I heard it on a BBC radio interview yesterday. The original creators were angling to create a way for Craiglist personal adds to have videos of people pitching themselves to potential dates. It turned out to be a flop, so they steered it toward general videos of any kind.

(edit) found it

I would love to find a proper app for Lemmy, ideally non-graphical. I tried Neonmodemoverdrive and it was broken out of the box. I think I heard there is an emacs mode for Lemmy but didn’t keep track of it. I would love to find something that maintains a local copy of threads of interest and which synchronises with the server whenever I am online.

Seems like a good approach for the scale. It’s quite thin but I’ll see if I can add a mechanical switch.

No I did not change my browser. But today it works so it seems they fiddled with an anti-ai-scraper mechanism and now it works again.

Thanks for the tip about transcriptly.org… looks useful. Otter did not work for me… perhaps it is anti-Tor. And rev.com looks like a closed-source mobile app. But in any case, transcriptly might be a useful alternative.

I use Tor so my IPs would be all over the place, perhaps even changing across the same session cookie.

I was forced to use Alexandrite for quite a long time because the stock client was unusable on Ungoogled Chromium. But in the past couple months the stock UI has been working again with the exception of this thread. But that’s fixed as well, today at least.

Today is my first visit since the OP, and it’s all good. So somehow it is fixed.

refreshing made no difference for me. Tried a hard refresh (control-shift-R).

I cleared the cache and did a hard refresh (control-shift-R) and this makes no difference.

BTW, I am able to reply to you only by hovering over the area where I expect to find a reply button, and the mouseover text says reply.

i might try this for the calipers. But the battery cover for the scale uses a screw… so i might opt to hack that to use external power of some kind.

I noticed after not using the caliper for days I opened the case and it was already on with the display faint due to weak battery. I suspect what happens is the calipers are very sensitive and power on with the slightest touch, so after I close the case something sometimes powers it on. Although I think it has an auto shutoff… so I’m not sure what the issue is. It could be overly warm in the summer (no a/c).

Did you try it? When I print the Pancake Corner menu page to PDF, it produces 10 pages of web junk and only one of those pages is the menu. The one page that is the menu only shows the cover of the menu (even if I have turned the page in the interactive application).

I could perhaps inspect the code and work out a way to hack around the obsticles, but let me give some context: when planning to visit a city for which I do not live for a short time (maybe just 1 day), I do some searches on the kind of cuisine I would like and get a list of URLs to ~20—30 restaurants. The goal is to quickly accumulate a local copy of many menus which can be used not just in advance planning but to have them on my offline phone for on-the-fly decisions. Spending all day planning out a day is a bit impractical for the benefit. PDFs from HTML contain a lot of junk, not just the menu, which then has a purpose-defeatingly-poor UX for trying to quickly see a menu on a tiny phone screen while running from one attraction to the next.

So in reality @[email protected]’s scenario plays out: the restaurant might lose my business because I cannot be bothered to go through all their hoops to get a menu in my local storage. Restaurants with easily reached PDFs have a business advantage because they are better exposed to get more of my attention. The other restaurants still have a chance if no menu seems enticing but they are a 2nd resort and may get lucky from my blind arbitrary selection.

your interpretation of my quote is incorrect

Your words, quoted here again as proof that you have defined “repair” so narrowly as to exclude taking actions to restore a product to put back into service:

I wouldn’t consider “hacking” a drive to continue using it when you shouldn’t a repair.

What is your mother tongue that is so far from English?

All I’ll say is I’m glad you have nothing to do with making the specifications for this sort of hardware and that it’s left to competent and educated engineers.

You are really lost here. We actually agreed on the engineering decision (which was the decision to have a fail safe trigger). Again, the point of contention is the management decision to block property owners from control over their own property after they recover their data – the management decision that forces useful hardware to be needlessly committed to e-waste after the data has been migrated. It is because you think the profit-driven management decision of a private enterprise is “engineering” makes you profoundly incompetent for involvement in engineering specs. But you might be able to do marketing or management at a company like Microsoft. Shareholders would at least love your corporate boot-licking posture and your propaganda rhetoric in framing management decisions as “engineering”.

But plz, stay away from specs. Proper specs favor the consumers/users and community. They are not optimized to exploit consumers to enrich corporate suppliers and generate landfill.

Me providing an example of a repair is not me claiming it is the only method of repair.

Luckily I quoted you, which shows that you have defined “repair” so narrowly as to exclude taking actions to restore a product to put back into service.

Except, again, you aren’t making it useful again,

Of course it’s useful again. To claim writing to a drive is not useful is to misunderstand how storage devices are useful.

you’re attempting to bypass a fail safe put in place by engineers.

No I’m not. The fail safe should remain. That much was well done by engineers and I would be outraged if it were not in place. I WANT my drive to go into read-only mode when it crosses a reliability threshhold. The contention is what happens after the fail safe – after recovering the data. No one here believes the drive should not fail safe.

The first paragraph quoted (and the article as whole) cover reads, different between different drives (including different specs for enterprise vs consumer) and how the values are drawn.

Yes I read that. And? It’s immaterial to the discussion whether it’s an enterprise or consumer grade. Enterprise hardware still lands in the hands of consumers at 2nd-hand markets.

10k is for intel 50nm MLC NAND specifically. Other values are presented in the article.

And? Why do you think this is relevant to the nannying anti-repair discussion? It doesn’t obviate anything I have said. It’s just a red herring.

It isn’t arbitrary as you’ve attempted to hand wave it as.

Yes it is. Read your own source. They are counting write cycles to get an approximation of wear, not counting electrons that stick.

It doesn’t matter how sophisticated the software standard is, the oxide on the drive will eventually wear down and is a physical problem.

This supports what I have said. Extreme precision is not needed when we have software that gives redundancy to a user-specified extent and precisely detects errors.

it doesn’t pass for right to repair imo.

Denying owners control over their own property s.t. they cannot put it back into service is an assault on repair. Opposing the nannying is to advocate for a right to repair.

It’s risking data loss to wring an extra 12 months (or likely, less) from a dying drive.

You’re not grasping how the tech works. The 12 months is powered off state maintenance for reading. Again, you’re missing the reading and writing roles here. I’m not going to explain it again. Read your own source again.

For every 1 person like you that its an annoyance for it saves multitudes more that are less savvy pointlessly risking data loss.

This is a false dichotomy. It’s possible to protect the low tech novices without compromising experts from retaining control over their own product. This false dichotomy manifests from your erroneous belief that the fail safe contradicts an ability to reverse the safety switch after it triggers.

In this case it’s an “Apacer” drive… some no name brand. It seems unlikely that I would be able to track down a responsive customer service worker. Seems like really a long-shot because even if I reach someone they will consider it a waste of their time and money that they are even talking to someone well after a warranty period is over. And from there, anything that enables someone to put a product back into service rather than buy a new drive is probably treated as a trade secret. Perhaps some social engineering could be used to reach an employee disgruntled enough to help.

I didn’t claim as such

Luckily I quoted you, which shows that you have defined “repair” so narrowly as to exclude taking actions to restore a product to put back into service.

and replacing a faulty or damaged module wouldn’t return it to factory condition.

I never said it would. But more importantly, this is a red herring. I don’t accept your claim that it wouldn’t, but it’s a moot point because this is not the sort of repair I would do and it’s not likely worthwhile. The anti-repair tactic that I condemn is the one that blocks owners from hacks that make the device more useful than the read-only state.

I wouldn’t consider “hacking” a drive to continue using it when you shouldn’t a repair.

(emphasis mine) This is the nannying I am calling out. If someone can make a degraded product useful again, it’s neither your place nor the manufacturers place to tell advanced users/repairers not to – to dictate what is appropriate.

As far as I’m aware it’s to comply with JEDEC standards.

It’s over-compliant. Also, we don’t give a shit about JEDEC standards after the drive is garbage. The standards are only useful during the useful life of the product. From your own source:

In the consumer space you need that time to presumably transfer your data over.

I need a couple weeks tops to transfer my data. It’s good that we get a year. Then what? The drive is as useful as a brick. And needlessly so.

I just don’t see how using a drive into the period where it’s likely to fail and lose data,

That’s because you’re not making the distinction between reading and writing, and understanding that it’s writing that fails. The fitness to write to a NAND declines gradually with each cycle. Every transistor is different. A transistor might last 11,943 cycles and it sits next to a transistor that lasts 10,392 cycles. They drew a line and said “10k writes is safe for this tech, so draw a line there and go into read-only mode when an arbitrary number of transistors have likely undergone 10k writes”.

The telemetry on the device is not sophisticated enough to track exactly when a transistor’s state becomes ambiguous. So the best they could do is keep an avg cycle count which factors in a large safety margin for error. So of course it would be an insignificant risk to do 1 (or 5) more write cycles. Even if the straw that breaks the camel’s back is on the 1 additional write operation on a particular sector, we have software that is sophisticated enough to correct it. Have a look at par2.

against specification,

It’s not “against” the spec because the spec does not specify how we may use the drive. Rightfully so. The spec says the drive must remain readable for 1 year after crossing a threshhold (which BTW is determined by write cycle counts not actual ability to store electrons).

is a good idea.

Bricking by design is a bad idea because preventable e-waste and consumerism is harmful to the environment. I write this post from a 2008 laptop that novice consumers would have declared useless 10 years ago.

Let alone a right to repair issue.

Of course it’s a right to repair issue because it’s a nannying anti-repair tactic that has prematurely forced a functional product into uselessness. I am being artificially blocked from returning the product into useful service.

64gb? Your SSD sounds pretty old and is at the end of its fairly short lifespan.

Indeed.

Modern SSDs will last much longer than a comparable HDD under average user conditions.

I have seen countless mechanical HDDs long outlast the usefulness of their capacity. This is not the case with SSDs. SSDs are fragile. They also need to be powered on periodically just to prevent data loss. Note cases where police put SSDs into an evidence room where they sat until the court needed the evidence, at which point data loss destroyed their forensic usefulness – which would not have been a problem with magnetic drives.

If you’re writing TB on a regular schedule, yeah it will probably die sooner because that’s not what it’s designed for. It’s just a different tool for a different job. If longevity and capacity was the only concern we’d all still be using tape.

Really a red herring here. It does not matter how the drive reached EOL. The useful life is being cut short (shorter than it could be) by an act of policy.

Hard drive passwords are removeable. The nuts and bolts of it is performing a change password operation where the new password is the NULL char.

If it were true that a password is required to write to the storage medium in the event of corruption, that would imply that it’s required for every write event.

Consider how OPAL drives have passwords just to get read access. You only have to enter the password once when the controller first powers up the drive. It does not have to send the password with every read operation because the drive remains unlocked until it powers off.

But I have to say I’m hand-waving because I only heard speculation that a password is used for write-access gate-keeping to begin with. Certainly it’s feasible that the ATA standard could have included a separate password for write access, but my question is whether that’s actually the case.

I don’t think this is right to repair tbh. You can’t repair the SSD in this state?

“Repair” does not necessarily mean returning to a factory state. If a machine/appliance/device breaks and the OEM parts are no longer available, and you hack it to serve your purpose without restoring the original mint state, that’s still a repair. My bicycle is loaded after-market parts and hacks in order to keep it in service. The fact that the parts function differently does not mean they cease to repair the bike.

In the case at hand, the drive is crippled. To uncripple it to get back some of its original functionality to some extent is to repair it.

Which click “ignore” after not reading the message informing them

That’s not how it works. Though it would be feasible for an OS creator to implement such a click-through hack, that’s on them. ATM it does not exist. It’s unlikely that OS suppliers would want that liability.

A good majority of users aren’t anywhere near as tech savvy enough to understand what’s going on.

Nannying those who do know what they’re doing is not a justified propoposition when low-tech users can still be nannied nonetheless. Anyone who implements a one-click automatic dialog as you suggest would be at fault for low-tech users getting stung. Publishing an ATA password for hdparm users gives a sufficient hurdle for the tech illiterates without nannying advanced users.