She/They

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  • 95 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 30th, 2023

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  • I gave up on TP-Link. I will never purchase any consumer router from them again. Little to no updates, connection issues that were made worse with an update, features REMOVED with an update, settings wouldn’t always stick, which results in a factory reset to get it to do anything. WPA3 just doesn’t work. It even would “mysteriously” turn it’s DHCP server back on, no matter how many times I turned it off, when it was in AP mode. Friend had the same model and most of the same issues.

    I have had better luck with the other brands, but I feel like most of them suck or cost way more than they should.



  • Thank you for answering the question! I am genuinely both trying to make a point and still be open to try new things. To me, there seems to be a real downward turn on UI/UX in a lot of applications these days, corporate included. When they mentioned the bit about supporting corporate, I have a hard time believing they will get very far with that customer group right now.

    I really wish software, especially FOSS, would stop making the UI the afterthought. I try to keep a holistic view when designing things and everyone has a seat at the table. I wonder if projects are boxing themselves in and making it harder for the UI teams to properly integrate, and vice versa? I will happily take criticism and ideas from pretty much anyone, especially outside my immediate teams.

    I am pretty out of the game on that as I spent quite a few years doing controls engineering instead. I am back in Software now and I feel old and a little lost. I graduated back in 2012 and we didn’t have all of these crazy developer roles and more specialized degrees. They were trying to get a Game Design program started when I graduated, and it was supposedly a mess for a few years.



  • All I read is Marketing Tech Speak that sounds no different than anything else that gets advertised in my face. At work, we use Teams. It is a pain sometimes when it gets a little buggy, but integrates into SharePoint/OneDrive and the noise suppression in meetings is pretty awesome. At home I use discord or GChat because that is where all my friends are. I don’t assume I have privacy on any of these platforms and they all work on my phone and computer.

    How is the user experience? Ultimately, give me privacy, but if the user experience and UI don’t give any improvements over the corporate ones, I will have to try it some other time.





  • For context, American. Those were the best 6 weeks of my life as far as work trips go. Having to go by German law was amazing. Unlike the 80-100 hour weeks I was doing at times in the UK for the same customer. The PM on the US side tried to encourage some of the team to work in the hotel after hours, or on their days off, but not let on with the customer who would send you home if they found out. That didn’t go over well. Screw you, I am going to a museum, having delicious schnitzel, beer, and touching some grass.

    Let’s just say that we pretty much begged for future jobs in Germany. Never got to go back, but was definitely one of the few jobs I can fondly look back on.



  • No idea about which specific type of business it is, but keeping that history long term can have some benefits, especially to outside people. Some government agencies require companies to keep records for a certain number of years. It could also help out in legal investigations many years in the future and show any auditors you keep good records. From a historical perspective, it can be matched to census, birth, and death certificates. A lot of generational history gets lost.

    Companies also just hoard data. Never know what will be useful later. shrug




  • UL certification can mean different things, depending on the product and type of mark. It also isn’t that expensive to get UL listed as it isn’t like every single item you produce is tested. Each product you design is tested, but not each item you produce.

    There are 3/4 types. UL listed, UL recognized, and UL classified. Certified is newer and more stringent.

    • Recognized is mostly for machinery and components within machinery. It isn’t terribly difficult to get, but annoying. I have dealt with this type as we design and build electrical panels. Usually you hand the design to a panel builder and they will get it certified before delivery.
    • Listed is for products and appliances, and is fully tested for safety. This applies to most consumer electronics.
    • Certified Enhanced is also for products, and you can read up on it here: https://www.ul.com/news/qa-uls-enhanced-certification-mark
    • Classified is for products and is half ass tested. All it means is that some requirements for UL were tested and passed, but not all.

    If a product is Classified by UL, this can mean its testing meets the particular requirements for a single test with a published result, but has nothing to do with all the other tests that may form part of a Standard (i.e., UL 181).

    As for pricing for UL listed, it can be just a few grand for a single product. Not much when you are selling thousands. I am sure Classified is even cheaper. I wonder how many of these cheap ass lamps say Classified.


  • No idea which phone you have, but dbrand does carry a decent amount of models. However, it is mostly limited to Apple, Google, Samsung, and One Plus. It does suck trying to find some things though. I do try to get things directly from the manufacturer website when it makes sense, but sometimes Amazon IS their website.




  • We had a student run server for piracy at my University to get copied textbooks from, but even then we had to sometimes look elsewhere. I often couldn’t afford books and not all professors allowed the cheaper used previous editions.

    Science textbooks were the worst with their stupid fucking online code bullshit so we could do homework. They even made it where you could buy just the code, which was something like $70. Still better than 300+, but JFC. Having to spend over $1000 for books that you are only going to use for 10 weeks was nuts.

    The last saving grace we had is all textbooks were required to have at least one copy in the library that could not be checked out/removed. You could photocopy the homework pages that way. If your classmates were nice, they would let you borrow theirs to copy any pages too. You could also buy your textbook, copy what you needed, and return it within the return window.