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A bit of a rant, but what to do about new smartphones?
  • A friend suggested me Sailfish OS, sadly it only supports Xperia, and Sony does not make phones that attend the frequency where I live.

    My next "phone" will be a pocket computer with a data chip. For the last 20 years, I only received phone calls from solicitors/scammers.

  • A bit of a rant, but what to do about new smartphones?
  • If you don't mind old hardware, get it refurbished from Amazon. You can get pixel 7 for 400 CAD, sometimes less. Amazon quality control is better than ebay, so was the support.

    My biggest problem is with the camera of all mobiles, the photo looks good because there is a lot of processing in the background, and it becomes very apparent how the hardware is bad when you take pictures with an aftermarket OS.

  • Game Video Clipping tool for Linux?
  • My favourite tool is GPU Screen Recorder - https://git.dec05eba.com/gpu-screen-recorder/about/

    This is a screen recorder that has minimal impact on system performance by recording your monitor using the GPU only, similar to shadowplay on windows. This is the fastest screen recording tool for Linux.

    It works with AMD, Intel and Nvidia GPUs. It is also the one that performs better. Official repos AUR or Flatpak, or you can install from the source above. The flatpak already comes with the UI gtk https://git.dec05eba.com/gpu-screen-recorder-gtk/

    Other tools I used were OBS and Steam - you can enable Steam to record your games in the Settings > Game Recording > Record in Background

    OBS was very laggy for me.

  • Game Video Clipping tool for Linux?
  • It depends on the tasks you are planning to do.

    Here is a list with a bunch https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/List_of_applications/Multimedia#Video_editors I tested most of them. While they all work fine, I had better experience with the flatpak versions when available.

    If you just want to do some quick cutting, trimming or merging - LosslessCut https://mifi.no/losslesscut/

    I use ffmpeg from terminal for quick stuff that I do often. Like resizing a video, cutting, getting an image from a frame.

    Lightworks and DaVinci resolve are industry standard, but require a license to use most of it. The problem with their free version is the limitation of input and output formats. Ideal if you are making movies/going professional. I prefer DaVinci Resolve, keep an eye for hardware sale, sometimes it comes with a license bundled - Speed Editor being the cheapest.

    Kdenlive is well-rounded, from the open source is the most robust, and with most maintainers. I use it mostly for gameplay and to add voice over to videos.

    For recording voice over and sound FX, there is nothing better than Ardour https://ardour.org/

    Natron is great for Visual FX, you can also use Blender for pretty much everything.

  • Kobo or Apple for e-books? What’s better for keeping profits local?
  • I use Calibre to organize my e-books, it is great. Mobi was giving me the best result when I converted from epub, the other Amazon format my Kindle supports is azw3.

    Sadly, I lost half of the last words per line converting from DRM-free books I got from humble bundle, and figuring out the proper settings was taking too long.

    When I learned about KOReader I never looked back, it allows me to sync with Calibre through Wi-Fi and accepts way more book formats. I have been using Kindle more since I installed it.

    The problem is that the process to get it running on Kindle is not that straightforward.

  • Google is preparing to let you run Linux apps on Android, just like Chrome OS
  • Unless there is a x86 to ARM translation layer on Linux that I’m not aware of?

    https://steamdb.info/app/3043620/

    It appears Valve is working on Proton for arm64, I was wondering if this is to attend the mobile market, a new Index or maybe a smaller Steam Deck.

  • Kobo or Apple for e-books? What’s better for keeping profits local?
  • What kind of question is “Do you need an E-ink display?”

    Currently, Apple does not offer any hardware form factor with an e-ink display. If the poster was interested in hardware, that would filter out Apple devices.

    What’s wrong with the kindle? I have a 2012 kindle paperwhite

    I also have a Kindle, PaperWhite 3.

    The list is long, in short: Kindle has a closed system. Similar to the reMarkable brand of e-ink devices, they make it hard for you to do anything it was not made for, and to be heavily dependent on their services.

    You can still run Doom and other programs on Kindle, but I would not recommend buying it new, nor to someone who does not want the hassle of tweaking it, as there are better options working well out of the box.

    In the poster case, converting DRM-free e-books to Amazon's proprietary format is not always straightforward and can cause severe artifacts in your books. You either need time and patience to tweak the settings of your conversion tool, or install something like KOReader that can read them as-is.

  • Kobo or Apple for e-books? What’s better for keeping profits local?
  • profits local

    Depends on the profits you mean, I don't think there is a single hardware built here, overall:

    • Buy hardware used or refurbished from local sellers.

    • Software that supports your local library borrowing system (Something like OverDrive).

    open source drm free e-books

    Most hardware supports them out of the box. For the ones that do not, there are some workaround (koreader).

    On the profit part, there are some publishers in Canada and you can always connect to your local library.

    kobo or apple

    That is like comparing apples to oranges. I don't think apple offers eBook readers.

    You need to think if you like/need a few things.

    Would you like e-ink display? Would you like colour? Is it just to read and annotations? Or you want to run apps available on your phone as well?

    Once I started using e-ink for reading books I cannot use LCD or LED panels anymore for that task.

    As e-ink eBook reader goes Kobo might be the best option in Canada, everything you need out of the box with the bonus of connecting to your local library.

    I saw some online sellers offering Bigme and Boox in Canada, but I could not confirm if they have offices here.

    I would stay away from Amazon unless you ok flashing used hardware (for safety) and with doing workarounds (to install koreader).

  • Question about proportional voting
  • It depends on how it is implemented. There are many examples out there. wikipedia list of electoral systems by country

    A pure proportional voting would have no ridding/districts, I think this is more common for municipal and provincial level elections.

    If the countries are divided into independent-ish states or provinces, they can divide the population by the number of available seats - that means a province with 10% of the population, ideally would have close to 10% of the seats.

    I am not a big fan of breaking down provinces further because the more you divide into smaller districts, more votes are thrown away, and you open it up for gerrymandering.

    Canada seems to do a good job dividing seats per province, the problem is that the provinces break it down into districts and use first past the post voting to elect officials.

    source

  • These Canadian cities are making it easier for cyclists and pedestrians to get around this summer | CBC News
  • I would not say Edmonton is making it easier. They used to have more summer streets (maybe covid related), and pretty much all attempts into new bike lanes were soon converted into parking / car lanes.

    Even if the sidewalks were not so narrow and close to a busy street, things are so far away from each other and extremely car centric. For example, Hawrelak Park is a straight line by car, but a zigzag if you are walking from north of the river.

    You can check the "walkability" of most cities and districts here https://www.walkscore.com/

  • InitialsDiceBearhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/„Initials” (https://github.com/dicebear/dicebear) by „DiceBear”, licensed under „CC0 1.0” (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)NI
    Nils @lemmy.ca
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