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Windows PCs can't sleep properly, and Microsoft wants it that way
  • Like the other replier and GP, my Linux and Mac desktops run for months at a time without a restart. I only restart when there's a software update that demands it. I don't have much experience with modern Windows, but I expect that's the norm from a modern OS.

    If you're running into runaway resource issues like this then you may want to spend a few minutes hunting them down and maybe replace the programs responsible. Daily restarts shouldn't be necessary.

  • Windows PCs can't sleep properly, and Microsoft wants it that way
  • Apparently not in Windows settings:

    If the BIOS says it supports Modern Standby, Windows takes it at its word and completely disables the ability to enter S3 sleep (classic standby). There’s no official or documented option for disabling Modern Standby through Windows, which is incredibly annoying.

    Side note: for a while, there was actually a registry setting you could change to disable Modern Standby on the Windows side. Unfortunately, Microsoft removed it, and to my knowledge, has never added it back.

    I'm not a Windows user, so I can't confirm one way or the other, but toward the end of the end of the article the author gives vendor-specific instructions for disabling the S0 Low Power Idle capability from BIOS.

  • Apple is using machine learning everywhere in iOS
  • I had the same experience with News.

    I use RSS very selectively, though. General news sites are too much of a firehose: instead of RSS I just picked a few favorite sources and check them occasionally – usually once in the morning/evening. I also read The Economist's briefs (requires a sub) to catch up on stuff I missed.

  • An Apple malware-flagging tool is “trivially” easy to bypass.
    arstechnica.com An Apple malware-flagging tool is “trivially” easy to bypass

    Background Task Manager can potentially miss malicious software on your machine.

    Background Task Manager can potentially miss malicious software on your machine.

    "It's a good thing for Apple to have added, but the implementation was done so poorly that any malware that's somewhat sophisticated can trivially bypass the monitoring," Wardle says about his Defcon findings.

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    BBC Launches A Mastodon Instance - fediverse - Project Segfault Kbin
  • For anyone as confused as I was: yes, this is indeed a link post on lemmy.world pointing to an article on kbin.social hosted by kbin.projectsegfau.lt and ultimately linking to social.bbc.

    The old Fedi switcharoo.

  • iPhone battery capacities compared: all iPhones battery life in mAh and Wh
  • I like the mini but this table highlights its major disadvantage. I still find its battery ample for a typical day, there's just not a lot of headroom for degradation.

  • Apple Again Fails to Save Classical Music
  • From the title I was hoping for an investigative piece on Apple's payment model and whether it treats classical musicians any better, but it's just a comparison to other streaming services padded with trademark New Yorker bloviation.

    tl;dr: they don't like Apple's editorials, prefer Idagio's search results, and everything invented after the phonograph was a mistake.

  • Hacking Apple's 1994 Set Top Box System
    oldvcr.blogspot.com Apple's Interactive Television Box: hacking the Set Top Box System 7.1 in ROM

    One of the coolest things to come along in the 68K Mac homebrew community is the ROM Boot Disk concept. Classic Macs have an unusually lar...

    Apple's Interactive Television Box: hacking the Set Top Box System 7.1 in ROM

    Apple developed the STBs in their Austin, Texas campus. It was based on stripped-down 1993 Quadra 605 hardware with extra silicon for the media features but kept serial, ADB and SCSI connections to allow it to run compatible CD-ROMs, sort of a Pippin before the Pippin, with plans to sell it for $750 [2023 dollars about $1500]…

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    Google is working on essentially putting DRM on the web
  • "Good vibes only" seems to be embedded in the culture of web development today. Influential devs' Twitter accounts have strong Instagram vibes: constantly promoting and congratulating each other, never sharing substantive criticisms. Hustle hustle.

    People with deep, valid criticisms of popular frameworks like React seem to be ostracized as cranks.

    It's all very vapid and depressing.

  • Google is working on essentially putting DRM on the web
  • Thanks for this. I skimmed the proposal doc itself and didn't quite understand the concern people have with it – most of the concerns that came to my own mind are already listed as non-goals. The first few lines of this comment express a realistic danger that's innate to what's actually being proposed.

  • Dear Diary: Day One of using an iPod Classic in 2023
  • It's funny that the author didn't think to try Music.app instead of doinking about in Finder. I just did this a couple of weeks ago with my own iPod Classic: Music supports iPod sync just fine. (Yes, still!)

  • Pikmin 4 Review MegaThread!
  • "Casual rescue mission" is a fun phrase. It fits, though. The first bloke I "rescued" in the demo was snoozing like Gulliver when I found him.

  • Pikmin 4 Review MegaThread!
  • Just tried the demo yesterday. The tutorial's integrated into the gameplay in a way that didn't feel obstructive to me. It's less like an old-school sandbox tutorial and more that the game makes it obvious what you have to do for the first mission. And it seems to focus on the new mechanics since the basic stuff is already made obvious by overlays showing the controls.

    There will be people who have no capacity for nuance and see this as a boolean thing, and for them: the tutorial's not skippable, no. But for most people, it shouldn't be an issue.

  • Miyamoto wonders why Pikmin hasn't sold more and why people think the games are difficult
  • Pikmin 4 may be worth a look, then. The time limit's been removed for this one.

  • US Cyber Trust Mark will boost smart home security, says White House
  • It's surprising that Apple isn't listed (among those backing the scheme) given that the company designed the HomeKit standard with security and privacy as key objectives.

    I think that's the conflict: Apple has its own certification programs. From Apple's perspective, a successful government-backed trademark would compete with Apple trademarks for consumer mindshare and the certification would add new overhead to Apple's own product launches.

    Other brands backing this program have more to gain than lose from it, e.g. because their own certifications aren't as well marketed, or because it simplifies product screening, or sets up new hurdles for competitors. Apple's in a unique position where none of those benefits are relevant. It only sees the costs.

  • Apple Maps Gradually Winning Over Google Maps Users, Report Suggests
  • The one thing I don't like about its navigation mode is that it can't be used for anything else at the same time. If I start walking directions to a restaurant and then someone asks me what time it closes or if there's a bar nearby then I have to cancel the navigation or use a different app to look that up.

  • Handheld Consoles Will Need Easily-Switchable Batteries By 2027, Says New EU Regulation
  • This got me to look up iFixit's guide to Switch battery replacement. It's better than some of my devices, but as soon as a replacement involves spludgers and adhesive it crosses a "yuck" line for me, going from something that looks kinda fun to sort of dreading that I'll break it.

    For contrast, past Nintendo handhelds made this a doddle, even in the post-AA era: here's the New 3DS battery replacement guide. The DS Lite even had a little battery door.

  • Samsung Debuts New $1,599 ViewFinity S9 5K Display to Compete with Apple's Studio Display
  • Priced at $1,599, the ViewFinity S9 has the same price tag as the Studio Display from Apple, but Apple charges an additional $300 for Nano-texture matte glass and $400 extra for a tilt and height adjustable stand.

    A lot of Apple users feel the Studio Display's overpriced, so it's interesting that Samsung isn't competing on price.

    If I were deciding between the two, and it didn't come down to unique features like portrait mode, then I'd want to see them side by side in a brightly lit room. The regular (non nano-texture) Studio Display handles most reflections decently well, but if the ViewFinity does much better then I can see that being a plus for an office setting where you have lights or windows behind you. I'm sure the nano-texture does better yet, but it has some trade-offs and cleaning requirements that make me very reluctant to recommend it. (I don't like that the wording above suggests nano-texture is a regular matte glass. It's not. It's better in many ways, but it's not for everyone.)

  • Apple introduces offline Maps—but how does it compare with Google Maps?
  • I use offline maps a lot. The article mentions a major reason: traveling, especially abroad, with limited or no data. It also comes in handy when we drop out of cell service, which happens more often than I'd expect outside of major cities in the US. My favorite app for those use cases is Organic Maps, which lets me download maps by city, state, or country.

    I use offline maps for hiking too, but it's such a different use case that I find I want an entirely different map type and UI – one that focuses less on roads and directions and instead surfaces tools for route-planning and managing tracks and waypoint markers. Gaia's long been my favorite app for that.

  • Apple Pulls iOS 16.5.1 and macOS 13.4.1 Rapid Security Response Updates Due to Safari Bug
  • This later article makes it sound like the issue was with websites using UA sniffing:

    For instance, after applying the RSR updates on an iOS device, the new user agent containing an "(a)" string is "Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 16_5_1 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/16.5.2 (a) Mobile/15E148 Safari/604.1," which prevents websites from detecting it as a valid version of Safari, thus displaying browser not supported error messages.

    I hope Apple's use of the Rapid Security Response system here was mostly an infrastructure test. I would be miffed to learn that a patch for some zero day was fumbled because Facebook didn't get the decades-old memo not to use UA sniffing for feature detection.

  • Time to do something I should have done a long time ago...
  • I'm guessing this is because of the å (a with overring)? If so, +a should work in any text input field on Mac, and is more broadly useful! You could use it for… angstrom units! And… er… Swedish folk singers?

  • Gurman: Apple to add hearing tests, other health features to AirPods

    "Likely several months or even years away," after the shift to USB-C:

    > > > The company is working on a new hearing test feature that will play different tones and sounds to allow the AirPods to determine how well a person can hear. The idea is to help users screen for hearing issues, not unlike how the Apple Watch ECG app checks for heart problems. The hearing test could "Sherlock" -- or make irrelevant -- existing apps like Mimi. (Apple held a meeting with its developers a few years ago.) > > > > Separately, Apple is exploring how it could better position AirPods as a hearing aid, a $10 billion-a-year market that's ripe for reinvention. > > > > Apple has already added hearing-aid-like features, such as Conversation Boost and Live Listen, but they don't yet have regulatory approval. Last year, the US Food and Drug Administration eased hearing aid purchase rules, allowing for over-the-counter sales without an exam or prescription. That's created more of an opening, and Apple has hired engineers from traditional hearing aid makers as part of this effort. > > > > There's also engineering work being done on adding sensors to the AirPods so they can determine body temperature via a wearer's ear canal. That type of data is considered more accurate than wrist temperature, which is collected on the Apple Watch Series 8 and Ultra models while users sleep. Apple relies on that information for fertility tracking but wants to expand its use to determine if a person has, say, a cold or other illness. > >

    Full article here.

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    Best places to get human reviews/recommendations outside of reddit?
  • I only had occasional luck with this even on Reddit. Some smaller subs for hobby stuff had genuinely good advice, but a lot of times it'd just be people repeating the same brands and products with a shallow recommendation. And there was a lot of astroturfing. Over the years I've learned to ask elsewhere:

    For major appliances, the best approach I've found is to find a local business – a well reputed one that's been around for years, and does service as well as sales – and simply ask the salespeople what they recommend. If the shop's willing to warranty it, it's probably good enough.

    For gadgets I tend to start looking at recognizable review sites that are easy to skim (RTINGS is especially useful, but Ars, The Verge etc. all have decent reviews) and then expand out to YouTube for the products I'm most interested in. Sometimes it's a good idea to look up the company itself for anything that might change your mind about them (Western Digital's unlabeled change to SMR drives is a recent example).

    Shoes and clothes are the hardest thing to get good advice on. The most useful advice I've received has been very general stuff about what to look for in fit and quality. I've also found that high ethical standards from a clothing company tends to go hand in hand with quality and longevity.

    Cars are an area where Reddit was still helpful. YouTube can be helpful here, but not so much typical car review channels: the most helpful YouTube videos are often from people who've owned a particular model for a year or so and can speak with experience about its quirks.

    Finally, and most of all, I've learned to check the instinct to look up reviews. It's worth spending some time to research stuff between you and the ground, or that you'll use daily, but I've wasted too many hours comparing details that really don't matter. Make sure it's something you legitimately care about before you reach for other people's opinions.

  • Today's iOS, iPadOS, macOS, and watchOS updates address zero-day vulnerabilities
    www.bleepingcomputer.com Apple fixes zero-days used to deploy Triangulation spyware via iMessage

    Apple addressed three new zero-day vulnerabilities exploited in attacks installing Triangulation spyware on iPhones via iMessage zero-click exploits.

    Apple fixes zero-days used to deploy Triangulation spyware via iMessage

    "Apple is aware of a report that this issue may have been actively exploited against versions of iOS released before iOS 15.7," the company says when describing Kernel and WebKit vulnerabilities tracked as CVE-2023-32434 and CVE-2023-32435.

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    iOS 17 and macOS Sonoma Add Passkey to Your Apple ID
    www.macrumors.com iOS 17 and macOS Sonoma Add Passkey Support to Your Apple ID

    Starting with iOS 17, iPadOS 17, and macOS Sonoma, users with an Apple ID will automatically be assigned a passkey, allowing them to sign into their...

    iOS 17 and macOS Sonoma Add Passkey Support to Your Apple ID

    Starting with iOS 17, iPadOS 17, and macOS Sonoma, users with an Apple ID will automatically be assigned a passkey, allowing them to sign into their Apple ID with Face ID or Touch ID instead of their password.

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    Supported Devices for Apple's 2023 Operating Systems
    tidbits.com The Real System Requirements for Apple’s 2023 Operating Systems - TidBITS

    Apple’s upcoming operating systems have broad hardware support, but devils dance in the details. Macs and iPhones from 2017 fall by the wayside this year, though a few 2017-era iPads soldier on. Older devices that are generally compatible won’t be able to take advantage of all the new features. Read...

    The Real System Requirements for Apple’s 2023 Operating Systems - TidBITS

    Covers macOS 14 Sonoma, iOS 17, iPadOS 17, watchOS 10, and tvOS 17, including feature-specific requirements.

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    Apple vs. Apples: A Truly Weird Trademark Battle
    www.wired.co.uk Apple Is Taking On Apples in a Truly Weird Trademark Battle

    Apple, the company, wants rights to the image of apples, the fruit, in Switzerland—one of dozens of countries where it’s flexing its legal muscles.

    Apple Is Taking On Apples in a Truly Weird Trademark Battle

    Apple, the company, wants rights to the image of apples, the fruit, in Switzerland – one of dozens of countries where it's flexing its legal muscles.

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    9to5mac.com Apple execs discuss third-party watch faces and watchOS 10 design decisions in new interview

    Swiss newspaper Tages-Anzeiger today published an interesting and expansive interview with Apple VPs Kevin Lynch and Deidre Caldbeck, discussing all...

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    Question Of The Week: What are your favorite iOS widgets?

    What first or third-party iOS widgets do you find especially useful?

    Are there any that you're already thinking about using on Mac with Sonoma's continuity feature?

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    EU law requiring easier iPhone battery replacement inches closer to enactment
    appleinsider.com EU works on new 'Right to Repair' rules for sustainable batteries

    The European Union is moving closer to enacting a law that will not just require smartphones like the iPhone to have easier battery repairs, but it will also mandate how much of a battery must be reclaimable after recycling.

    EU works on new 'Right to Repair' rules for sustainable batteries

    The European Union is moving closer to enacting a law that will require smartphones like the iPhone to have easier battery repairs.

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    Question Of The Week Suggestion Thread, WO Jun 18

    Suggest questions here for next week's Question Of The Week thread.

    • Questions must be Apple related, of course.
    • I'll have Siri roll a dice to decide between the most upvoted suggestions in the comments. (I'll probably ignore downvotes.)
    • Remember that this thread is for questions, not answers! Be curious, not… answery.
    • This is a new idea and I don't want to force it, so I'm adding "Question Of The Week is silly and we shouldn't do it" as my own suggestion in this thread. Please upvote that comment if you feel that way. If it's clearly the top answer then I'll skip the dice roll and not do Question Of The Week again.
    • Hooray for democracy (with some Siri-powered bias).
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    Other Apple communities in the Fediverse

    I'm gathering a list of Apple-related communities for this magazine's sidebar. Add new suggestions in the comments!

    A few rules:

    • Must be directly Apple related
    • Must be part of the Fediverse (e.g. a Kbin magazine or Lemmy community)
    • Must be compatible with this magazine's rules (not an instance that supports hate speech, etc.)

    Given the pace people are setting up new instances, a complete list will eventually be quite long, so I'll link this thread in the sidebar too.

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    restofworld.org Apple’s biggest competition in India? Used iPhone sellers

    “We give them the same phone, in the same brand-new condition,” says one seller.

    Apple’s biggest competition in India? Used iPhone sellers
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    Supplier capacity may limit Vision Pro shipments
    thelec.net How many units of Apple Vision Pro will be shipped?

    Japanese tech giant Sony, which is supplying the panel used by Apple for its new mixed reality device Vision Pro, has a capacity of 900,000 units of these panels per year, TheElec has learned.Sony manufactures the OLED on silicon, or OLEDoS, which uses silicon as a substrate to make a high-resolutio

    Sources said Sony's OLEDoS capacity means Apple will only be able to ship hundreds of thousands of Vision Pro at most next year.

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    512pixels.net Apple’s Original Vision Products Were a Line of CRTs

    The Apple Vision Pro may be ushering in the era of spatial computing, but like many other Apple products, it's using a name steeped in history. Ok, steeped may be a little strong, but Apple has had other products with "vision" in their names over the years. Seven products, to be exact, and all of [....

    Apple’s Original Vision Products Were a Line of CRTs

    The Apple Vision Pro may be ushering in the era of spatial computing, but like many other Apple products, it's using a name steeped in history.

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    Judge denies Amazon & Apple’s motions to dismiss class action price-fixing suit
    arstechnica.com Judge denies Amazon’s, Apple’s motions to dismiss class action price-fixing suit

    Which markets are hurt by companies' agreement is "reserved for a jury."

    Judge denies Amazon’s, Apple’s motions to dismiss class action price-fixing suit

    "The suit claimed that the agreement essentially killed the market for refurbished Apple goods on Amazon while giving Amazon a discount of up to 10 percent on its own sales of Apple goods."

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    Question Of The Week: What's an app you'd like to try in visionOS?

    Can be an app that exists on other platforms or a new idea, as long as you don't mind sharing.

    Since we're still a relatively small magazine it might be fun to have a conversation starter as a sticky post each week. Next Saturday I'll start a thread to collect ideas for the following week's question!

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    Infinite Mac: Classic Macs running in the browser
    infinitemac.org Infinite Mac

    A classic Mac loaded with everything you'd want.

    Infinite Mac is a collection of classic Macintosh system releases and software, all easily accessible from the comfort of a web browser.

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    /kbin meta @kbin.social tojikomori @kbin.social
    Is there a Patreon/Ko-Fi/OpenCollective for Kbin?

    What's the best way for us to chip in and help fund Kbin's development or the hosting costs for kbin.social?

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    tojikomori tojikomori @kbin.social

    Conscientious spectre making a home in the threadiverse.

    I also toot as @tojikomori.

    Posts 27
    Comments 69