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Not me!

I spent most of the weekend in VR No-Mans-Sky exploring a made-up galaxy, and when someone tried to speak to me near the meetup-for-missions place I ran away.


Really what I want is for the task-bar to not send everything to a search-engine anyway.

I don't want web-results in a task-bar-search at all. I'm trying to launch a program, not tell Microsoft-search the names of every program I launch.


HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Search

Set to 0 the following keys (add them if needed)

- BingSearchEnabled (DWORD)

- CortanaConsent (DWORD)

I've been running w/ those since Windows 1903, and that's why I don't care about all those Edge shenanigans (except the default browser switcher).

All those sub-par web experiences in the Windows Shell are tiresome. Taskbar search breaking because of internet issues tops it all off nicely.


These registry keys are completely ignored on the latest version of Windows 11.

MS documented the change here, very buried:

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/windows-11-specifica...

Look under "Feature deprecations and removals" > "Search Results from the Internet" and you see:

"Windows 11 does not support disabling the return of internet Search results via Registry Key."

They imply there that you can still use Group Policy to make this change, but... that doesn't work either in the latest builds.


Just for fun, I downloaded the Windows 11 dev VM via Hyper-V to try it out.

And you're right, the keys I mentioned don't seem to work anymore.

There's a policy called "Don't search the web or display web results in Search", which doesn't seem to work. Perhaps it requires Windows to be domain-joined?

Or perhaps they were referencing the "Turn off display of recent search entries in the File Explorer search box" policy, in which case it works. The description for that policy doesn't mention web results at all, which is odd. Anyway, you will have to kill SearchHost.exe for the policy to take effect, it will be launched automatically when initiating a new search.


Oh. :(


Thanks. Will try and have a look next time I'm forced to boot into windows.

Used to be that Windows users would complain that Linux made them edit arcane config files, I guess now it's Linux users that complain about Windows needing you to edit arcane registry settings.


Presumably they make more money with the user-hostile version and the user isn't paying so...


I press it as soon as I see a popup about cookies or login or sales or basically anything at all.

I press it when there's a paywall.

I press it when the site doesn't do dark-mode.

I press it when adverts become annoying.

There also exists an auto-reader-mode plugin that you can tell to always open that site in reader-mode in future.

Reader mode is great. Hope it doesn't become popular so website start trying to stop it working.


Well. A Russian company, DDos-Guard, did host Parler in the end didn't they?

And sure enough, the FBI is investigating.

Signal is a charity rather than a company, but dunno if that makes any actual difference.


Fermi's paradox says nothing about how likely aliens are to visit earth. It notes that we can't see any sign of them when we look into the sky.

Perhaps the humans don't care about the ants, but the ants damn well can see signs of human activity.


Would an intelligent ant species living on an uninhabited island identify global warming and driftwood as conclusive evidence of the existence of a higher intelligence causing it?


If they have telescopes then the trails from star-link satellites would probably give it away.

The ants in the article were in driveways though.


My band haven't really been able to get into a room together since about March, mostly it's not even been legal but even during the time when it was legal we figured it was probably inadvisable.

So we've been trying to do it online.

And then decided it might be worth trying to perform online, with each of us in different rooms around the city.

I'm taking a video-feed from four different people, and audio feeds from six different audio-sources, mixing them and then pushing that out as a member of a video-chat with dozens of other people.

So I was kinda glad of my half gig symmetric.

I think I'd have needed the full gig if we were a twelve-piece band, say.


I think people tend to overestimate how much bandwidth they use. Pandora and other services stream audio at something like 256kbps. And for most people who aren't audiophiles, that's a high-quality stream. Uncompressed CD Audio is something like 1.5mbps.

Netflix serves up 1080p video at around 4-6mbps. Just for fun, lets round that up to 10mbps per stream, you're talking about being able to handle 50 simultaneous streams at 500mbps.

And really, you're only serving one stream outbound to your video chat service, assuming something like Twitch or whatever. And that always gets compressed to hell. Not to mention, most webcams aren't going to serve up Netflix-quality video, so there's not even a point to trying to use that much bandwidth from the incoming feeds.


Latency probably matters more than bandwidth in a case like this.

Gotta pay for the direct-fibre for the ping as much as the volume.

Congestion is gonna mean you always need slack. There must be unused bandwidth or the occasional packet-loss just cascades.


Interesting - are you using something like jacktrip for low-latency audio?


We are using Jamulus, and I won't try and pretend that it's great, but it's just about workable.

https://sourceforge.net/projects/llcon/


Indeed.

"All your work is instantly synced to the cloud"

Ugh. Nope nope nope.

But now maybe sounds like I could turn that off and just rsync the files to my Debian tower.

That is more win.


> But now maybe sounds like I could turn that off and just rsync the files to my Debian tower.

Yes, I can confirm this. I have never connected my device to wifi. I backup my notes to my home server using rsync.


You mean rsync via USB? Or can you rsync by WiFi without allowing it to send requests to their services?


> You mean rsync via USB?

I mean rsync via USB (but over ssh protocol - the USB mounts as a network device, rather than as a disk drive).

> Or can you rsync by WiFi without allowing it to send requests to their services?

I have never connected the device to wifi, so I don't know about this.


While I haven't used this device, because it's just a standard Linux system, certainly.


Their support page does imply if you want to avoid cloud sync you should keep it offline, but perhaps that is just because it is the most brief/user friendly way to describe the situation. There definitely isn't an explicit option to turn off the cloud sync in the device settings, but I wouldn't be surprised if there are workarounds to this once you ssh in. You could also maybe block internet access to the device via your router settings, so you could at least use rsync while at home?

https://support.remarkable.com/hc/en-us/articles/36000264829...


The cloud sync requires an account, which the device works fine without. So just don't sign up.

I think I'm missing out on features I don't care about, like OCR and emailing docs to people, but it's well worth it.


But can you have it sync automatically in the same way with your own private cloud? That would be really awesome.


Sounds like you could maybe use git-annex on it for that? (I use rsync (via "FolderSync") on the android-based onyx boox max, so as soon as I turn on wifi it pushes to one of my personal boxes (internal format is a hideous sqlite-based thing, but after the third round of updates they generate competent PDFs so I just push those) - sounds like on this I'd also just use rsync from an ifup script or something...)


Sounds like the optimal approach would be to run some kind of server on your own hardware, and update the /etc/hosts on the device to point at it.

Shouldn't be too hard to figure out what it's communicating over the network, then put together a server to match that and do useful things with it.


I don't own one of them, but I would surely be able to instruct my router to put it in jail like I can every other device.

LAN-only.


Fine until you're elsewhere.


Eh?

When I'm elsewhere it can continue to not have the passwords to anyone else's wifi.


Wouldn't you still need to be careful about the device auto-joining to open public wifi? Basically, if you were going to be away from your house you'd have to always remember to disable the wifi before you left. Alternatively, just keeping wifi off and only using the USB cable means you don't have to worry about forgetting to disable wifi before you leave home. :)


Most devices don't auto connect to open wifi unless you tell them to. I'd assume this would have an option for that as well.


This requires being militant about never connecting under any conditions. If the device ever is even briefly connected to a particular network (especially any commonly-named public network), unless that entry is cleared, the device may reconnect later unintentionally and with no obvious indication of having done so..

For those with more expansive threat models, intentional dvice or network spoofing or cloning might bebrisks.

Since firewalling is performd off-device (on the home-LAN router), this will resut in an unsecured evice.

My preference would be for some on-device configured networking limits. Putting full reliance in fixed-site infrastructure migh be unpleasantly surprising.


This.


People have mentioned you can ssh into it, so it might be possible to make changes to the /etc/hosts file.

That's assuming the device doesn't use straight IP addresses for whatever it's communicating with. That's possible, but pretty unlikely.


Or update/modify the networking, WiFi, routing, gateway, firewall, or other configurations on the device itself such that it connects to and communicates over only specified networks and/or hosts.

Again my point is that relying on off-device, local-netork hardware and configs is brittle.


...and now I, too, have reason to consider ordering one. Looking like it was dependent on the cloud was what turned me off before.


>"All your work is instantly synced to the cloud"

It's opt-in, FWIW, it doesn't work unless you log in to a ReMarkable account and you can just store everything locally. It has ~6GB of usable space (8GB but 1-2GB reserved by OS)

And if you mod it, it looks like you can fairly trivially handle the syncing yourself: https://github.com/verbavolant/reMarkable-autosync


My thoughts exactly


You borrow some money, buy a house, do it up, sell it for more, pay off the debt with some left over for your trouble.

That's using debt as a tool to make more money than you could have made if you didn't have access to credit to buy the house.

Or you borrow some money, build a car-factory, sell some cars, pay off the debt, and then have an income stream you couldn't have had without having access to credit to pay to build the car-factory.


Was just thinking about how I'm nearly going to be getting the payoff from not playing any No Man's Sky until there's a VR version.

And here's another proceduraly generated universe that pips it to the post.

Have you used the VR system? Looks like some of that UI in the video wouldn't work without a mouse/keyboard. How much of the system is VRable?

Looks like it's just rocks and light too, right? No pretend life?


When I tried it VR support was pretty rough control-wise. Some UI stuff looked like it was trying to work but was borked, and also it looked like custom control binding was necessary to get it more useful.

It looked really awesome though!


you should check out Elite Dangerous too, its great in VR


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