Skull giver

Huh, last time I checked that didn’t work. Guess they must’ve fixed it at some point! Good to know!

That makes a lot of sense.

I first started donating blood when I read about shortages, but it turns out that was mostly other blood types. After the entry testing, they recommended me to switch to plasma donations because my blood type was common enough that they’d probably never need my full blood.

If you have a relatively rare blood type, you may be able to help people even if they have enough blood to help most people.

I think paying for blood or other bodily fluids is bad. It provides incentive for desperate people (addicts etc.) to lie on the safety forms to keep getting paid.

I know a few people who donate blood despite not getting anything in return. I personally stopped donating plasma after a few times for health reasons (nothing dangerous in the plasma itself, luckily). To me, being able to help a hospital or a person by simply sitting back and watching shows on my tablet is probably the easiest, laziest charity you can support. The snacks are nice, too.

Not everyone can donate blood, but everyone who is able to, you should consider it, even if you won’t get paid for it. You can doom scroll and browse Lemmy like normal, except you’re sitting in a weird chair and get free food.

I suppose in the shittier countries, where all blood donation stuff is run for-profit, you should let them pay you if they’re making a profit off of you, but I still think it brings a bad incentive.

You guys get a day off? All we get is time off to donate (also as many cookies and drinks as you want within reason, of course.

Yes. If you want to block this, you either have to edit the source code or, at the load balancer/reverse proxy, block /api/v3/comment/like if the POST body’s JSON content contains like with value -1.

I totally agree, but unless there’s something wrong with their mental faculties, they can choose back pain over TV savings. The downside of freedom of choice is that people make the wrong choices all the time.

Even if you cut 120 dollars a month, a good mattress will still be half a year or longer in the future. And that’s with a normal one, not a medical mattress.

“Best by” often means “will lose taste over time and taste worse by” when it comes to chemical products like these.

If this stuff contains lots of sugar or no natural compounds at all, give it a try, I guess. Especially if they’re sealed in a box. Trust your senses, don’t try too much at once if you don’t know if it’s still good, and don’t swallow until you’ve verified there’s no taste of rot or other grossness. If you want more safety, have a bottle of vodka ready to rinse your mouth with in case you do notice a bad taste.

If these powders are completely dry and stored airtight (and the packaging isn’t damaged), you could probably store them for literal decades without a problem. If there’s stored in uncoated cardboard (no sealing lining), maybe treat them as mold infested, even before their expiration date. The way they’re stored makes all the difference.

I fucking hate apps. Maybe I don’t hate them enough to warrant 120 a month, but I can see why people pay extra not to have to bother with figuring out what show is on what app and how to search and cast and browse the damn things

If they use the TV box all the time, why do they have those apps?

You showed them the price difference. They clearly value the current setup over the savings. Unless they’re using your money to pay for all this, just drop it.

I don’t really see what that has to do with the feasibility of writing a new browser engine or the development status of either browser engine, but yeah, it was pretty silly of him to get dragged into an argument over that.

That’s because of the way HDR works. It can work accurately, or it can work with user dimming controls.

Netflix decided my phone can only do SDR 480p because of my ROM, so I don’t have that problem with Netflix. I can’t find good HDR torrents, though.

Andreas Kling wrote a lot of Ladybird himself. It’s not finished yet, and it’s turned into a big community project with full time employees now, but with some experience building browsers, the modern spec evidently makes it quite a reasonable task to build a web engine. There are a lot of IDL files and whatnot to parse and process documents and the rendering algorithms are almost all laid out in the spec these days.

I tried Servo last month and I must say that after what I’ve seen Ladybird do, I was kind of disappointed. I don’t think release is very close based on the problems I’ve encountered.

Unfortunately, ING is getting rid of mobile payments and is the last to move to Google wallet. You can hack around the attestation requirements for Google Wallet but without hacks wireless payments are going to stop working for every Dutch bank it seems.

It’s good for all Europe, without roaming charges

Watch out: roaming costs are a thing of the past in the EU, not in Europe. Vistising Switzerland, the UK, and various other European countries outside of the (expanded) EU area can/will cause roaming charges.

This can be especially annoying when near the border, as your phone can easily pick up a non-EU cell tower and you’ve probably enabled roaming already (as you are in a different country after all). With a bad carrier combo this can cost you whole euros per call or text.

You’ll probably never run into this problem, but with how good we’ve got it here in the EU, it’s easy to forget about the existence of roaming costs as a tourist.

That makes a lot of sense. I like the GrapheneOS approach to these things.

I hope they can figure something out that’ll be user friendly that’s also recoverable if your forget the password. Wouldn’t want to put myself in a “lost my key, guess I can never sell my phone now” situation.

Standard SMS/MMS are the de facto standard in the US, outside of iMessage. Hundreds of millions of people use it. It’s not “never really used anywhere”.

And you’re right, people have moved on from caveman technology; the youth is switching to iOS and iMessage en masse. That’s why people need to deal with shit like this, iOS users don’t know that the only reason they can text like normal people is because of Apple’s weird version of WhatsApp.

If iMessage hadn’t been sneaked into the iOS texting app, Americans may have moved over to something better as well, but they didn’t. They never felt the pressure to switch to texting apps because their carriers charged differently/less for texts than the ones in other countries.

And it did go somewhere. RCS is SMS/MMS for data networks. Carriers didn’t run RCS servers and phones didn’t come with RCS clients so it went nowhere. Until Google started hosting Jibe and including it in the messages client, that is.

Even RCS took some massaging by Google to make it actually usable as a texting standard, with Google making use of the freeform HTTP nature of the protocol to add some proprietary standards to make it actually usable. The first released versions of RCS were kind of terrible, basically MMS but over IP rather than weird telecom protocols.

I pity the fool trying to use RCS without Jibe. Luckily, carriers are shutting down their bespoke RCS servers and renting RCS services from Google instead. Unfortunately, that makes RCS a standard practically governed by Google, carriers from whatever countries Google isn’t permitted to operate in, and spying agencies.

I think RCS comes with some autodiscovery capability (by sending a request to a magic HTTP URL over the right APN, haven’t read the spec in a while) but it does make sense that carriers push it in profiles as well.

Linux has support for updating various Lenovo models through a piece of software called fwupdmgr. If your laptop is support, it should show up automatically in Gnome Software or similar package managers.

For your laptop, Lenovo has a “Bootable CD” download option for non-Windows users. It’s intended to be written to a CD (but a flash drive will probably also work), for example by using one of those USB DVD drives.

If you don’t have a flash drive for some reason (and I doubt you’ll have a DVD drive in that case), you can try to make the Ubuntu bootloader boot the ISO, though that’s not something for beginners. Here are the official instructions in case you still want to try, but I don’t think I’d bother.

The easiest method may be to contact Lenovo and ask them how to do it. I think they’ll refer you to the bootable ISO. If they don’t make their updates available for anything but Linux, you’re going to have an annoying time.

Spending the five dollars on a flash drive to write the bootable CD to would be worth it in my opinion.

To answer your question: if the software manager doesn’t offer you the firmware update already, the easiest (not necessarily easy) way would be manually adding a bootloader entry to your Grub configuration to boot the update ISO you can download from Lenovos’s website.

The second easiest way would probably be to extract the firmware updater from either the Windows download or the ISO file, extracting the .efi files and the .rom files, placing them on your EFI partition, and using the boot menu to manually boot the firmware updater.

Or, to answer more succinctly: if you don’t get those updates already, there’s no easy way without a bootable medium. Sorry. Tell Lenovo to publish the firmware updates through the standard Linux channels like they do for other laptops.

The EU actually ruled that iMessage isn’t a gatekeeper because it’s not used enough to be considered important for now. I do believe China is forcing phones to be RCS compliant though, so it’s still mostly about government pressure.

They have to if they want to support payments over RCS (it’s in the spec). Gotta love telecom specifications!

Luckily that stuff isn’t too hard to get around