hammycheesy

I'm not the user you replied to, but I run a similar set-up using "WG Tunnel," which is available on F-Droid and the Play Store.

You can configure a WireGuard tunnel to auto-connect when you are not on a set list of "trusted networks."

I was having some good fun chatting with other randos on here, then a few minutes ago nearly everyone was kicked out of the room, and now I just see a few bots talking to each other with some canned phrases. Bummer.

This makes me very nostalgic, but in a slightly sad way, where I remember how much better the real chat experience was back in the day.

This look-alike client struggles to show me messages in real-time. It looks like they only get pulled down in big chunks every few seconds. It also fails to scroll the new messages into view. I don't remember these sort of problems in IRC clients or IM programs of the 90s (though there were many other problems).

In a way I guess it paints the irony of modern computing, where we have several orders of magnitude more in computing power and resources, but that has only enabled us to keep rushing out perpetually unpolished, unfinished products.

It's still a bunch of fun to see a bunch of strangers talking completely unfiltered nonsense in a rudimentary chat room, though!

> My decision to sell it was met with a lot of backlash but was successful enough to launch me into a self-sustained career.

As someone who is interested in eventually freeing myself from the corporate job and diving head-first into my side projects, I would love to hear more about this aspect.

For some reason the idea of trying to charge folks for the work I would normally do for the fun of it on the side is daunting to me, even though I know it could enable me to focus on doing the stuff I love full-time.

A friend of mine was a Program Manager on Xbox that worked on some HCI projects like the original Kinect.

He told me there was once an experimental keyboard that used the two thumbsticks on an Xbox controller like a dual radial menu to input text - the left thumbstick would select a character group, and the right thumbstick would input a character from that group.

The learning curve was deemed too steep for the average customer, but apparently those who spent enough time using the prototype were able to type an order of magnitude faster than with traditional on-screen keyboards.

The memory sticks out as an amusing idea, and potentially a really cool "power-user" input modality for game controllers.

I had a Sonim XP3 "dumb phone" that I used for a year and successfully drove my screen time down from 1-2 hours per day to <10min.

The key for me was that the input (T-9 keyboard) and output (tiny non-touch display) modalities were so constrained that any task that wasn't completely trivial was made so painful that I would put it off until I was in front of a computer, if I did it at all. This was a great way to filter out tasks that weren't truly important enough to work on immediately in the moment.

The downfall was my new job which required travel for work, which meant needing a phone capable of managing flights, navigation, and coordinating with my coworkers.

If my circumstances change, I fully intend to switch back to the XP3 or something similar.

I do wish there was something available that could perform those tasks I need for work, but not give me the "full throughput" to get distracted.

For me this link leads to what looks like a domain squatting page. Is something broken?

> a lot of the Windows shell and apps have been slowly rewritten in C#

I worked on the Shell team until late 2022. There is very little C#, if any at all. The vast majority of the Windows Shell is still C++ with a significant amount of WinRT/COM.

I'm a native US English speaker and I'm familiar with this idiom.

I tried to use the linked Colab notebook to generate my own, and it appears to have been successful, but I don't see any way to view the generated images via the notebook interface. I'm not familiar with the notebook tool - have I missed something?