I admin the.coolest.zone, the coolest site on the net for online social engagement.

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 17th, 2023

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  • So this is actually an interesting term. Looking it up from Wikipedia…

    The term “sideload” was coined in the late 1990s by online storage service i-drive as an alternative means of transferring and storing computer files virtually instead of physically. In 2000, i-drive applied for a trademark on the term. Rather than initiating a traditional file “download” from a website or FTP site to their computer, a user could perform a “sideload” and have the file transferred directly into their personal storage area on the service.

    The advent of portable MP3 players in the late 1990s brought sideloading to the masses, even if the term was not widely adopted. Users would download content to their PCs and sideload it to their players.

    So as applied to phones it originally meant a particular type of download and install - rather than installing directly to your phone from an app store, you have somehow obtained the file on your PC, transferred the file to your phone, and then installed it. In that context, downloading an APK directly to your phone and installing it would not be sideloading.

    However, semantics have shifted somewhat and now it’s used generally to refer to any install that isn’t directly from an app store of some kind, and requires downloading an actual package file and then installing it.


  • I think this is mostly what you want, but as far as I can find online (and I’ll test it again later today) it no longer shows traffic warnings and your current speed like the destination maps does. I think it used to, though, which is what’s annoying about this whole situation.

    I actually lost this feature for a while - it used to be under the hamburger ≡ menu as “Just Drive” and then the hamburger menu disappeared, and I’ve just recently found it again as a widget.

    So, yeah, Google kills all good things and I’m sure it won’t last for much longer, but it’s nice in the meantime.






  • Re: this section:

    As a technical writer, you should stay close to the teams whose work you are documenting. Listen out for any code, SDK, or product changes that may require action. When you hear that a tool may be deprecated, start communicating.

    It just assumes that nobody will ever proactively reach out to the technical writer about deprecations, which is entirely true in practice, but just feels so sad to acknowledge. Please keep your content and document management team(s) in the loop!


  • people working at the San Francisco-based startup “look down on what they consider legacy companies” and “see themselves as innovators who are radically changing the world.”

    With the rumors that the ethics board was worried about OpenAI and Altman moving too fast to truly consider ethics… This checks out. Startups are truly a different beast to larger “legacy companies”, who move slower because they have checks and balances and a reputation to maintain.

    I do think Microsoft would have given them a lot of leeway though, given the gold mine they were about to be sitting on. Staying at the front of the copilot race is critically important right now, and as Microsoft continues to move all its Office 365 services to the web and cross-connect them, it’s even more important for them to have a copilot for Enterprise clients that spans and can pull data from all those services.


  • Ok, so I use Gboard and it doesn’t seem to do that for me, it leaves existing spaces alone. Here are my settings:

    Under Text Correction I have enabled:

    • Show suggestion strip
    • Auto correction
    • Auto capitalization
    • Double space period
    • Proofread

    Everything else is disabled, so maybe try toggling things off and on and seeing whether the behavior changes?

    I also have two keyboards I switch between: English (US) and हिन्दी . I’m unsure whether having multiple language keyboards changes how the base functionality works.



  • As we’ve been tracking, Google is now beginning to roll out “Profile discovery” in Messages for Android to establish your name and photo across the RCS app and others.

    This is part of “Profile discovery,” which appears in Messages Settings > Advanced once rolled out to your phone. It is a Google Account-level setting that you can turn on/off. Google notes what phone number is associated with your name and profile image, with the ability to change things.

    Ok, so good things:

    • I’m glad it’s not auto-pulling from your Google profile, because you may not want that data actually visible to everyone who has your phone number.
    • I guess it makes it more like iMessage which is cool (?)

    Thoughts:

    • So our text messages (which, I know RCS technically isn’t but for all intents and purposes it is a replacement and serves the same purpose) are becoming more chat-like.
    • At the same time, Google has made Google Chat more like Messages, visually.
    • If the intent is to eventually combine the two, the advantage is that Google has a stronger and more unified messaging platform, but the downside is Google’s RCS implementation is even more customized to the point it’s harder for others to hop on.
    • If the intent is not to combine the two, I don’t see why making them look almost identical and yet having two separate apps is at all a good thing for Google. Their user base remains fragmented.

    Hopefully this is some secret ongoing messaging solution cleanup plan by Google. I won’t hold my breath, but a small part of me still longs for the return of a Hangouts-esque combined system.


  • Azure AD is now Entra ID. Please do not deadname the Microsoft cloud offering (even if we all think it chose kind of a dumb sounding new name 🤫).

    And Microsoft is heavily pushing their cloud services of course, but you can still set up on-prem AD as an option as well as other on-prem services.

    It’s just that all their cross service interoperability stuff won’t work as well if it’s not all in the cloud. Like, all their stuff is designed to work together in the cloud and keep you entrenched in the ecosystem, like any company I guess, except I actually like using Teams/Office/SharePoint combo, it’s executed well.



  • So… let me get this straight. Google sucks and Pixels are only sold in some countries, so their solution is to reduce Fitbit devices to those same countries?

    This is foreboding. Could this be the start of either a rebrand of Fitbit or, worse, a culling of the line in favor of Pixel smartwatches?

    Google, I swear if you fuck with my Fitbit I’m adding it to The List (right under Play Music and Inbox). I don’t want a smartwatch, I never wanted a smartwatch. I want my compact little step tracker that gives me a ton of metrics data.



  • The thing about the jpg ones is that the jpgs can’t be stored in the blockchain, so what is actually stored is a URL to some server (and that URL endpoint could be redirected elsewhere, the server could go offline, etc).

    The other major use case I see touted is “own your game objects and bring your objects to different games” but 1) why would a company spend resources supporting an object they did not sell you and 2) could this not be handled more simply on e.g. Steam? (yes, locked into a service, but that’s just the way the industry is and I don’t see why it’s worth the time and effort for them to change that)

    I do see how potentially a blockchain that stored actual data, e.g. some JSON, could be of more use. However, I struggle to find cases where just a regular database wouldn’t be more practical. I guess it would be limited to cases where auditability and visibility of changes are topmost concerns, and where it’s important that anyone can have a local backup copy at any time.

    If you have some examples of where this technology could be one of the best solutions, I’d love to hear them. The blockchain does fascinate me but I feel like it’s often a solution in search of a problem rather than the other way around.