Quick, how do you hold your phone? Is the bottom of it resting on your pinkie, while you cradle the back with your index, middle, and ring fingers, and your thumb does all the scrolling? Alas, like the many other seemingly easy, intuitive things we do, it is wrong.

While the one-handed claw is seemingly the most convenient way to grip your device, over prolonged periods of time, it could be doing damage to your wrist and aggravating your ulnar nerve—among other issues.

At first, I thought this was the old iPhone antenna issue ;-) but I have been noticing if I do a longer session at the end of the day, my pinkie gets a bit sore and I have to shift position. It may well be good to be more conscious about this issue, especially if you use your phone a lot. Maybe this is a good case for slightly thicker phones with more battery capacity, or least more ergonomic phones, instead of just smaller and smaller all the time.

See https://lifehacker.com/have-you-been-holding-your-phone-wrong-this-whole-time-1848521531

#technology #mobile #ergonomics #health

The myth about how you can’t use an electric car for long trips continues to circulate, so Porsche decided to do something about it. According to Business Insider, the 2,834-mile (4,560km) long trip was carefully planned to take advantage of high power chargers along the route. Driving an electric car does require a bit more planning for trips than a gasmobile does. But it showed that electric car road trips are perfectly doable.

It can accept a charging rate of 350 kilowatts, allowing it to add 75% of its battery capacity in 22.5 minutes, according to Porsche. At one stop, the Taycan took just 22 minutes to charge from 6% to 82%, the company said. That, friends, is some fast charging.

The point also is, that batteries are getting better, and chargers are getting better. For 99% of normal use to work and back, and leisure, the capacity is just never going to be all used in a single trip. An overnight charge at home with a 220V charger is just going to be fine. It's going to get better, not worse, over time.

See https://cleantechnica.com/2022/02/11/porsche-explodes-the-evs-arent-good-for-long-distance-traveling-myth/

#environment #EV

About 500 e-commerce websites were recently found to be compromised by hackers who installed a credit card skimmer that surreptitiously stole sensitive data when visitors attempted to make a purchase.

“The Natural Fresh skimmer shows a fake payment popup, defeating the security of a (PCI compliant) hosted payment form,” firm researchers wrote on Twitter. “Payments are sent to https://naturalfreshmall[.]com/payment/Payment.php.”

If your credit card company provides single use, or pausable, virtual cards, it is well worth the effort to make use of those. You can use a virtual card once, and then delete it. This is especially necessary on foreign, or never before used, sites. For regular payments, I've set up a separate virtual card with a tight monthly limit.

See https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2022/02/hundreds-of-e-commerce-sites-booby-trapped-with-payment-card-skimming-malware/

#technology #ecommerce #malware #fraud #security

"After being hacked, I've lived without Facebook and Twitter for four years, and life has been fantastic," German Economy Minister Robert Habeck said at a press conference in Paris.

French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire, who spoke alongside Habeck, said: "I can confirm that life is very good without Facebook and that we would live very well without Facebook."

I can testify to the same thing. I deleted my Facebook account a good two years back now. It's true that many businesses still use Facebook (because of status quo) and that Facebook Marketplace is used by many scammers, but there is also Craigslist and other local online classified that be used that offer better protections to sellers and buyers.

It seems the youth anyway are migrating to TikTok and similar platforms as their numbers are way down on Facebook, and advertisers are starting to change their adverts to suite the TikTock environment.

Now Meta has pulled back a bit, stating this was just a business risk they were highlighting, but hopefully the EU stands firm. The world needs to move on from networks that exploit users' personal data at all costs.

See https://www.businessinsider.co.za/confirm-life-very-good-without-facebook-eu-ministers-meta-pullout-2022-2

#technology #deletemeta #socialnetworks #EU #privacy

What I like about this clone is it works exactly the same as the original Wordle (one word per day, sharing of stats, 5 letters with 6 guesses), but the key difference is, it is not playing the same daily word as Wordle.

So the key difference is a bit sad in that you're not competing globally with everyone on the same word. Still, with that said, the look and feel is identical, and it is very easy to set up for family and friends to share that same version and all compete on the same word (that was the key reason why Wordle only had one word per day).

What's also fascinating is that this project has spun off some other languages like Afrikaans, Latin, Arabic, German, Ukranian, and more, as well as fun themes, and also others focussing on math, acronyms, science, tech and more. It seems to be under active development, with quite a few ideas being tossed around.

See https://github.com/cwackerfuss/react-wordle

#technology #opensource #wordle #afrikaans #reactle

Accessing a remote desktop computer is made possible by the remote desktop protocol (RDP), a proprietary protocol developed by Microsoft. It gives a user a graphical interface to connect to another/remote computer over a network connection. FreeRDP is a free implementation of the RDP.

RDP works in a client/server model, where the remote computer must have RDP server software installed and running, and a user employs RDP client software to connect to it, to manage the remote desktop computer. In this article, they share a list of software (not all open source) for accessing a remote Linux desktop: the list starts off with VNC applications.

VNC (Virtual Network Computing) is a server-client protocol that allows user accounts to remotely connect and control a distant system by using the resources provided by the Graphical User Interface (GUI).

See https://www.tecmint.com/best-remote-linux-desktop-sharing-software/

#technology #remoteaccess #linux #rdp #vnc

Setting up a Raspberry Pi board has always required a second computer, which is used to flash your operating system of choice to a SD card so your Pi can boot. But the Pi Foundation is working on a new version of its bootloader that could connect an OS-less Pi board directly to the Internet, allowing it to download and install the official Raspberry Pi OS to a blank SD card without requiring another computer.

To test the networked booting feature, you'll need to use the Pi Imager on a separate computer to copy an updater for the bootloader over to a SD card — Pi firmware updates are normally installed along with new OS updates rather than separately, but since this is still in testing, it requires extra steps.

It's something that many Windows PCs still can't do despite their modern feature-rich UEFI bootloaders (presumably in part because of licensing restrictions).

See https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/02/raspberry-pi-bootloader-enables-os-installs-with-no-separate-pc-required/

#technology #raspberrypi

Spinal cord injuries are life-altering, as they prevent the transmission of nerve impulses past the point of injury. That means no sensory inputs make it to the brain, and no signals from the brain make it to the muscles normally controlled by the brain. But improvements in our understanding of neurobiology have raised the hope that we can eventually restore some control over paralysed limbs.

Some of these efforts focus purely on nerve cells, attempting to get them to grow through the damage at the site of injury and restore a functional spinal cord. Others attempt to use electronics to bypass the injury entirely. Today, there was very good news for the electronics-focused effort: researchers have designed a spinal implant that can control the leg muscles of paralysed individuals, allowing those individuals to walk with assistance within hours of the implant being activated.

Prior to activating the implant, none of the three participants could initiate any sort of muscle activity when attempting to take a step. The same day that the model was trained, all of the subjects could take steps on a treadmill if they were supported. The model was able to generate the right series of currents to stimulate the leg muscles appropriately.

See https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/02/new-spinal-implant-gets-paralyzed-people-up-and-walking/

#technology #health #spinalinjuries #medical

Being able to extract text from photos, PDFs and the like isn’t something new. Indeed, many ace tools exist for the job, including several well-regarded command line ones available on Linux. But being able to do it very easily? That is new.

With modern operating systems like macOS and Android making image OCR an integrated feature of their native image viewer tools or photo managers, it’s understandable that some folks new to Ubuntu, Linux Mint, and other distros expect similar functionality.

And with TextSnatcher, they do. The tool performs optical character recognition (OCR) in seconds, allowing you to quickly copy text from anything visible on your screen to your system clipboard, ready to paste elsewhere.

This application’s interface couldn’t be easier to use: you open it, click the “snatch” button, then use your DEs default screenshot tool to take a full screenshot or partial screenshot (recommended) focusing on just the text you want to copy.

See https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2022/02/textsnatcher-copy-text-from-images-linux

#technology #opensource #ocr #linux