-in mail app, ringtones, etc. Individual apps could set their own custom notification sound as well, or enable a setting that allowed users to change them. But there was also a default, “general” notification sound set by Apple that would be used by any app that hadn’t specified a notification sound, and that could not be changed by the user. It was perhaps the single most annoying thing when I switched from Android.

More specifically, it looks like the change came in iOS 17.2 after Apple changed the default notification sound for everyone in iOS 17 from the one they’d used for years. I guess enough people hated the change and wanted to go back that they finally gave users an option to pick their own.

Still can’t change the Apple Watch default sound, apparently.

I thought we’d seen it all when they finally let people change the default notification sound in iOS 17!

I guess that bug hit me at some point. I was sure the screen had been damaged and that was the cause of the phantom touch issues. Support had me force reboot and it seemed fine, then they had me do an OS update. I did have it happen once since, and a reboot cleared it again. Hopefully this does the trick!

I went 16-inch M3 Max with 36 GB of RAM and 2TB SSD. I mainly did the Max because I could see myself connecting more than 2 external displays sooner than later; otherwise I think I would’ve been fine with the Pro.

I have a 16-inch M3 but really don’t expect you would see any difference in power and thermals on the 14-inch. I can’t directly compare, but I’d run out and bought a 14-inch M2 at Costco shortly before the M3 was unveiled. It wasn’t quite the specs I wanted but it was on sale and I’d picked up a contract where I quickly realized I needed an upgrade from my 2015 Air. It soon became apparent that the 512 GB SSD would get too full too fast, so I switched to a 16-inch M3. They really felt largely identical and I didn’t notice any difference in heat between either.

I would go with the largest internal storage you can buy, since that can’t really be upgraded later. If you prefer the smaller size that’s a bonus; it’s certainly more portable.

Is there a community for fountain pens or pens in general?