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Cake day: February 10th, 2024

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  • zarenki@lemmy.mlto196@lemmy.blahaj.zone📄 rule
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    2 months ago

    and it’s free

    This is very uncommon in the US. Most major banks (I’m not aware of any exceptions) charge a fee for each outgoing wire transfer, usually $25-$30. Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Chase, and PNC for just a few examples I’m aware of, plus every credit union that has local branches in my area. Some of those banks even add a second fee at the recipient’s side for incoming wire transfer.

    They often encourage customers to rely on third party services like Zelle instead for small transfers to friends and family. Many banks’ sites/apps can also handle transfers between two accounts that both belong to the same bank for free too.


  • There actually is a silent and very subtle revision they made to the dpad less than a year after Switch launched (iirc around the time of the Xenoblade 2 controller). The protrusion out the middle of the underside was made slightly longer, which makes you less able to push down all four directions at the same time. The chance of undesired diagonals is very high either way but just slightly lower for the newer one.

    Even the improved version is one of Nintendo’s worst dpads ever (including handhelds) imo, with only the GameCube’s coming remotely close. A huge step back from Wii U Pro’s dpad.


  • That’s strange. As far as I can tell from any web searches, every version Windows still defaults to storing local time to the hardware clock and there are no reports of that changing with an update, nor is there any exposed setting control to configure this behavior outside of regedit. If you’re curious enough, you can check the current setting in the registry at HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\TimeZoneInformation. Windows maintains the current time as UTC if and only if the RealTimeIsUniversal key is present and nonzero.

    I expect it’s more likely some other issue would make the BIOS display an hour that’s inconsistent with your local timezone. For example, maybe a bug in the BIOS, maybe a timezone offset setting within the BIOS, or maybe a dead clock battery.


  • Unix time is far less universal in computing than you might hope. A few exceptions I’m aware of:

    • Most real-time clock hardware stores datetime as separate binary-coded decimal fields representing months, days, hours, minutes, and seconds as one byte each, and often the year too (resulting in a year 2100 limit).
    • Python’s datetime, WIN32’s SYSTEMTIME, Java’s LocalDateTime, and MySQL’s DATETIME similarly have separate attributes for year, month, day, etc.
    • NTFS stores a 64-bit number representing time elapsed since the year 1601 in 100-nanosecond resolution for things like file creation time.
    • NTP uses an epoch of midnight 1900-01-01 with unsigned seconds elapsed and an unusual base-2 fractional part
    • GPS uses an epoch of midnight 1980-01-06 with a week number and time within the week as separate values.

    Converting between time formats is a common source of bugs and each one will overflow in different ways. A time value might overflow in the year 2036, 2038, 2070, 2100, 2156, or 9999.

    Also, Unix time is often managed with a separate nanoseconds component for increased resolution. Like in C struct timespec, modern *nix filesystems like ext4/xfs/btrfs/zfs, etc.


  • as soon as the BIOS loaded and showed the time, it was “wrong” because it was in UTC

    Because you don’t use Windows. Windows by default stores local time, not UTC, to the RTC. This behavior can be overriden with a registry tweak. Some Linux distro installer disks (at least Ubuntu and Fedora, maybe others) will try to detect if your system has an existing Windows install and mimicks this behavior if one exists (equivalent to timedatectl set-local-rtc 1) and otherwise defaults to storing UTC, which is the more sane choice.

    Storing localtime on a computer that has more than one bootable OS becomes a particularly noticable problem in regions that observe DST, because each OS will try to change the RTC by one hour on its first boot after the time change.


  • On Switch, no game cards support writing of save data or anything else. It’s a departure from 3DS and all previous Nintendo cart formats for as long as games have supported saving at all.

    That change is probably done to help tie saves to user accounts, enable cloud saves even when the card is not inserted, accommodate variable-size user data features like level creation, and mitigate the risk of game save based exploits like Twilight Hack spreading from user to user.

    Unfortunately that (plus inability to put saves on SD card) means that backing up your own save data requires either being able to run homebrew on the system that has the save or having another Switch that can and relying on Nintendo servers to perform the transfer. Either way, having a Switch that runs homebrew means you don’t need this dumper.


  • zarenki@lemmy.mlto196@lemmy.blahaj.zonemicrotransactions rule
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    4 months ago

    You joke, but it really exists: the company that acquired uTorrent 17 years ago now sells an ad-free version of their current torrent client as “BitTorrent Pro” for USD$20/year, or alternatively as part of a VPN service bundle for $70/year.

    Needless to say, stick with FOSS clients like qBittorrent/Deluge/etc instead.


  • Nonfree media codecs like HEVC/h265 are affected by US software patents. Distributing them from US servers without paying license fees to MPEG LA can put the host at risk of lawsuit. VLC, deb-multimedia (Debian), and RPM Fusion (Fedora) all avoid that by hosting in France, but even with those sources enabled patent issues can break things like hardware acceleration. Free codecs like AV1/VP9/Opus avoid all these problems.

    Microsoft is US-based and can’t avoid those per-install fees. They could cut the profit from every single Windows license but apparently chose not to.


  • The main reason people use Fandom in the first place is the free hosting. Whether you use MediaWiki or any other wiki software, paying for the server resources to host your own instance and taking the time to manage it is still a tall hurdle for many communities. There already are plenty of MediaWiki instances for specific interests that aren’t affected by Fandom’s problems.

    Even so, federation tends to foster a culture of more self-hosting and less centralization, encouraging more people who have the means to host to do so, though I’m not sure how applicable that effect would be to wikis.