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Admiral Patrick

@ ptz @dubvee.org

Posts

134
Comments

1793
Joined

2 yr. ago

I'm surprisingly level-headed for being a walking knot of anxiety.
Ask me anything.
Special skills include: Knowing all the "na na na nah nah nah na" parts of the Three's Company theme.
I also develop Tesseract UI for Lemmy/Sublinks
Avatar by @[email protected]

4d ago

whats the best way to share/embed videos in a post?
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Admiral Patrick @dubvee.org 4d ago
Generally stick with H264 codec in mp4 container and you'll be fine. Those are supported by pretty much every browser and most apps.
Uploading to your instance is hit or miss depending on how it's configured or whether it will accept anything other than images. Most people just upload them to catbox and use the link from there in the posts.

4d ago

What's an unscientific opinion that you firmly hold?

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Admiral Patrick @dubvee.org 4d ago

The loneliest number

5d ago

What's an unscientific opinion that you firmly hold?

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Admiral Patrick @dubvee.org 5d ago

Eh, gotta break at least one egg to make an omelette (or break the seal on the packaging if you're using egg substitutes) lol.

5d ago

What's an unscientific opinion that you firmly hold?

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Admiral Patrick @dubvee.org 5d ago

Sounds like my idea of curating a social platform devoid of "-ist's and -ism's" is doomed to failure then lol

5d ago

What's an unscientific opinion that you firmly hold?

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Admiral Patrick @dubvee.org 5d ago

Patrick's Law: If a comment thread on the internet is more than 7 replies deep, it's a slap-fight that's best avoided.

2w ago

Why do some people make such a big deal over ages of someone's account on here?

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Admiral Patrick @dubvee.org 2w ago

Because ban evasion is an everyday occurrence here. Someone gets banned for being a jackass, and 9 times out of 10, they come right back with a brand new account and come in hot with inflammatory posts and a chip on their shoulder.

Or trolls just troll - spin up new accounts over and over and throw out rage bait or whatever their shtick is just to be a dick.

Combined with the fact that the fediverse's growth has been a bit stagnant lately, when a bunch of new accounts suddenly pop up, they're rightly met with suspicion until they've established themselves as being here with good intentions.

Not saying new accounts should be ostracized, but given the context of the current state of the fediverse, being suspicious of them is warranted.

2w ago

What's something which you pay more than "it's worth" for the sake of good quality/experience?

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Admiral Patrick @dubvee.org 2w ago

Probably power banks. I pretty much only buy Anker these days because I've had too many cheap/no-name ones just fail, turn into spicy pillows, flat-out lie about the capacity, and/or, in one case, actually catch on fire.

One of my Anker power banks was recalled, and they notified me as well as had the replacement to me within 2 days. And the replacement model was actually nicer than the one I had.

I guess anything, really, that is part of my everyday carry and has a potential to burst into flames is grounds for paying the "premium" price where there's good quality control and product support.

2w ago

What is too high for a pending authorization charge for a gasoline purchase?

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Admiral Patrick @dubvee.org 2w ago

$150 is about normal these days. The pumps will usually have a little sticker somewhere that list the authorization hold amounts.

Fun fact: The auth holds used to be $1 way back in the day. But when prepaid debit cards came around, people could have a balance of $1 on them, get $50 worth of gas, and the station wouldn't be able to charge the actual amount (it would decline for NSF with no way to recover it as with a regular debit/credit card). That's why the hold amounts are between $75 and $150.

If you want to avoid the authorization hold, you can either pay cash or pre-pay with a cashier; the latter case will charge only what you pay.

2w ago

Does digital payments made cash wallets obsolete?

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Admiral Patrick @dubvee.org 2w ago

Does digital payments made cash wallets obsolete?

Nope.

Phones crash, apps screw up, Google arbitrarily decides your phone isn't "secure", batteries go dead, cell networks are sometimes unavailable (wallet app requires internet), merchant payment networks occasionally go down, etc.

I don't use digital wallets since the only options are Apple and their walled garden or Google who uses every transaction to profile you for targeted ads and deems your phone insecure should you do anything that might keep their eyes out of your life. But even using my "old school" debit card, I still feel much more secure always having some cash on hand for emergencies.

2w ago

What industry could benefit from more of their technology being open source, but the solutions are either not there or seriously lacking?

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Admiral Patrick @dubvee.org 2w ago

Any silicon vendors (NVidia, Qualcomm, Broadcom, Realtek, etc) should have open source drivers / firmware. I can't imagine what, if any, benefits there are to keeping that secret, and it seems logical that sales could/would increase if people were easily able to adapt them for their use cases.

And also the huge reduction in ewaste by being able to keep smartphones up to date or repurpose them without having to spend years painstakingly reverse-engineering binary blobs that only work with ancient kernels.

5mo ago

What's your favorite thing that anyone has done out of pure spite?

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Admiral Patrick @dubvee.org 5mo ago

One particular spite house in Boston: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skinny_House_(Boston)#History

According to local legend, the structure was built as a "spite house" shortly after the Civil War:
... two brothers inherited land from their deceased father. While one brother was away serving in the military, the other built a large home, leaving the soldier only a shred of property that he felt certain was too tiny to build on. When the soldier returned, he found his inheritance depleted and built the narrow house to spite his brother by blocking the sunlight and ruining his view.
Another source states:
Not much is known about the city's narrowest house. Legend has it that ... its unnamed builder erected it to shut off air and light from the home of a hostile neighbor (also nameless) with whom he had a dispute. ... Believed to have been built after 1874

5mo ago

Who's the most wittily hilarious person in your personal and professional circles?

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Admiral Patrick @dubvee.org 5mo ago

Sadly never came up.

5mo ago

What's the solution to QR code phishing?

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Admiral Patrick @dubvee.org 5mo ago

Not sure about Android, but on iOS, when one scans a QR code it shows the web address on the screen that the user then taps on. For the average user, I doubt that they are going to question what the URL is before following through to the website.

Android does the same. The problem is most of those QR codes are encoded short links which tells you nothing about where they're taking you.

https://short.link/au1034gha could take you to a PDF on the restaurant's Wordpress site or it could take you to malware or somewhere else you really don't want to go.

In that case, I blame the people generating the codes for using URL shorteners. My org uses them in flyers for the public, and I always have to chastise them and re-create the QR codes because they run the URL to our website through bit [dot] ly. 😡

5mo ago

Who's the most wittily hilarious person in your personal and professional circles?

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Admiral Patrick @dubvee.org 5mo ago

I used to work with a guy who was a dead ringer for Bill Bailey both in appearance and personality.

5mo ago

What is the best way to sync images to my NAS?

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Admiral Patrick @dubvee.org 5mo ago

Weird. Other than how it used to choke when there were conflicts (and all uploads stopped until that was fixed) I haven't had any issues like that. Guess I'm just lucky.

5mo ago

What is the best way to sync images to my NAS?

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Admiral Patrick @dubvee.org 5mo ago

I've had pretty good experience with Nextcloud's instant upload. The only time I've had it shit the bed was ages ago when it would occasionally get stuck on a conflict, but that hasn't happened in a long time. Pretty much all of my image folders (camera/DCIM, Screenshots, Downloads) get synced. The only annoying thing was when apps would suddenly change where they download to and I'd have to reconfigure yet another sync folder, but I can't really fault NC for that.

Mine is set to upload and keep a local copy and only do a one way sync (phone to NC). Not sure if that causes less issues than a 2 way sync or deleting the local copy after upload?

5mo ago

Sir Mix-A-Lot - Baby Got Back

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Admiral Patrick @dubvee.org 5mo ago

[Turns on the oldies station] Next up, a stuffy old song about the buttocks.

5mo ago

Got my Minimal Phone today. It's DOA.

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Admiral Patrick @dubvee.org 5mo ago

I tried a true dumb phone but was breaking out my laptop too much for everyday tasks (dumb phones these days can do hotspot).

The flip phone I have runs Android 11, so I have the bare minimum necessary chat apps, email, GPS maps, and such. The main draw is that those work well enough, but anything more than that is possible but very frustrating. That's kind of what the Minimal is about: e.g. yeah, you can watch YouTube videos on it, but you won't want to.

Then, when the detox period is up and you're fully off the addiction, you can get the standard phone back.

That's kinda what I did. I used my flip like a true dumb phone for 30 days as a challenge and then un-dumbed it a little bit back to where only my basic needs were met and nothing more. I assumed I'd have rushed back to my old smartphone, but after breaking a bunch of habits, I found I didn't really want to. Plus, I really missed T9 texting as weird as that sounds lol.

5mo ago

What some good ancient Egyption music to chill withto?

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Admiral Patrick @dubvee.org 5mo ago

They Might Be Giants - Istanbul (Not Constantinople)

5mo ago

Got my Minimal Phone today. It's DOA.

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Admiral Patrick @dubvee.org 5mo ago

Yeah the marketing for it was lost on me. I already digitally detoxed last year when I switched to the flip phone I'm currently using, so I ignored the sales pitch and just looked at it from the cool hardware perspective and mostly reasonable price.

Credit where it's due, though: I tried unsuccessfully to just uninstall the time sink apps from my regular smartphone and always ended up just reinstalling them. It took using a device that couldn't feasibly run those (plus a weaning-off period) for me to fully let go. Seems like that is what the marketing is trying to target.