“… highlighting conviction in healthcare…”

The banality of evil is going to be such a tired trope by the time my kids are my age.

Not clicking on the link, but this is right up my alley. Would love to host something like that locally, some sort of convenient museum of emulated stuff.

My imperfect solution of downloading on PC over time and using the network transfer feature might still be better suited for the way my internet speed and quota works, but this is great for small updates and that kind of thing.

For the future: File Lockpick, from PowerToys. The only thing the Windows product managers haven’t ruined, and only because it’s on Microsoft’s GitHub and not built into the OS. Or in Winget, since this is Lemmy.

You can just right click the drive that won’t eject or the file that won’t cut and it’ll list everything that had a handle open, without digging through the SysInternals programs.

I wonder where my computing would be if I spent all this time scaling the Linux learning curve instead of the Windows one. Probably more friction at my work-issued Windows machine. Probably increasingly many hours saved on “fixing” every successive Windows install.

For me it ends up being SpaceSniffer a solid 20% of the time.

Logitech has consistently gotten worse over time, so I’d be wary of their new stuff. Best of luck with the G600 collection. Logitech’s own software isn’t what it used to be. Mouse QMK can’t come fast enough.

I avoided Razer like the plague and was really turned off by their marketing up until I tried this last mouse, after getting recommendations and being told a few times that they’re not the same cringey gAmErZrIsEuP brand they used to be. My understanding is that they got their shit together and are not the same gimmick salesmen that they were when they exploded in popularity. The software wasn’t too bad IIRC, but I remember being frustrated when all I wanted was the G604’s simple premise: six side buttons (I just need four), two extra top buttons (I just need one), physically unlocking scroll wheel, and quick switching between computers (one button to switch from Bluetooth to wireless dongle and back). The big dealbreaker wasn’t the repeated recharge cycle or the need to double mouse it, it was the damn electro-magnetic scroll wheel. If you scroll too much in one direction, its clicks lose resistance. I’m someone who probably scrolls longer distances than I walk some days. The scroll tactility slowly becoming sludgy made me go back to my old mouse within a month.

Edit: I’ve just pulled it out of the drawer to see. Have wrapped my observations in a spoiler tag to keep things readable.

For what it’s worth Windows 10 is/was perfectly usable after setting it up properly. A bit of customization needed but nothing crazy. Honestly I liked the OS and its design, it felt very clean and utility oriented.

I’ve set up a new Windows 11 install from scratch this past month and it has been a real pulling-teeth experience. It’s not completely unfixable (yet) but even the annoyances that are not sinister are perplexing. There’s a new context menu that has a cut down layout and takes a few milliseconds to load - I get the design decision to keep it short, and have a button for more options, but it lags - so I’m out. It’s just a little hidden config to automatically skip to the full (more cluttered but no lag) menu (which you could do by holding shift every single time). There’s a few dozen little annoyances like that. A few are bigger than others, like the need to drive Copilot out to the desert and double tap it in the head unceremoniously. They’ve put it in Paint. They’ve put it in fucking Notepad.

That’s not even getting into how desperately they want every user signing away the rights to their bone marrow to the Microsoft Corporation. The computer I’ve set up is more or less where I want it to be, but I’m wary of things breaking with an update.

I’m not big on quotes but I’ve been coming back to Ed Zitron’s words a lot lately:

I will never forgive these people for what they’ve done to the computer.

I find it funny how the tables turned. Used to be that Linux was the one that needed unintuitive setup and Windows was the one that just worked. I don’t think I’ve used a single Linux image that didn’t just drop me into a desktop environment no questions asked upon boot, and that’s a world away from the awful, awful new Windows experience. Unless Microsoft conspires to make the next decade of Linux hardware drivers absolutely abhorrent, I think this will have to be my last Windows machine. That or the entire executive suite of Microsoft’s OS division has an epiphany about not wanting to spend eternity in hell.

For all the Just Use Linux people: I’ve got more machines running Linux in my house than Windows. I’ll get there, Microsoft is just doing everything they can to push everyone off their OS.

I’ve detailed elsewhere in the thread, but this is about the G604. The G700s was a similar story before it, although it was easier to take apart (with the caveat that it was much more annoying the very first time - two boards are soldered to each other and the guides online instruct you to add a male and female header strip so you can assemble and disassemble it later with much less headache).

Honestly if the new shell had the same textured plastic as the G700s I’d consider my repaired mouse to be damn near perfect.

Donor switches? The ones that come with most mice aren’t very good, and if you’re extracting them they’re probably not new anyway.

You can buy some online that last much much longer.

I wholeheartedly believe that Logitech is intentionally using the older, rapidly-failing Omron D2FC-F-7N switches to make people buy more peripherals more frequently. Spending an extra 1-2$ on lasting switches should really not be too much trouble when they’re selling fancy computer mice that cost like 100$ now.

I looked up that part number, I don’t know it off the top of my head, just to be clear. This isn’t a niche special interest thing. You use your computer mouse more than you use your car and probably your phone.

My post is about my G604, but it mirrors my earlier adventures with the G700s. When the G604 was announced and then released, I felt like Logitech were actually trying to make a decent product again, and the tiniest bit of tech doomerism got lifted off my chest. Pity that it didn’t last.

I’d rather have some variety here on Lemmy, I feel like a lot of us are people who have a genuine fascination with technology who are disgusted with the state of it. My own posts are very skewed towards complaining about tech. I wanted this post to be more about sharing the banal but comforting idea of repairing something as seemingly unimportant but still used for hours per day as a computer mouse.

Switches are the easiest thing to fix, and the shell looks like it’s not made to disintegrate on the G600. So you’ll be fine. These older models are also much less tedious to take apart.

This post is about my G604. I consider this model (which they only made for a short period, mind you) to be the only attempt at a successor to my previous GOAT model, the G700s. That one had a rough grippy outer plastic shell and to this day I still think that’s the best possible material.

Replacing switches is dead easy once you become slightly comfortable with a soldering iron. You can buy a tiny Aliexpress tier macropad (“keyboard” with like 9-20 buttons), solder on and desolder the switches once, and you’re basically done with learning what you need to do to your beloved mouse. You can buy your mouse switches on there directly as well. They’re universal for the most part. I’d recommend the Huano White Dot switches. I used to recommend another type but those ended up with a manufacturing error that makes it impossible to guarantee that they’ll last. And you can get replacement teflon pads as well while you’re at it.

The alternatives, from what I’ve read, don’t have great support in Linux, so I might have to frankenstein this one to keep it going once the switches start to go…

I’ve tried a Razer Naga V2 for a while, and it seems like a direct response to the G600. I prefer the Logitech mechanical scroll instead of the (cool but ultimately not great) electronically-tensioned scroll wheel that it came with. But one of the interchangeable side plates was a ridiculous one with a ton of buttons and I used that to try to replicate my G604 setup.

Honestly, I’m fully sold on the G604 button layout, I don’t need any more than this. I like where they are spread out. Logitech just isn’t fucking trying anymore, and that’s the problem. The one good mouse that appealed to me after half a decade of no G700s ended up being made of self destroying plastic and using the same short life switches that were obsolete a decade ago.

IIRC I played it a little and it was just mobile microtransaction hell after a certain point, no?

Unmistakeable piss filter on the left. Nobody who has used an entire pencil in their life would draw that shit.

I think I’m subconsciously holding back going back into Skyrim until Inigo V3 is released.

Did all my urgent housework on Friday evening. Got up at 8:30 AM. No sleeping in today, I have a game I want to play, and I’m going to spend a leisurely day that I’ve dedicated to it.

It’s now 8 PM. My computer is still off. I don’t even know what I did all day.

I think I should have been more clear, this is exactly what I’m asking about. I’m somewhat surprised by the reaction this post got, this seems like a very normal thing to want to host.

Doesn’t help that some people here are replying as if I was asking to locally host the “trick” that is feeding a chatbot text and asking it whether it’s machine-generated. Ideally the software I think I’m looking for would be something that has a bank of LLM models and can kind of do some sort of statistical magic to see how likely a block of tokens is to be generated by them. Would probably need to have quantized models just to make it run at a reasonable speed. So it would, for example, feed the first x tokens in, take stock of how the probability table looks for the next token, compare it to the actual next token in the block, and so on.

Maybe this is already a thing and I just don’t know the jargon for it. I’m pretty sure I’m more informed about how these transformer algorithms work than the average user of them, but only just.

I have a whole ass case of assorted fine Lebanese wine for Natenyahu, stashed away in my family’s old home in the mountains.

Here’s hoping he doesn’t get to it before I do.

Oh that’s a good point. I have only ever encountered these on Lemmy or similar places where you are clearly clicking a link that starts with “xn——————“ and then seeing how it ties together on my phone’s browser.

Maybe we shouldn’t be using these. I did find myself looking at domains with emojis in them, weirdly enough for someone who doesn’t use or really like them. But the fact that this extends to basically any Unicode character is an absolute security black hole.

Unless the standard is extended to have more guardrails/to make it impossible to resolve domains with the most egregious fake characters. Or better, to make characters interchangeable the same way domains aren’t case-sensitive.

The learning curve for understanding the actual web and its protocols looks more and more insurmountable to me every day lol

Welcome to today’s 10,000. Today’s episode is about Punycode. It’s basically a standardized way of putting unusual characters in a domain name.

The way the link is shown in your interface/client, it’s giving you the encoded version that looks nonsensical. But if you click on it, the link in your browser’s address bar will more likely render properly.

I’ve seen this done with URLs that contain emojis, this one contains katakana (?) characters.

This might be the best way to go about it. Wireguard has an iOS client and it should be easy to set up. I’ve done this for dumber devices, should be okay.

Or frankly, some others here are mentioning that logging in to one service doesn’t automatically log you into all of them. So maybe I’d be giving my family member more flexibility by not limiting them to a small number of servers as defined in the configs, since each one needs a file and picking among them is annoying if there’s an issue.

That said, going from 5 euro a month for Mullvad to 5 + 10 to add Proton does add up, and to be honest, a second free Proton address and a second Mullvad subscription (and investing in a more local solution instead of getting tied down to Proton Drive) might be better for me.

But I haven’t made any decisions just yet. The 500GB of storage might just end up swaying me.

I feel like the dialogue in the last panel is unnecessary.