ASMedia is the only controller IC manufacturer that can be trusted for these IME. They also have the best Linux support compared to the other options and support pass-through commands. These are commonly found in USB DAS enclosures, and a very small fraction of single disk SATA enclosures

Innostor controllers max out at SATA 2 and lock up when you issue pass-through commands (e.g. to read SMART data). These also return an incorrect serial number. These are commonly found in ultra cheap desktop hard drive docks, and 40pin IDE/44pin IDE/SATA to USB converters

JMicron controllers (not affiliated with the reputable Micron) should be avoided unless you know what you are doing… UASP is flaky, and there are hacky kernel boot time parameters required to get these working on Raspberry Pi boards. Unfortunately these are the most popular ones on the market due to very low cost

Probably not.

However, not all USB to SATA adapters support SMART, so even if there is a bad sector that gets remapped by the HDD on-the-fly (and thus does not show up in the software scan), you may not find out easily

This infographic is really helpful. Stuff like this makes me relieved I use the majority of services in a browser, rather than native apps

Chromium… I’m so getting downvoted with this one.

Why? Anyone is free to use whatever browser floats their boat 🤷‍♂️

Firefox itself is quite sluggish and slow to open on that piece of hardware

Do you get the same issues on an older version of Firefox for that device? If yes, proceed with caution - your device’s internal EMMC might be nearing EOL considering how old Android 6 is

But the problem is they all do not support modern arm64 apps that most Android phones use nowadays. Instead they need this other type called armeabi-v7a

They probably just stopped building for Android 6 devices. The SDK and various third party libraries continue to add new features all the time, and unlike Firefox, the majority of devs do not have the time or resources to manually code-in the missing bits to retain compatibility with old versions of Android. As a side effect, these custom implementations may have bugs or issues that go unnoticed due to the shrinking install base.

One of the more noticeable bits that changed is the Share API, which is why Firefox’s one looks so different vs every other app. There are other things like enhanced battery optimization and the storage API, which have changed a lot since Android 6.

IMO your best option is an older version of FF, or install Lineage (etc) on that device and use another browser

Edit: change “age of device” to “shrinking install base”

Really nice to see improcements being made to local voice control.

I personally haven’t opted for it yet due to the computing reqirements - instead been looking into dedicated offline voice recognition modules, since they use much less power. Downside is that they recognise a mostly predefined set of commands, and are just looking for patterns in speech instead of actually performing voice recognition

Would be interesting to compare the two voice control approaches side by side at some point

IIRC Beehaw doesn’t federate downvotes. The OP has been pretty heavily downvoted for no valid reason

I’ve tried both on my low powered HTPC and came to the same conclusion - especially noticeable where video acceleration is concerned

Something about that channel feels “off”, don’t know what it is. Maybe all the rants and abundance of negative opinions?? Perhaps it’s the culture difference in how he communicates on camera?

The only positive videos I’ve seen are him moving to macOS, the dell laptop one, and i guess the keyboard one, the other ones seem to be mostly opinion pieces & rants. There are other channels that do a better, more balanced job of this I think

Okay then, steal the battery 🤷‍♂️

The owner still has a bicycle to ride home on.

On the newer Bosch ones, the head unit functions as a remote key/killswitch when removed from the bicycle. They’re pretty $$$ though

https://www.bosch-ebike.com/us/produkte/kiox/#c366929

Explains why I was having issues with this in Gnome on my HTPC…

Ended up making a remote button shortcut to maximise and restore apps

Deleting documents from insider branch users a few years back, forced installation of HP SMART printer utility, constantly switching users’ default browser back to Edge, even bypassing my employer’s GPO to do so at one point in a Teams update

Not to mention their habit of making practically everything opt-in by default. And what is up with the new Aptos “cloud” font that only works if you have an active Office 365 subscription?

I don’t know tbh, Windows just doesn’t cut it for me anymore personally, mainly because of Microsoft. Stuck with it on my desktop though because of sim hardware.

I still have XP on an airgapped old PC for nostalgia ☺️

I used to have only 4GB in my old Linux HTPC, didn’t take much for it to choke when using the browser. Upgraded to 16GB and no issues since

Jawg would know everywhere where you go, since they provide the tile data. I don’t think they would be able to link it to an OSM account though

The public would be able to identify where you go because your changes would be published against your username, as it is with Wikipedia

“Abusing their dominant position” feels a bit far… the competition is just 💩 IMO. Just the fact that EGS practically gives out games for free, and still struggle to penetrate the market, should tell you all you need to know.

Steam provides discussion boards, workshop (mods), cloud saves, a whole console (deck), frequent games sales, achievements, best-in-class refund policy, regional CDNs for faster game downloads, and the list goes on. They even still support the Steam Link box which was discontinued several years ago.

They pretty much go above and beyond the current offerings of any other gaming platform, and have outlasted failed ones like Games For Windows. In the rare case that they do go out of business, there are steam emulators to run your games as long as they do not implement any additional DRM.

It says Valve “forces” game publishers to sign up to so-called price parity obligations, preventing titles being sold at cheaper prices on rival platforms.

EGS exclusives are worse, locking a whole other platform out for an entire year. With Steam’s agreement surely you could just run the sale on both platforms at the same time? Anyway, Amazon is well known for doing this, why not take them to court instead?

enabled Steam to charge an “excessive commission of up to 30%”, making UK consumers pay too much for purchasing PC games and add-on content.

The 30% fee is a bit high, but looking at everything that it pays for, and the contributions to open source, I don’t think it’s too bad. Publishers are also the ones choosing to price their games high, and to create as many DLCs as possible to increase recurring revenue. The ones who want lower fees already sell on EGS IMO…

Doubt it, after reading it myself it is nowhere as calculated and artificial as ChatGPT output

It is a pretty good read though.

Got to really wonder what’s going on at Mozilla. Between the previous CEO milking it for cash, the purchase of an ad company, and now this?

Not the case with ARM processors sadly, IMO they’re a bit of a mess from that perspective. Proprietary blobs for hardware, unusual kernel hacks for some devices, and no device tree support so you can’t just boot any image on any device. I think Windows for ARM encouraged some standardization in that regard, but for the most part looking at Android devices it’s still very much the wild west.

This is one of the many reasons why Raspberry Pi ARM boards remain popular for the time being, despite there being so many other cheap alternatives available: they actually keep supporting their old boards & ensure hardware on their boards works from the get-go.

There are also some rare cases where Raspberry Pi rewrite open source implementations of Broadcom’s proprietary blob drivers, in one instance for the built in CSI (optional camera)

Absolutely love the ability to share links from my android and have them open automagically on my linux HTPC. Also made a command shortcut for my laptop so I can unlock it from my android. Really versatile

No - however you could look for macro boards that have VIA firmware, as most of those can be configured using Chrome browser (WebHID), unless your org has an enterprise policy that interferes with that? The config software runs in Chrome as a website - so worth checking if the VIA keyboard web app is accessible on your work machine before purchasing a macro pad.

VIA firmware stores the config in the keyboard’s internal eeprom AFAIK, so you should be able to setup your macros from another computer or android phone and still use them when connected to your work machine - unlike other software like Logitech Options where the config is deleted from the peripheral after a connection interruption…

Does your employer have a policy allowing you to request software to be installed on your machine, especially if it’s needed for work? I had Logitech Options installed on my first day with no hassle from IT. Your situation sounds a lot like an unfortunate case of possibly power tripping IT admins doing more harm than good