I guess, that's not the biggest issue. Everyone has that, who's sorting their trash. The real annoying part (at least for me) is taking the effort to physically take the trash apart. For example removing cellotape from cardboard, removing metal clips from cardboard, washing food remains from containers, removing paper labels from cans, etc. It takes time, and sometimes it's not even easy to do.
I go to great lengths to do all that, but when it turns out to be impossible, I just throw it in the general waste and I don't care.
Help with regaining ability to focus and fight procrastination
I'm looking for book recommendations in the topics mentioned in title.
I often find myself feeling down and not being able to accomplish anything, and the tendency has been increasing.
I cannot even work on my hobby projects, because I'm just staring at the screen and my brain is not functioning, which leads to launching a game or watching YouTube videos and waste time.
I cannot find the way out of this madness, and my last resort is to find some books that might help with my issue.
I don't wanna rely on search results on the internet, because I don't trust random compilations of "read these 10 books to be productive".
Well, this is optional, but in case the book you recommend indeed helped you, I'd be curious how permanent the impact was for you, if that makes sense. I know mostly it depends on the person; it's me who has to make the effort, not the book. But I'd be curious how easy it is for you to consistently maintain what you learned from the book.
Regarding the format, it has to be in epub. And I'd very much prefer DRM-free books, price doesn't matter. If the only good books are all DRM-enshittified, that sucks, but I'll consider that too if I have no other choice.
Thanks in advance if anyone can help with recommendations!
Here's a mixture of applications, some for Linux, some for Android, some for both. And some of them might work on other platforms as well, but I'm not sure.
Borg for making backups. For the first glance it could look overwhelming, but after reading through the quick start guide, it's really easy to use.
VeraCrypt for encryption of removable media.
Megalodon as a Mastodon client.
Voyager as a Lemmy client. It has a very weird and unintuitive UI, but there are no ads and the content is well readable, well presented.
OsmAnd for offline navigation. It's especially great for cycling and hiking, as even the most insignificant trails are on the map. It isn't free, but it's cheap.
Thunderbird for emails. Until recently I just used the online interface for my emails, but ever since I got a Proton subscription and multiple aliases with it, I started to use Thunderbird so I can see everything in one place, and also it has advanced filtering capabilities (the best of any email client I've ever used).
Proton Calendar, just for the sake of not to use Google.
Firefox with uBlock Origin. These two together is the bare minimum nowadays if you are thinking about browsing the internet.
VS Code for smaller stuff. Not gonna list my extensions here, but there are a few less known ones that I always install.
Zed is in early development, but if it gets as mature as VS Code, I'll consider using this instead.
JetBrains IDEs for software development. It makes me cry every year when I spend a buttload of money on renewing my license, but for me it's worth it. No other IDE ever made it so easy for me to set up and work with projects.
Dia for UML or database schema diagrams, and bunch of others. Sadly it's a bit outdated, but it's simple and easy to use.
I've used KDE for more than a decade, and then about 1.5 years ago I decided to give Gnome a try. A few months ago I wanted to see KDE again, but I quickly switched back to Gnome.
KDE:
- Feature-rich desktop with feature-rich tools by default. Everything is so advanced and customizable, I really miss this.
- Lately I've encountered many annoying bugs (this was the main reason why I tried Gnome in the first place). Crashing while trying to unlock the screen, fractional scaling issues, and random crashes here and there (although these are rare). And I would love to dive into it and fix them, but there are so many other stuffs I wanna do, I don't have the capacity for this.
- Setting color profiles for monitors is not trivial.
- There are many annoying UX issues that are really negligible, but if they worked well, my experience would've been much smoother. Here's an example: start to type your password on the lock screen, while the monitor is sleeping. On most OS and also on KDE, the first interaction must be to wake up the screen, and then you can type your password. On Gnome, just start typing and hit enter. The screen might wake up halfway while you're typing, but it still does what you'd expect. These kind of small things make my experience so much smoother and so much more comfortable.
Gnome:
- It just works. Flawlessly and smoothly, to my surprise. Sure, it's easy to accomplish when it's so minimalistic, that almost nothing is in there. But whatever there is, at least it works.
- Fractional scaling is a pain in the ass here too, but in a different way. It's still an experimental feature though, so we could say this feature doesn't even exist, which is a huge disadvantage.
- Feature-rich software can be installed afterwards. So it's not really bothering me that the pre-installed tools are too minimalistic.
- Setting color profiles for monitors is very straightforward, but there's way to improve here too.
To sum up, my preference is less bugs over more features, so I pick Gnome.
I guess, it depends on the dictatorship. For example if it's the one being formed in the US currently, here are some ideas: https://theintercept.com/2024/11/14/trump-agenda-organize-protest-movement/
Ever since I got my own place, I'm significantly less stressed. So much, that my health condition pretty much got back to normal after living with a colon disease (AND my mom) for a long time.
Folks, do not underestimate the power of stress.
The good things:
- It really is an advantage over normal USB, that I don't have to trun the plug three times while trying to connect it, as it can be plugged in either way.
- I find the extra protection also cool, so in case you accidentally try to plug in something you are not supposed to, it just simply won't work instead of, I don't know, supplying too high voltage or something.
So far it caused a lot of headaches though:
- Way too often I found myself in a situation, where I couldn't use some devices, because I didn't have the necessary adapter. This issue should be temporary though, so I'm not complaining.
- Some cables are not compatible with some devices, and it can be really confusing. Before I knew this, I was certain that a monitor and a laptop of mine weren't compatible for a long time, until someday I read about this and tried it again with a different cable.
- In most cases this is not an issue, but rarely I find that the USB type-c plug is not as robust as a micro USB for example. On my girlfriend's Samsung S8 it always slipped out, so the contact was terrible, while a micro USB plug does have some clamps to properly attach. Again, in most cases the type-c plug is clicking in properly, so it's not an acute problem.
No need to tell me all this; I've been using Linux for more than 15 years and I don't freakin' care what's happening to Windows.
Now either you haven't read properly what I said, or my wording was not clear - apologies in the latter case. Either way, I'll try to explain what I meant.
- It's pointless for Microsoft to make Recall (or anything) unremovable, since someone will find a solution to it pretty quickly. So those who use Windows, most likely will still have the option to continue to use it without Recall, in my opinion.
- I also highly recommend everyone to just use a usable operating system instead.
- Telling the average user to use a better operating system is one thing. That's fairly doable nowadays, I don't see basically any obstacle to that, and I wouldn't even mention it, because you just tell them the facts, and the smarter ones will listen and think it through, the rest of them will do whatever they want, it's their problem. What I find very problematic, is industrial environments. There are tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands or millions of workstations, terminal computers, controllers in companies of varying sizes, where it's absolutely not cost efficient to switch from Windows to something else (well, at least not until they get into their first data breach attributed to Recall or other shady Microsoft services). They have highly specialized tools complete with documentation and support and everything made for the one specific platform they are operating on, and it's certainly not easy to change that, especially without halting production. If there's one IT advice I could give to those companies, it would be to start creating a strategic plan to drop their Microsoft dependencies, and then execute their plan. It would take probably years, but they gotta start doing it like ASAP. And along the way, while porting their toolchains, they could as well do it the smart way: make it highly portable, so whatever platform they switch to, wouldn't be the only option. Should that platform go south just like Windows did, they'd have the option to switch again to something else, just much easier this time.
- According to my experience, customization tools to remove bloat (including Recall) are not permissible in work environments, and spyware (such as Recall) are not (supposed to be) tolerated either. If this doesn't make them switch to a better platform, nothing will.
Just because Microsoft makes Recall "unremovable", doesn't mean anything to me. We've seen debloater tools, alternate start menus, someone even ported explorer from Windows 7 to Windows 10/11.
I'm pretty sure there's gonna be a solution for this in no time.
That being said, just use a better OS ffs. I get it, some companies cannot easily switch from Windows because of tools specifically built for Windows, or due to strict policies or regulations or software support, but damnit, somewhere you have to draw a line and start a migration process to an alternative system. And maybe learn from this, and make your tools portable next time.
Having spyware on your system is certainly a big no-no at companies, and probably the aforementioned debloater/customization solutions as well.
I'm using Deezer, because its Duo plan's T&C doesn't require couples to live in the same household. (Fuck Spotify because of their shitty plan.)
Unfortunately Deezer's Android app sucks, because it never reaches the server. Sometimes songs are just restarting or stopping, and you have to press the "add to favorites" button hundreds of times to finally successfully add it to your list. It's horrible. But in the browser it's smooth, there's no problem with it. I even find songs I would never expect to find there (much more than on Spotify). Also you can create playlists together with others, even if others are using a different streaming provider.
If your only choice is between YouTube and Spotify, I'd go for Spotify because fuck Google, and also Spotify app is smooth, and has the ability to control your music from your phone even when the music is playing on another device. (This is possible to do with 3rd party apps with any music player, but Spotify has it built in.)
Sooo they turn into racist slowly? That's still not cool.
Holy shit, this is much better than the original!!! Damn, I should rewatch the series like this. Where can I find all of it without the laugh track?
Edit: I have to add, the long pauses make it a bit annoying. With the laugh track the pauses aren't noticeable (to me at least; my girlfriend did notice the long pauses even with the laugh track, and it was annoying to her).
They say, nowadays nearly any laptop you could get is garbage due to insufficient cooling. Maybe they look promising at first, but you cannot use them for longer than 2-3 years, because the components simply get cooked inside. The only ones worthy of spending money on are the business-grade laptops, but they're crazy expensive (for a good reason). Therefore you should probably look for a used one, maybe from a company dealing with refurbished devices. Sometimes it's possible to get one that had been used for like 6 months, and you still have a number of years of warranty on it.
My personal favorite is the ThinkPad T, P or X series. Those are quality products, and there are official video guides, spare parts for self repair. I've also read about bad experiences about a T580 (I think) here, on lemmy, but the circumstances were unclear to me. They wrote about a bending motherboard issue, when you pick up the laptop holding only at the corner.
Framework laptops are also recommended a lot, but I've never gotten my hands on one, I don't know their build quality.
Do you remember 9gag? Some of you certainly do. Anyway, during those times they created another app called 9chat, later renamed it to Cookie, and later renamed it back to 9chat again.
Well, we met there, on 9chat/Cookie.
There weren't an insanely huge amount of people there, and there was a section for newcomers to upload their selfie and/or introduce themselves. And I found this gorgeous girl there, started to text her, and to my surprise, she actually replied and didn't even ghost me.
We had a nice conversation there, and we continued on WhatsApp, and three months later we met in real life too. This was 7 years ago, and sadly we're still in LDR, but the most important thing is, we have each other.
What could be the best possible way for Malaysia to commemorate the tragic event of MH17 on its 10th anniversary? Joining the terrorists who shot it down, right?
You can do just that. Before you begin the quiz, there's a link to skip the quiz and directly enter your preferences.
I'm not from the US, so I don't know how accurate this is, and I also don't know if this thing has ever been updated (I found it a long time ago), but there's this tool that might help with deciding: https://www.whereshouldilive.co/
I mean, if the words "Israel" and "interrogation" are in it, it pretty clearly conveys what you just described.
I'm using Qwant. Works better for me than DuckDuckGo.
The amount of people not knowing what a "web app" is, is seriously concerning.
Anyway, I tried "old" and Alexandrite, but I just ended up sticking with the default. I find "old" ugly, and on Alexandrite, I couldn't find my saved posts. Maybe it has been fixed since, but the default one works for me best.
Where have you witnessed Scrum being used outside of the IT industry?
Scrum is an agile framework that, if applied properly, can boost the efficiency of teamwork. It is known to be versatile enough, so it could be applied in basically any sort of productive teamwork, even beyond IT (e.g. bakeries, government organizations, etc.)
However, I've never ever seen it being used anywhere else other than in software development, therefore I've always been curious if Scrum is actually being used outside of IT somewhere.
Composable function design - best practices
Hi everyone,
As I've been developing my Android app, I've quickly found myself in a situation, where all my @Composable functions are quite hectic, not really maintainable.
I am wondering, is there any guide for best practices regarding @Composable functions?
Thinking in Compose is a straightforward article, and it all makes sense - until I want to build something other than Hello World. Something more complex, I mean.
What I understand from the article is, that I should keep the logic out of these functions as much as possible, and pass only primitive types as parameters. Behavior should be kept in callback functions. This is very nice and clean, I like it, but then what should I do, when I have quite a lot of functions nested?
For example, on MainActivity I have a Scaffold, within that a NavHost with four different tabs, each with completely different content, some of them with a BottomSheet, which are also completely different for each tab (that has one), and some of the BottomSheets can call a Dialog, which again, has a form in it, and so on. So the hierarchy has quite a level of nesting. And if I understand the recommendation correctly from the article mentioned above, then I am supposed to keep the states and callback function definitions somewhere in MainActivity (or ViewModel), and pass everything through the entire hierarchy. Everything. The value of every single Text (those that cannot be hardcoded), all the list items to DropdownMenus, all the list items for Lists, literally everything. And then, according to the article, the renderer is smart enough to only recompose those elements that really changed.
To me this sounds tedious. I've also seen recommendations to just pass the ViewModel itself in order to reduce the number of parameters. But if I do that, then how would I make a @Preview out of it? Probably it's possible, but it wouldn't be convenient at all.
So what's a clean approach for designing a good @Composable function hierarchy?