I don’t use any myself, but my first search turns up a couple options:

Or if you know better place to ask (other than /r/…), I’d be glad.

This is on Reddit, but it has people talking about just buying new mouse switches for arbitrary mice and resoldering them.

https://old.reddit.com/r/MouseReview/comments/11ay2sq/silent_mouse_switches/

I’m not familiar with this, but it sounds like it’s practical to just take a mouse, buy new mouse switches, swap them out, as long as you can solder. So if you’ve got another mouse that does what you want – and it sounds like you like the Logitech G305 – you can probably just modify it, if you’re willing to put in the effort. I’d read up on this further before going that route.

This post specifically deals with replacing the switches on a Logitech G305 to make it silent:

https://old.reddit.com/r/MouseReview/comments/vi1z4p/how_to_make_a_g305_silent_this_works_for_other/

Additionally, it looks like silent mice are a thing, so you’ve probably got a number of options out there if you want off-the-shelf.

Could barely sleep, literally heard it in my dreams.

I do think that there’s an argument that maybe apartment buildings should be required to list some kind of sound isolation metrics.

This is not social media.

I hate to break it to you, but Reddit and similar fall under the category of social media.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemmy_(social_network)

Lemmy is made up of a network of individual installations of the Lemmy software that can intercommunicate. This departs from the centralized, monolithic structure of other social media platforms.[9] It has been described as a federated alternative to Reddit.[10]

but all social media is like this.

I’m not a bot, and we’re talking on social media.

Not having mandatory security is a legit issue, but there isn’t a drop-in replacement that does, not in 2024. You’re gonna need widespread support, support for file transfer, federated operation, resistance to abuse, client software on many platforms, etc.

And email security is way down the list of things that I’d be concerned about. At least with email, you’ve got PGP-based security. If you’re worried about other people’s mail providers attacking mail you send them, that’s getting into “do you trust certificate authorities to grant certificates” territory, because most secure protocols are dependent upon trusting that.

Like, XMPP with OTR is maybe a real option for messaging, but that’s not email.

EDIT: Not to mention that XMPP doesn’t mandate security either.

No PGP support

Why would the mail provider need to support it? I mean, if they provide some sort of webmail client, maybe it doesn’t do PGP, but I sure wouldn’t be giving them my PGP keys anyway.

I haven’t used any of them, but I don’t think that you can go too far wrong here, since you have your own domain. Pick one, try it for non-critical stuff for a month or two, and if you don’t like it, switch. As long as you own the domain, you’re not locked in. If you do like it, then just start migrating.

The main differentiating factors I can think of are (a) service reliability, (b) risk that someone breaks in and dumps client mail, but it’s hard for me to evaluate the risk of that at a given place. And © how likely it is that other parties spam-block mail from them.

I’d look for TLS support for SMTP and IMAP; that may be the norm these days. The TLS situation for mail is a little unusual compared to most protocols, where on a new connection, some servers initially use the non-encrypted version and then upgrade via STARTTLS.

If you intend to leave your mail on their server rather than just using it as a temporary holding point until you fetch it, you might look into what their storage provided is.

I’d also see what the maximum size of any individual email that they permit is.

I would advise against this.

I am all about running things yourself, run most stuff myself, but email is just a nightmare these days with all the anti-spam stuff out there.

Go ask at [email protected]. They’ll tell you the same thing. Lots of hassle, lots of potential pitfalls.

Removed by mod

there don’t seem to be that many on Steam that catch my interest.

I don’t know the situation on consoles, but on the PC…

I am not a pinball expert, though I do enjoy video pinball, but none of these are what I’d call the major PC pinball engines with reasonably-realistic physics, things that do a lot of tables. Look at these:

• Visual Pinball. I was not able to get this working on Linux the few times I’ve tried or to successfully get access to the forums that distribute tables (some kind of broken registration system). This is, as I understand it, what a typical person uses if they just want to make and distribute a free table. It also has many bootleg implementations of commercial tables. Open-source Source-available, though only runs natively on Windows.

• Pinball Arcade. IIRC, these guys used to have a license for some major physical table distributors, like Williams, and had it expire. I have this, and the engine hasn’t been updated in some time. I run a high-refresh-rate monitor, and IIRC it has a limit of 60Hz, probably because the physics engine also runs at that rate. I don’t think that it’s getting a lot of updates, and I had some trouble running it last time I tried. This would not be my recommended engine unless it’s the only place to get a table that you specifically want.

• Zaccaria Pinball. Good if you want elderly pinball, pre-solid-state-electronics era, electromechanical pinball tables. They have some tables that they developed, not copies of real-world tables, that I personally like more than their real-world tables. They don’t have implementations of real-world tables for some major popular US manufacturers.

• Pinball FX3 (less old than Pinball Arcade). Not bad, but replaced by the below Pinball FX.

• Pinball FX (despite the name, newer). This is the only one off the top of my head that can do high-refresh-rate, and it’s also being kept current. It has a lot of stuff that I’d call fluff and would rather not have, like toys that animate more than on the real-world tables and sometimes obstruct your view, animations to wait through, and such. Also has some kind of online-DRM system that takes a sec at startup. Some of this can be turned off. Places a lot of emphasis on this virtual pinball basement full of virtual trophies. Has occasional very brief stutters for me. Many of the non-real-life board are wide, designed around a present-day portrait-orientation computer monitor, which feels weird but is more friendly to, say, a laptop with a fixed orientation monitor, though maybe not what you want if you’re going to set up a dedicated pinball computer with portrait-orientation monitor. Lots and lots of non-real-world licensed tables associated with movies and the like that I’m not really enthusiastic about; I would recommend trying those tables before buying them. This is probably what I’d look at if I were aiming to get one today, as the engine’s the newest.

I think that all of these let you download the engine and try out some basic play (IIRC Zaccaria has time-limited plays on tables that you don’t own, and Pinball FX has a rotating collection that you can try for free), so you can just install them and see what you like, but if you’re looking for a starting point with something reasonably modern and with a bunch of tables, these are probably where you want to look.

If you don’t have a strong preference as to tables and are also just feeling around for something to try, I personally like some classic real-life Williams tables, Medieval Madness and Tales of the Arabian Nights. Neither is too rough in terms of draining down the side channels, in my humble opinion. The Addams Family is also a popular table.

Note that if you haven’t touched video pinball for a long time – like, I played a few games in the late 1990s and then was away from it for a while), these engines also simulate nudging the machine and doing so is expected during play.

EDIT: If you’re willing to hit Reddit for information, /r/videopinball and /r/pinball exist; they were where I got some information back when. If not, there’s [email protected] – not a lot of life yet, but, hey, each additional person adds to it!

EDIT2: My understanding from past reading of said forums is that Visual Pinball is considered to have the best physics, but is fiddly to get working and get tables working on (and I don’t think that this was said from the standpoint of someone trying to run anything on Linux, just Windows).

EDIT3: I would also recommend not purchasing a great many tables unless you’re sure that you’re actually going to play them. Yes, you can buy the equivalent of multiple arcades full of virtual machines at one swoop thanks to modern technology, but…I have tables on all of the commercial engines here and personally find that I play a very small percentage of the tables that I have. Pinball, I think, benefits from becoming familiar with particular tables.

The reason that robots.txt generally worked was because nobody was trying to really leverage it against bot operators. I’m not sure that this might not just kill robots.txt. Historically, search engines wanted to index stuff and websites wanted to be indexed. Their interests were aligned, so the convention worked. This no longer holds if things like the Google-Reddit partnership become common.

Reddit can also try to detect and block crawlers; robots.txt isn’t the only tool in their toolbox.

Microsoft, unlike most companies, does actually have a technical counter that Reddit probably cannot stop, if it comes to that and Microsoft wants to do a “hostile index” of Reddit.

Microsoft’s browser, Edge, is used by a bunch of people, and Microsoft can probably rig it up to send content of Reddit pages requested by their browser’s users sufficient to build their index. Reddit can’t stop that without blocking Edge users. I expect that that’d probably be exploring a lot of unexplored legal territory under the laws of many countries. It also wouldn’t be as good as Google’s (I assume real-time) access to the comments, but they’d get to them.

Browsers do report the host-referrer, which would permit Reddit to detect that a given user has arrived from Bing and block them:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_referer

In HTTP, “Referer” (a misspelling of “Referrer”[1]) is an optional HTTP header field that identifies the address of the web page (i.e., the URI or IRI), from which the resource has been requested. By checking the referrer, the server providing the new web page can see where the request originated.

In the most common situation, this means that when a user clicks a hyperlink in a web browser, causing the browser to send a request to the server holding the destination web page, the request may include the Referer field, which indicates the last page the user was on (the one where they clicked the link).

Web sites and web servers log the content of the received Referer field to identify the web page from which the user followed a link, for promotional or statistical purposes.[2] This entails a loss of privacy for the user and may introduce a security risk.[3] To mitigate security risks, browsers have been steadily reducing the amount of information sent in Referer. As of March 2021, by default Chrome,[4] Chromium-based Edge, Firefox,[5] Safari[6] default to sending only the origin in cross-origin requests, stripping out everything but the domain name.

Reddit could block browsers with a host-referrer off bing.com, killing the ability of Bing to link to them. I don’t know if there’s a way for a linking site to ask a browser to not give or forge the host-referrer. For Edge users – not all Bing users – Microsoft could modify the browser to do so, forcing Reddit to decide whether to block all Edge users or not.

It has an engine that permits recording and “rewinding” gameplay, with a lot of interesting quirks, like elements that don’t rewind. Puzzle platformer based on that.

It was a fascinating thing technically, and the creator did a lot with that capability. But IMHO it’s not otherwise exceptional, like graphically or such.

I guessed in a previous comment that given their new partnership, Reddit is probably feeding their comment database to Google directly, which reduces load for both of them and permits Google to have real-time updates of the whole kit-and-kaboodle rather than polling individual pages. Both Google and Reddit are better-off doing that, and for Google it’d make sense for any site that’s large-enough and valuable enough to warrant putting forth any effort special-case to that site.

I know that Reddit built functionality for that before, used it for pushshift.io and I believe bots.

I doubt that Google is actually using Googlebot on Reddit at all today.

I would bet against either Google violating robots.txt or Reddit serving different robots.txt files to different clients (why? It’s just unnecessary complication).

I haven’t hit that, but one thing that might help if you don’t like that – you might be able to set it up such that they only operate in your environment when chorded – like, when you hit multiple buttons at the same time. Like, only have “left click plus back” send “back” and “left click plus forward” send “forward”, or something akin to that.

These days, I use sway on Linux, which provides for a tiled desktop environment – the computer sets the size of windows, which are mostly fullscreen, and I don’t drag windows. But when I did, and before mice had the convention of using “back” and “forward” on Button 4 and Button 5, I really liked having the single-button-to-drag-anywhere functionality, though I never really found a use for the fifth button. If I were still using a non-tiled environment, I’d probably look into doing chording or something so that I could still do my “drag anywhere on the window” thing.

I don’t personally go down the wireless mouse route – in fact, in general, I’d rather not use wireless and especially Bluetooth devices, due to reliability, latency, security, needing-to-worry-about-battery-charge, and privacy (due to broadcasting a unique ID that any nearby cell phone will relay the position of to Google, Apple, or similar). But I’d say that aside from that, most of those are advantageous, and a lot of people out there don’t care (or don’t know about) wireless drawbacks, so for them, even those are a win.

The main complexity item I can think of is the buttons. Maybe back in the day, few set up Mouse Button #5 to be “drag window” in their window manager, as I did, so I could drag windows anywhere rather than on their titlebar. However, the browser “back” and “forward” functionality that I believe is the default in all desktop environments these days seems pretty easily-approachable.

I’m not planning to throw that watch away ever. So why would I be throwing my mouse or my keyboard away if it’s a fantastic-quality, well-designed, software-enabled mouse?

Because watch technology is mature and isn’t changing. Nobody’s making a better watch every few years.

That generally isn’t true of computer hardware.

In the 1980s, you had maybe a one or two button mouse with mechanical optical encoder rings turned by a ball that gummed up and would stick.

After that:

• A third mouse button showed up

• A scrollwheel showed up

• Optical sensors showed up.

• Better optical sensors showed up, with the ability to function on arbitrary surfaces and dejittering.

• Polling rate improved

• Mice got the ability to go to sleep if not being used.

• More buttons showed up, with mice often having five or more buttons.

• Tilt scrollwheels showed up

• Wireless mice showed up

• Better wireless protocols showed up

• Optical sensor resolutions drastically increased

• Weight decreased

• Foot pads used less-friction-inducing material.

• Several updates happened to track changing ports (on PC, serial, PS/2, USB-A, and probably soon USB-C).

• The transparent mouse bodies that were initially-used on many optical mice (to show off the LED and that they were optical) went away as companies figured out that people did not want to have flashing red mice. (I was particularly annoyed by this, modded a trackball that used a translucent ball to use a near-infrared LED back in the day).

If wristwatches had improved like that over the past 40 years, you likely wouldn’t be keeping an older one either.

If you think that there isn’t going to be any more change in mice, okay, maybe you can try selling people on the same mouse for a long time. I’m skeptical.

Well, they give the rationale there too – that most webpages out there are, well, useless.

I think that the heuristic is mis-firing in this case. But…okay, let’s consider context.

I think that the first substantial forum system I used was probably Usenet. I used that at a period of time where there was considerably less stuff around on the Internet, and I had a fair amount of free time. Usenet was one of several canonical systems that “intro to the Internet” material would familiarize you with. You had, oh, let’s see. Gopher and Veronica. FTP and Archie. Finger. Telnet. VAX/VMS’s Phone, an interative chat program that could span VMS hosts (probably was some kind of Unix implementation too, dunno). IRC. Usenet. The Web (which was damned rudimentary at that point in time). I’d had prior familiarity with BBSes, so I knew that forums were a thing from that. There are maybe a few proprietary protocols in there too – I used Hotline, which was a Mac over-the-Internet forum-and-file-hosting system.

But there just weren’t all that many systems around back then. Usenet was one of the big ones, and it was very normal for people to learn how to use it, because it was one of a limited set of options.

So the reason I initially looked at and became accustomed to a forum system was because it was one of a very limited number of available systems back in the day.

Okay, what about today? When I go see a new forum system, I immediately say to myself “Ah hah! This is a forum system!” I immediately know what it is, roughly how it probably works, what one might do with it, its limitations and strengths and how to use it. Even though I have maybe never used that forum website before a second in my life, I have a ton of experience that provides me with a lot of context.

Let’s say that you don’t have a history of forum use. Never before in your life have you used an electronic forum. Someone says “you should check out this Reddit thing”. You look at it. To you, this thing doesn’t immediately “say” anything. You’ve got no context. It says “it’s the front page of the Internet”. What…does it do? What would one use it for? There’s no executive summary that you see. You don’t have a history of reading useful information on forums, so it’s not immediately obvious that this might have useful information.

Now, I’m not saying that you can’t still assess the thing as useful and figure it out. Lots of people have. But I’m saying that having it fail that initial test becomes a whole lot more-reasonable when you consider that missing context of what an electronic forum is coupled with the extremely short period of time that people give to a webpage and why. You’d figure that there would be some significant number of people who would glance at it, say “whatever”, and move on.

Facebook was really successful in growing its userbase (though I’ve never had an account and don’t want to). Why? Because, I think, it is immediately clear to someone why they’d use it. It’s because they have family and friends on the thing, and staying in touch with them is something that they want to do. The application is immediately clear. With Reddit or similar, it’s a bunch of pseudononymous users. People don’t use Reddit to keep in touch with family and friends, but to discuss interests. But if you’ve never had the experience of using a system that does that, it’s not immediately obvious what the problems are that the system solves for you.

I was talking with some French guy on here, few months back. He was talking about how American food is bad. He offered as an example how he went to an American section of a grocery store in France and got a box of Pop-tarts after hearing about how good they were. He and his girlfriend got a box and tried them. They were horrible, he said. He said that he threw them in the garbage, said “they should be banned”. I asked him whether he’d toasted them before eating them.

Now, is the guy stupid? No. I’m sure that he functions just fine in life. If you look at a box of Pop-tarts, it doesn’t tell you anywhere on the thing to toast them. The only clue that you might have that you should do so is in the bottom left corner, the thing says “toaster pastries”, but God only knows what that means, if you even read it. Maybe it means that they toasted them at the factory. We don’t have that problem, because we have cultural context going in – we had our parents toast them for us as a kid, and so the idea that someone wouldn’t know to toast one is very strange to us. The company doesn’t bother to put instructions on the box, because it’s so widespread in American culture that someone know how to prepare one. My point is just that a lot of times, there’s context required to understand something and if someone has that context available to them, it can be really easy to forget that someone else might not and for the same thing to not make sense to them.

I had a family member remark that they had tried to use Reddit, and it was “too busy-looking” and hard to understand, and they are in their 40s.

So, I remember reading something on website UI back when, where someone said that some high percentage of users basically will only allocate a relatively-low number of seconds to understanding a website, and if it doesn’t make sense to them in that period of time, they won’t use it. It’s a big reason why you want to make the bar to initial use as low as possible.

kagis

This isn’t what I was thinking of, but same idea:

https://www.nngroup.com/articles/how-long-do-users-stay-on-web-pages/

It’s clear from the chart that the first 10 seconds of the page visit are critical for users’ decision to stay or leave. The probability of leaving is very high during these first few seconds because users are extremely skeptical, having suffered countless poorly designed web pages in the past. People know that most web pages are useless, and they behave accordingly to avoid wasting more time than absolutely necessary on bad pages.

If the web page survives this first — extremely harsh — 10-second judgment, users will look around a bit. However, they’re still highly likely to leave during the subsequent 20 seconds of their visit. Only after people have stayed on a page for about 30 seconds does the curve become relatively flat. People continue to leave every second, but at a much slower rate than during the first 30 seconds.

So, if you can convince users to stay on your page for half a minute, there’s a fair chance that they’ll stay much longer — often 2 minutes or more, which is an eternity on the web.

So, roughly speaking, there are two cases here:

• bad pages, which get the chop in a few seconds; and
• good pages, which might be allocated a few minutes.

I’ve also seen both Lemmy and Mastodon criticized for the “select an initial home instance” decision, because the point is that that significantly increases that bar to use. Maybe it’d be better to at least provide some kind of sane default, like randomly-select among the non-special-interest top-N home instances geographically near the user.

Reddit (at least historically, don’t know if it’s different now) was somewhat-unusual in that they didn’t require someone to plonk in an email address to start using the thing. That’d presumably be part of the “get to bar to initial use low” bit.

We can also learn about alternative networks by perusing Gopher, Gemini, and other networks.

I think that Gopher is neat and have some nostalgia going on there, but it’s not what I would recommend to random people as a first stab if they just want a less-centralized experience.

Snowcrash

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snow_Crash

The Deliverator belongs to an elite order, a hallowed subcategory. He’s got esprit up to here. Right now, he is preparing to carry out his third mission of the night. His uniform is black as activated charcoal, filtering the very light out of the air. A bullet will bounce off its arachnofiber weave like a wren hitting a patio door, but excess perspiration wafts through it like a breeze through a freshly napalmed forest, Where his body has bony extremities, the suit has sintered armorgel: feels like gritty jello, protects like a stack of telephone books.

When they gave him the job, they gave him a gun. The Deliverator never deals in cash, but someone might come after him anyway – might want his car, or his cargo. The gun is tiny, acm-styled, lightweight, the kind of gun a fashion designer would carry; it fires teensy darts that fly at five times the velocity of an SR-71 spy plane, and when you get done using it, you have to plug it into the cigarette lighter, because it runs on electricity.

The Deliverator never pulled that gun in anger, or in fear. He pulled it once in Gila Highlands. Some punks in Gila Highlands, a fancy Burbclave, wanted themselves a delivery, and they didn’t want to pay for it. Thought they would impress the Deliverator with a baseball bat. The Deliverator took out his gun, centered its laser doohickey on that poised Louisville Slugger, fired it. The recoil was immense, as though the weapon had blown up in his hand. The middle third of the baseball bat turned into a column of burning sawdust accelerating in all directions like a bursting star. Punk ended up holding this bat handle with milky smoke pouring out the end. Stupid look on his face. Didn’t get nothing but trouble from the Deliverator.

Since then the Deliverator has kept the gun in the glove compartment and relied, instead, on a matched set of samurai swords, which have always been his weapon of choice anyhow. The punks in Gila Highlands weren’t afraid of the gun, so the Deliverator was forced to use it. But swords need no demonstrations.

The Deliverator’s car has enough potential energy packed into its batteries to fire a pound of bacon into the Asteroid Belt. Unlike a bimbo box or a Burb beater, the Deliverator’s car unloads that power through gaping, gleaming, polished sphincters. When the Deliverator puts the hammer down, shit happens. You want to talk contact patches? Your car’s tires have tiny contact patches, talk to the asphalt in four places the size of your tongue. The Deliverator’s car has big sticky tires with contact patches the size of a fat lady’s thighs. The Deliverator is in touch with the road, starts like a bad day, stops on a peseta.

Why is the Deliverator so equipped? Because people rely on him. He is a role model. This is America. People do whatever the fuck they feel like doing, you got a problem with that? Because they have a right to. And because they have guns and no one can fucking stop them. As a result, this country has one of the worst economies in the world. When it gets down to it – talking trade balances here – once we’ve brain-drained all our technology into other countries, once things have evened out, they’re making cars in Bolivia and microwave ovens in Tadzhikistan and selling them here – once our edge in natural resources has been made irrelevant by giant Hong Kong ships and dirigibles that can ship North Dakota all the way to New Zealand for a nickel – once the Invisible Hand has taken all those historical inequities and smeared them out into a broad global layer of what a Pakistani brickmaker would consider to be prosperity – y’know what? There’s only four things we do better than anyone else

• music
• movies
• microcode (software)
• high-speed pizza delivery

The Deliverator used to make software. Still does, sometimes. But if life were a mellow elementary school run by well-meaning education Ph.D.s, the Deliverator’s report card would say: “Hiro is so bright and creative but needs to work harder on his cooperation skills.”

So now he has this other job. No brightness or creativity involved – but no cooperation either. Just a single principle: The Deliverator stands tall, your pie in thirty minutes or you can have it free, shoot the driver, take his car, file a class-action suit. The Deliverator has been working this job for six months, a rich and lengthy tenure by his standards, and has never delivered a pizza in more than twenty-one minutes.

So far, this thing doesn’t seem like a very impressive tablet. But Daylight is more a display company than a tablet company — and the display is pretty great.

Hmm.

kagis

It looks like you can get this RLCD stuff as a computer monitor, too.

https://www.sunvisiondisplay.com/product/The-rE-Monitor-Featuring-32-Color-RLCD-Technology

full color RLCD computer monitor A vacation for your eyes

With SVD’s groundbreaking reflective LCD technology, you get all the benefits of LCD monitors without all the headaches —zero blue light emissions, no backlight-related flickering, and brightness perfectly matched to your surroundings.

If laptop screens could be disconnected so that one could swap a display of different type in, I imagine that it’d be nice to swap one of these in if you wanted to work outside.