AJ Sadauskas
Australian urban planning, public transport, politics, retrocomputing, and tech nerd. Recovering journo. Cat parent. Part-time miserable grump.
Cities for people, not cars! Tech for people, not investors!
- 46 Posts
- 80 Comments
11·5 months ago@crispyflagstones @yogthos Someone is named @dansup who also created @pixelfed, the app is called Loops, you can follow his progress here: @loops
I mean, Windows is just such a weird proprietary distro.
It doesn’t use the latest Linux kernel, or even a mainstream POSIX-compliant alternative like BSD. Instead, you have a strange CP/M-like monolithic kernel — I think they used to call it DOS — that’s been extended to behave more like VAX and MP/M.
It also doesn’t use either X11 or Wayland as a display manager. Instead, you have an incredibly unintuitive overblown WINE-like subsystem handling the display.
Because it doesn’t use Linux, Wayland, or X11, you are limited in the desktop environment that you can use. There’s really limited support for KDE, despite the best efforts of volunteers.
Instead, there’s a buggy and error-prone proprietary window manager that ships with it by default. A bit like how Canonical tried to ship Unity as it’s default desktop environment with Ubuntu.
And confusingly, they’ve named that window manager Windows as well!
That window manager lacks many of the features an everyday Gnome or KDE user would expect out of the box.
It also doesn’t ship with a standard package manager, and most of the packages ship as x86 binaries, so installing software works differently to how an everyday Linux user would expect.
There’s also only one company maintaining all of these projects. It insists on closed source, and it has a long history of abandoning its projects.
And sure, if you’re a nerd who’s into alternative operating systems, toying with Windows can be fun.
But if your grandpa is used to Linux, frankly he’ll be utterly bamboozled by the Windows experience.
I’m sorry to be glib, because Windows does have some nice ideas.
But.
Windows on the desktop just isn’t ready for your average, everyday Linux user.
@mcSlibinas @etbe Worth noting that in the six months after Apple releases the thinnest, best iPhone ever each year, it would receive several million two-year-old iPhones as trade-ins.
So you could theoretically reflash several million units of nearly identical hardware with embedded Linux (or QNX), remove the batteries (and screens?).
You would then have several million near-identical motherboards ready for second life embedded in appliances or sensors.
@mcSlibinas @etbe Really good point.
The development time and cost is an overhead. That’s divided between the number of units you produce.
If the programming costs are $100k and you produce one unit, then that unit costs $100k.
But if you flash the same software on to 1 million units, then it’s just 10 cents per unit.
Worth remembering that millions of people junking their two-year-old iPhones and Samsung Galaxies at roughly the same time.
I think the broader underlying issue is that our economy is optimised for labour productivity, rather than making the most out of finite environmental resources.
It really should be the other way around.
@ordellrb @eugenia The other place the motherboards of old phones could be repurposed is in embedded processors.
Most home appliances feature embedded processors and motherboards these days. Many commercial and industrial buildings and structures feature a range of embedded sensors.
In many cases, a repurposed three-year-old or even six-year-old iPhone or Samsung Galaxy motherboard is overkill in terms of being capable for these kinds of applications.
Especially if they’re reflashed with an embedded device-focussed operating system, such as QNX.
Instead of making new motherboards for embedded devices, why not repurpose old consumer tech instead?
10·6 months ago@Hello1000 @ylai Yeah, the Dutch have solved this one already. It’s called a bakfiets: https://youtu.be/rQhzEnWCgHA?si=jc9mn4E_0SYhG78q
As for cycling in the snow, here’s @notjustbikes on why the Finns can happily cycle in the snow but Canadians can’t: https://youtu.be/Uhx-26GfCBU?si=9OWyiLYq3kgEsfAU
@awelder @jedsetter @nictea @philip @fuck_cars You often hear from Melburnians that it’s the world’s most livable city, and how the CBD is laid out nicely in the Hoddle Grid is laid out compared to inner-city.
And how Melbourne’s inner-suburban tram network means it has much better public transport than Sydney.
And it’s true. Colonial Melbourne, funded by its gold rush, did a much better job at planning than early Sydney.
But after the World Wars, it’s a very different story.
Sydney is at least constrained by Ku-ring-gai Chase National Park to the north, the Royal National Park to the south, and the Blue Mountains to the west.
That means the only places for new sprawl are either northwest past Rouse Hill, or southwest around Campbelltown and Camden.
As a result, there’s a lot more pressure from developers to densify.
Meanwhile, Melbourne just has the Dandenong Ranges to the east and Port Phillip Bay to the south.
As a result, even right now, you have new housing estates past Pakenham, Melton, Wyndham Vale, and Craigieburn.
As for sprawling Australian capitals, I think Perth has definitely been punching above its weight since the 2000s mining boom.
There’s now continuous McMansions sprawl right down the Coast from north of Joondalup to south of Mandurah.
And there’s new subdivisions that are closer to Bunbury than they are to the Perth or Fremantle CBDs.
@nictea @philip @fuck_cars Even the 903 SmartBus only runs a 15 minute timetable during the day, which is less than the minimum 10-minute service busses should be running.
And other services in the area, like the 737 (Croydon to Boronia to Knox to Glen Waverley to Monash Uni) is a 40-minute-plus frequency during most of the day.
And people wonder why more residents in the outer suburbs use public transport…
@nictea @philip @fuck_cars Pretty much the whole City of Knox (a large chunk of outer-eastern Melbourne) is 1970s and 1980s car-centric suburbia at its worst.
The only rail in the whole area is basically Bayswater and Boronia stations on the Belgrave line. And trains only run every 30 minutes, aside from the morning and evening peak.
Other than that, you have the SmartBus from Ringwood to Frankston, the Rowville SmartBus, and a bunch of infrequent suburban busses.
And the stroads! There’s literally a stroad called High Street Road (which is quite possibly the stroadiest name ever invented).
And all of them — Boronia Rd, Stud Rd, Wellington Rd, Burwood Hwy, Wellington Rd, Dorset Rd — are a nightmare during peak hour.
There’s whole housing estates with detached residential homes where the only practical way to get anything is to drive.
If anyone says Melbourne does planning well, take them out to Knox (you’ll need to drive) and they’ll come away with a different opinion.
#Knox #Melbourne #Urbanism #UrbanPlanning #Bayswater #Boronia #Planning
@philip @fuck_cars And a little post-script: It’s now 2024, Waverley Park is now long gone, and the long-promised Rowville railway still hasn’t been built.
Here’s some background info on it from Melbourne’s Public Transport Users Association ( @ptua and @danielbowen ).
1·6 months ago@thegiddystitcher @helenslunch I think hashtag feeds being overrun with vertical videos is an excellent point. (One I hope @dansup considers!)
But beyond that, I think vertical videos through Loops on the Fedi are likely to be far less obtrusive than they have been on other platforms.
What’s so annoying about them on Instagram and YouTube is that the algorithm automatically drops vertical videos into my feed.
And there’s *lots* of them in my feed, often on topics I’m not interested in.
They’re not there because I’m interested, but because they serve the commercial interests of the social media app’s owners.
Hashtags aside, on the Fedi, they’ll only appear in your feed if you follow a Loops account you’re interested in, or someone you follow finds one interesting enough to share.
And if people on your Mastodon server all find them really annoying, there’s always the option to just block the Loops servers and be done with it.
@fullfathomfive @jedsetter @fuck_cars Really important point.
While it’s open for submissions, it’s worth putting in a submission pointing out where there are oversights the strategy around accessibility, and some of the ways they can be fixed.
And some of those issues (for example, more accessible public transport) will need the City of Sydney to work with external departments and agencies (such as Transport for NSW) to fix.
@alexisdyslexic @fuck_cars Thanks for sharing those, I appreciate it ☺️
It just goes to show how far off the mark Business Sydney is.
@alexisdyslexic @fuck_cars Definitely worth sharing the link ☺️
@deadsuperhero @nutomic I think the concept of a TikTok on the Fediverse is solid. And if short form videos help to get more people on the Fedi, and engaging with the Fedi, that’s a good thing in my book.
@AMillionNames @nutomic In which case the ibis, a species of bird that’s also known as the bin chicken, might be a fitting name for the platform?
@Etterra Because I’m not in America, I prefer to use the correct English spelling.
Which, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, is tyre: https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/definition/english/tyre
Not to be confused with tire, as in: “I tire of the American misspellings of words” ☺️
@Simplicator @NarrativeBear Our whole economy is geared towards disposable consumerism.
Yeah, we could make sturdy wooden chairs like the ones your grandma had at her dining table for 50-odd years.
Or we could get new plastic chairs every five years or so from IKEA.
The way things are set up, making 10 disposable chairs that last five years is far better for the economy than making one chair that lasts 50.
There are plenty of things that could be user serviceable, repairable, repurposable or upgradable that aren’t because our economy is geared towards disposable consumerism.
Even look at the economic measuring stick we use: GDP.
If using economic activity as the measure of the health of your economy, then it’s far better to manufacture 10 chairs instead of one.
But what if we were to use a different set of economic measurements? For example, the utility we gain from our goods, and many natural resources it takes to achieve that level of utility?
By that measurement, manufacturing 10 chairs over 50 years instead of one for the same utility (sitting down during dinner) is a monumental waste.
@nutomic That last question was me trying to get my head around how this works.
Will each page have a username, in the same way each Lemmy group has a username, which can be followed from Mastodon?
If you follow that username from Mastodon, will you see a series of posts? If so, will they contain page edits or something else?
What happens if you tag that account in a post from Mastodon? Or reply to one of those posts?
@LostXOR @yogthos @NoIWontPickAName @technology There’s a few other steps they could potentially take.
The first would be to block any financial institution in the US, or that deals with the US, from sending any payments to or from ByteDance’s accounts.
They could also freeze any assets currently held by US financial institutions.
Second, if they can get Apple, Microsoft, and Google on board to help do their bidding, they could pull the ByteDance app from the Apple and Google Play app stores.
That includes removing it from any apps where it’s already installed. Globally.
They could also request that TikTok is removed from Google and Bing search results.
On top of this, they could do what you suggested, and ask ISPs and mobile carriers to block domains and IP addresses used by ByteDance.
And the US could apply diplomatic pressure on other countries to implement similar financial and ISP-level blocks and bans.
So, potentially, it’s also blocked in the UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, and elsewhere.