Garmin Explore has a bit of a learning curve but offers a variety of very good maps and (once you’ve discovered where the web developers have hidden them) tons of nifty features. One of them is waypoints: you stick a flag somewhere and can give it a name, icon and colour. That sounds like the thing you’re looking for.
The downside is that it’s made for outdoor stuff so you get street names and some POIs, but no turn-by-turn navigation.

I use the website (https://explore.garmin.com/) to plan my tours and import/manage GPX files, and the Android app and an inReach 2 Mini satellite messenger while underway. The three sync seamlessly.

Since I have a paid subscription (required for satellite access) I can’t tell you what (if anything) you get for free, but it should be relatively easy to find out if you think it might be what you’re looking for.

For car navigation I used TomTom Go - it costs something but the quality of POIs and navigation is far superior to Google Maps in my experience. You can also add your own locations but have to do it on the phone by hand.
In my new car I use Google Maps because it came with the car and there’s no real alternative at the moment. I do miss my TomTom app.

According to FlightStats and FlightRadar24, the original plane was a Boeing 777-206 from 2003, which has been replaced by a 777-300 from 2023. It’s en route now over the Atlantic.

So an issue caused by Boeing’s recent series of quality problems seems unlikely, unless there was a dodgy spare part involved.

This is actually a super smart move, from an evil genius point of view. The plaintiffs now have an interest in the company growing instead of shutting down.

Though I really hope some judge somewhere stops that deal.

What color is your function?

It’s a rant opinion piece about the caveats of mixing async and sync functions, and divides code into ‘red’ (async) and ‘blue’ (sync) functions to explain the various problems associated with it.

I really wish there were any even remotely credible way to disagree with that statement.

I offer you a third option: at least one Lidl in Croatia uses blinking tags for stuff they really want you to look at.

Sometime soon we’re gonna have to invent a spam filter for real life. Hey, maybe that’s the use case that the Vision guys at Apple have been looking for?

Seriously, health departments around the world should have offered a fourth Covid certificate during the pandemy - tested, vaccinated, recovered and “will irrevocably forego any right to treatment in a hospital in case of infection”. That way all the tinfoil hats couldn’t have spread their ‘dictatorship’ bullshit nearly as easily, because hey, all you have to do in order to be able to go to the pub is to absolve society of the risk of you catching an absolutely harmless and possibly even imaginary cold.
Let a few thousand of those fuckers die and at the same time keep the hospital beds free for those who need them through no fault of their own. Watch the survivors crap their pants and mumble something about science maybe not being so bad after all.

The problem is that some people consider stupidity to be a virtue. That’s their right (sadly), but they shouldn’t be able to make society suffer the consequences.

Thanks to a few centuries of upper nobility, we already know that marrying your cousin for several generations is not always a good idea. It’ll be interesting to see what happens after a few iterations of AIs being trained on data mostly produced by other AIs (or variations of themselves). I suppose it largely depends on how well the training data can be curated.

ChatGPT says:

Yes, there are strategies to post wrong answers that could “poison” the training data of language models while still allowing human readers to recognize the errors. Here are a few approaches:

1. Subtle Semantic Errors: Provide answers that contain subtle but significant semantic errors. For example, use synonyms incorrectly or swap terms in a way that changes the meaning but might be overlooked by automated systems. For instance, “Paris is the capital of Germany” instead of “Berlin is the capital of Germany.”

2. Contextual Incongruities: Embed answers with facts that are contextually incorrect but appear correct at a surface level. For example, “The sun rises in the west and sets in the east.”

3. Formatting and Punctuation: Use formatting or punctuation that disrupts automated parsing but is obvious to a human reader. For example, “The capital of France is Par_is.” or “Water freezes at 0 degrees F@harenheit.”

4. Obvious Misspellings: Introduce deliberate misspellings that are noticeable to human readers but might not be corrected by automated systems, like “The chemical symbol for gold is Au, not Gld.”

5. Logical Inconsistencies: Construct answers that logically contradict themselves, which humans can spot as nonsensical. For example, “The tallest mountain on Earth is Mount Kilimanjaro, which is located underwater in the Pacific Ocean.”

6. Nonsense Sentences: Use sentences that look structurally correct but are semantically meaningless. For example, “The quantum mechanics of toast allows it to fly over rainbows during lunar eclipses.”

7. Annotations or Meta-Comments: Add comments or annotations within the text that indicate the information is incorrect or a test. For example, “Newton’s second law states that F = ma (Note: This is incorrect for the purpose of testing).”

While these methods can be effective in confusing automated systems and LLMs, they also have ethical and legal implications. Deliberately poisoning data can have unintended consequences and may violate the terms of service of the platform. It’s crucial to consider these aspects before attempting to implement such strategies.

That screenshot alone brings back so, so many memories.

Been with Winamp ever since my first 486DX all the way up to my first 4k screen when it became unusable due to size/scaling issues.

I’m really keeping my fingers crossed for this one to succeed.

Well, I can confirm from personal experience (me and family) that tourists wanting to enter the US aren’t treated that much differently from criminals.

But then you’ve created dozens (or hundreds) of opportunities a day for someone to get your passcode by shoulder-surfing, which you probably wouldn’t even notice in many situations. I’d argue that unless someone forcibly borrowing your face or fingers to unlock your phone is a strong possibility, entering a passcode each time is less secure than using biometrics.
Especially since the passcode also protects various security settings.

So far I’ve found most of what I’ve been looking for on www.exlibris.ch, though www.orellfuessli.ch seems quite nice as well. Normally it says in the details whether or not a particular book comes with DRM.

The DRM-free books are still digitally marked - Ex Libris will include your e-mail address in one of the first pages, and there are probably subtle differences in the text itself. I don’t mind that, though I blame the technology for the occasional annoying ‘typo’ in the book.

I ue Epubor Ultimate because I never got Calibre’s de-DRM working on my machine. It’s drag&drop for Adobe Digital Editions and also works very well in the very rare cases that I want a book that’s only available on Amazon (though buying one of those still leaves a bit of a bad taste in my mouth).
A DRM-free copy of the original is still preferred though. There’s one online shop in Switzerland that has started selling more of these lately. Maybe that’s a good sign.

I should probably care about this way more than I do, but this is a fight I’ve largely given up. The ‘right’ thing to do would be to boycott all DRM-encumbered content, but that’s a fight that very few people outside of a comparatively small circle of tech idealists would even about, much less care… and boycotts have never worked for CDs, DVDs or even VHS tapes. The sad truth is that DRM does work as designed for the overwhelming majority of less tech-savvy consumers who either aren’t aware of or can’t be bothered to try alternatives.

The good news is that it’s relatively easy to remove the DRM from ebooks, especially compared to other types of media. As long as this remains possible with just a few additional mouse clicks, the status quo “works for me”. I’m all for paying the artist/author, I just don’t want the thing I’ve bought taken away from me as soon as the publisher decides to pull the plug on their DRM server.

And what I’ve noticed here in Switzerland, even though it’s non-representative and anecdotal evidence, is that more and more ebooks are sold DRM-free.

It’s as if iPhones were only able to make calls to other iPhones

Don’t give them ideas!

I suspect that’s a lie. From a technical point of view there are way easier and cheaper ways to detect potential customers. A simple LDR would probably do a better and more reliable job and cost hundreds of times less.

The spokesdroid also stated that the machines do not take pictures. Duh. It’s a camera, what else would it do. May they meant it doesn’t store images, but the statements made so far don’t exactly instill trust.

I say sue them into oblivion. Make an example out of them.

There’s actually an option to turn GMS off entirely if that’s a concern (Settings–>About–>Advanced). It comes at the cost of slightly increased battery usage. Sadly Google does have a bit of a monopoly on mainstream Android there.
Having said that, the messages themselves should never pass Google’s servers, just a packet saying “check your Threema server, there’s new stuff waiting for you.”

If that’s a concern you could also always use Threema, which has been built from the ground up to use anonymous random IDs and optionally lets you link a phone number or e-mail address to that ID. The company has also won important court cases against having to store metadata preemptively and responding to blanket requests by law enforcement.

I use VLC for the handful of streams I need regularly. In the More tab you can create launcher (home screen) shortcuts for recently viewed streams and then rearrange them into a group. It doesn’t get any more straightforward than that.