• 4 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 21st, 2023

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  • krayj@lemmy.worldtoTechnology@lemmy.worldPrinters
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    1 year ago

    I would NEVER recommend a modern HP printer, but…I have a HP Laserjet 4000 (Circa 1997) that I ‘acquired’ from the company I worked for that went bankrupt.

    This thing refuses to die. current impression count is over 500,000 prints. All its patents expired over a decade ago, and it’s still easy to find parts and toner (originals, and now even 3rd party knockoffs). It’s old enough now that modern generic drivers have built in support for it. The only parts I’ve ever had to replace are the rubber sheet feeder rollers which dry out and stop working correctly after 12-15 years.

    So, I guess the point here is that some really solid printers were made a couple decades ago, back when manufacturers still took pride in their products, and they are old enough that the hardware is no longer protected by patents (so practically open) and robust driver support without all the bullshit. Picking up something from this era and cleaning it up would come close to satisfying a lot of your requirements.







  • Some were produced that were claimed to be dimmable - and I wasted my money on a few and was still unhappy with them. The other problem I forgot to mention earlier was the startup time: the earlier bulbs (and the cheaper ones) wouldn’t just ‘turn on’ when the power was turned on…they took some time to start making light, and the colder it was the longer it took - this is an aspect where LEDs are amazing - maximum brightness within milliseconds of getting energized.


  • One problem is that CFL bulbs is that they contain small amounts of mercury (about 4mg per bulb). Because of that, disposing of them responsibly requires going through big hassles rather than just throwing them in the trash. Also, because of that mercury, accidentally breaking one means contamination of the environment around the break.

    Flickering - always was a big problem for these things.

    Longevity: They were very sensitive to heat, which meant that they loved to burn themselves up in a lot of applications.

    Dimming: CFLs were NEVER good at being dimmable.

    CFL was just a very poor technology detour on the way to the vastly superior LED lights.






  • Maybe I am in the minority but I’ll never need an aux jack again

    There is still significant lag for bluetooth audio on both ios and android platforms. It’s doesn’t really impact calling, and it doesn’t really impact watching video content (because they figured out how to measure that latency in real time and inject artificial delay into the video stream so that audio and video sync). But what they haven’t figured out yet is the answer for bluetooth audio for gaming. When gaming, you can’t arbitrarily delay the video feed so that it lines up with audio, so the bluetooth audio experience is complete dogshit for any gaming scenario. If you game, you have to use the physical cable or the constant audio lag will drive you mad.

    Also, there used to be (still are) a fair number of accessories designed to work through the aux port. Examples: mobile credit card readers that connect through aux jack (like square/paypal) that are used heavily by small vendors (especially for shows/events); also things like selfie sticks that use a cable plugged into the aux jack connected to a length of wire running inside the selfie stick to a button on the end of it.

    The market is starting to come up with wireless versions of these things, but the modern wireless versions now require unique ios and android versions of them when the aux-jack solution used to be platform independent.

    Also, the audio quality of an aux jack is an order of magnitude superior to anything that can be piped through bluetooth…still.

    I very much appreciate devices still throwing traditional aux jacks onto mobile devices. Ideally, there will be a wireless technical solution that eventually is superior, but that technology is definitely not bluetooth and we’re still waiting for it to be invented and hit consumer availability.


  • I must be completely “dull witted” then. When I first started looking into lemmy, I went to the official “join-lemmy.org” website, clicked on “join a server” and picked one of the top listed recommended results. It just happened to be a VERY small and VERY new instance. But as a completely stupid dull witted new user who knew literally nothing about lemmy, I didn’t know any better.

    After joining that instance and looking for communities on it, I only saw the local communities plus a few non local communities from larger instances and I legit thought that’s all there was on lemmy. I mean, it was clear I was seeing the local ones, and it was clear I was seeing some nonlocal ones, who why tf would I expect that I wasn’t seeing everything?

    Your perspective is tainted by the fact that you know how it all works. People new to lemmy don’t, and I’m telling you that the onboarding and community discovery process is dogshit. I beg you to try considering things from the perspective of a newer user.


  • I tried mutualaidhub.org - and found another one that is about 45 miles from me so I went to their site to check it out. From what I can tell, it’s nothing more than a hyper-localized version of gofundme.com. It seems most of these things are just links to facebook groups. I don’t think these things are as organized or as helpful as your original post made them out to be.

    Also, for the record, I’m not actually looking for assistance. I’ve honestly never heard of this thing until your post and just am trying to learn more about them, what they do, who and how they help, and maybe find something I could contribute. These things do not seem like a very viable alternative to traditional social services.


  • That’s not exactly how it’s working in practice.

    Sure, for the top 5 lemmy instances, that’s kind of how it’s working. But for all other lemmy instances, when you load their communities and filter by “all” instead of by “local”, you are only seeing the communities that specific instance has become aware of (by virtue of that instance’s members manually subscribing to foreign communities on foreign instances).

    Since the very nature (by design) of lemmy is to be fragmented, it’s almost a foregone conclusion that users of most instances will never even become aware of that the most popular foreign communities are for the topics they are interested in, without resorting to 3rd party search tools and community trackers/locators.

    The very design of lemmy actually actively promotes fragmentation…fragmentation not just among the user base, but among communities of identical topics as well across different instances.

    The only way it would be ‘solved organically’ as you say, is when fragmentation is minimized by just having a few super-massive instances – but that seems to be counter to the fundamental ideals of lemmy itself.

    Personally, I think this is a huge usability problem that needs some better technical solutions.


  • I only heard about them recently too so I might give an incomplete answer but

    If you only recently heard about them, then why wouldn’t you logically conclude that a plausible answer to your original question might be that more people don’t join them because people haven’t heard of them?

    This seems like a no brainer so what am I missing?

    People haven’t heard of them.

    Also, using the mutualaid.wiki resource you cited - I decided to look up what was available in my state and the only couple of groups seem to focus on Covid-19 related things…leaving me even more confused about what you’re talking about.