>They are also fast, like you don’t even have to break your strike while passing the turnstiles to enter the metro.
They are not slow, but it's faster in Japan, still. At least in the Taipei MRT.
The Taoyuan Metro is way worse, though. If you keep walking while going through the gate and the card doesn't scan fast enough, it'll error and tell you to step back outside of the gate area (the in-between part) and scan again. It slows traffic down quite a bit.
Same in the Taipei Metro system. Stations often have facilities(like toilets, stores and lockers) within the paid area. However, getting in and out at the same station charges you the base cost: NT$20 (About US$0.66).
For example: You'd explain to the staff that you want to use the toilets, and they'll hand you a plastic NFC token coin, limited to enter and exit at the same station. You use that to enter the paid area, go to the toilet, then deposit the coin in a special slot to exit.
>Gate guards usually hand you a slip that explains the situation at the other gate or when leaving again.
That was done in the past, but it's quite nice that they just hand you a token now.
Alternatively, train stations in the Netherlands have done away with fees for entering and exiting the same station altogether. Toilets within stations often charge a €0,70 fee, though.
>I'm sure it's possible they made it up, but we had similar restrictions where I could use an Arduino for my engineering Senior Design Project in college, but no Arduino or module libraries - just our own C.
When I started compsci, it was the first year of a all-new curriculum for CompSci.
Literally the first week: We had to program an Arduino to play a song on a speaker by toggling GPIO, within a week. No assembly or any of that high-level mumbo-jumbo. We had to read the datasheet, look at the instructions and write the hex representation for each instruction in a txt file.
We had a "linker" tool: It took a basic bootloader (containing some helper functions for GPIO), turned our hex-txt file into actual binary, then just copies that to a set address. The bootloader did nothing more than init the GPIO pins and jump into our code.
We were given the locations of where these helper functions lived, nothing else.
It was to give a quick and intimate understanding of how CPUs actually work and why we use compilers and stuff. It worked really well, but it was so much of a pain that they changed it to allow students to use asm a year or two after.
You were lucky! We had to design and build the computer out of Z80-family components first before we could play around in binary.
There was actually a reason - this was back in '83/84 in a physics lab, and the idea was to be able to build your own logging / control device. PCs existed, but were terribly expensive.
>It's amazing to watch systems do things as humans initially have intended, then see those system fail in the most spectacular ways, because the humans didn't think of every possible failure scenario.
You should come to Taiwan! They've never considered non-Chinese names.
If you something online and pay by card, you can choose to ship it to a 7-Eleven or other convenience store, so you can pick it up at your own convenience. They'll ask for the name on your ID card/Passport, which the store will check before handing the parcel to you.
The problem? Many online stores do not accept names longer than a handful of characters. Chinese names are almost always two or three characters long, rarely four. Five or more characters exist according to a quick Google search, but I've never seen them myself. Good luck with western names, where even a short name like "John Doe" will be considered too long (The space counts as a character).
If you're a foreign resident, you can choose to get a Chinese name to deal with the parcel issue. Now you have two legal names: The name on your passport and the Chinese name. If you deal with public institutions, they'll prefer to use your Chinese name. Private companies have their own policies: Banks, for example, prefer to use the name on your passport. I've had issues with my insurance claims being rejected because the name on the government-provided documents did not match the name they had on file.
>The interesting thing about audio chains is that they do NOT follow the "as bad as the weakest link" principle. A poor quality MP3 will be much more listenable on an overall crappy setup than on a high-end setup, mostly because the crappy setup will cut out both the lows and highs and leave you with an OK "background music, more or less".
As someone who sometimes listens to music digitized from analog sources, this has been my experience, too. Tape hiss, cracking/pops and distortion are easier to notice on my headphones+DAC than on my (somewhat cheaper) IEMs.
At that point, it doesn't matter whether you have FLAC or MP3.
Used to have an MBA 2013. Great device, which ran well despite its age.
The MBA 2018 is awful. The keyboard is awful (have the double-keystroke issue), the performance is awful and the device would get hot and throttle with even the least demanding of tasks. And no magsafe! At least the USB-C connectors were a welcome addition. And an additional regret (totally my fault) is that I got the ISO-keyboard version.
I now also have an MBA M3 for work, which is a great device. The keyboard feels better, it runs smooth as butter and hey, the magsafe's back!
Got a Sonos One for free when I bought a new phone once.
So many issues with setting it up with WiFi. Gave up and used an ethernet cable.
It's absolutely useless without a network connection, as it lacks bluetooth. You can't use it as a speaker for a Windows machine, only for MacOS (using AirPlay). I only use it for Spotify.
I've had a bit of Sonos gear: A Play:1, a Bridge, and a fancy jog-wheel remote that I forget the marketing name of.
They deliberately bricked the jog-wheel remote around a decade ago. ("We aren't just not going to support these anymore; we're actually going to remote-brick every single one of them.")
Upgrading the Play:1 to S2 broke the Bridge. (It wasn't bricked, but it was incompatible with their S2 and thus became useless to me; they didn't care.)
Lately, the Play:1 has distortion in the woofer. Sounds like normal audio stuff; a torn surround, maybe. I don't know how to open it to even do a visual inspection.
At 0/3, I've got a lot to complain about with Sonos.
But the one thing I'm not complaining about is how it worked (when it worked): It is a networked loudspeaker, with network datagrams on one side and audible music on the other side. Once music is playing (started by an app or computer software or UPNP or whatever), it continues to play that music all on its own.
It continues to play music if I take my phone and wander off, or take a call, or if I reboot my PC. It lets someone else control the music that is playing. Other than control, one or more Sonos speakers comprise a standalone system that is dependent only upon having the network behave.
I have a very effective LAN in my house, just as I have also had in other living situations. That's an advantage and I want to use it.
I definitely don't want things like this to be burdened with Bluetooth's problems.
>It is a networked loudspeaker, with network datagrams on one side and audible music on the other side. Once music is playing (started by an app or computer software or UPNP or whatever), it continues to play that music all on its own.
This has been my experience, too, as long as you don't touch it. Using the controls to skip a song has caused issues before, as well as unpausing after you've paused it for a while.
That said, most of those problems have been solved by just using ethernet instead of WiFi. Even with my access point being 1~2m away, I've had connectivity issues.
I wouldn't throw it away nor sell it, as it works fine when it does work.
I generally always had good results with my regular wifi, but I had more-predictable results with a Bridge (which just produces a dedicated 801.11 "SonosNet" network), when that device still worked for me.
When I occasionally installed Sonos professionally (a long time ago), we always installed a Bridge into a system or made sure that one Sonos endpoint/speaker was plugged into Ethernet by design. In doing so, this allowed the Sonos-widgets to form their own meshed wifi network that generally behaved just fine.
(And no, none of that is quite ideal.
These days I'm mostly divorced from Sonos. But I sometimes have issues with my various Google Home and Alexa devices that connect with wifi. To combat this, I also plug my old-school tiny-ass Chromecast Audio into an Ethernet adapter, as well as the CCwGTV on my main BFT. I do this just to be sure, because having consistent audio is very important to me, and it does work.
But these devices don't make their own mesh like Sonos can do. [Well, maybe Alexa devices can if combined with an Eero router to steer the whole ship, but I don't want that at all.])
If you've got Chunghwa/HiNet, you most likely don't suffer from CG-NAT. They're the most expensive offer because they're the best offer.
If you're with those shitty resellers, you 99% will get CG-NATed. You pay 50% of the CHT price, but you get 25% the quality. You see this in large apartment buildings: They take Chunghwa fiber and resell it, NAT the entire building into the 192.168.0.0/16 block to save on costs, because IPv4 is $$$. Forget about IPv6 support. The bandwidth they have is oversold, so the 400M you bought might not actually reach those speeds during peak hours, unless you're lucky enough to be living in a new building where more than half the apartments are vacant.
I have some experience with the latter. Their support staff is often utterly incompetent, too.
This sounds like the solution the provider offered when they commercialised my student internet connection. A building with over 1k connections had 4 ipv4 adresses and no proper cgnat. This means you get niceties like:
* Everyone gets their neighbors favourite language in the search engine if you have a incognito session.
* Only about 32k sessions possible per adres. And yes you can claim them all and kill everyone's internet connection.
* All local ip's were interconnected and not firewalled. That was fun.
* You get banned or soft throttled everywhere due to "strange behaviour".
They were doing it on the cheap and fortunately got told it would void their contract if they did not provide something better and it was "fixed" after about a year. But during rush you would still end up maxing the 4gbit fiber uplink even with only a fast ethernet connection for everyone.
And to add that he tried out the exploit on unknowing participants. It would be better to try this with a friend in-the-know at a separate table. It makes me think he did it more as a practical joke than testing his exploit, especially because he mentioned they were "not-too-intimidating-looking guys".
I'll admit it is a bit funny and the damage caused is tiny(just the price of the food). However, things like this do harm the reputation of bug-bounty hunters.
He could have just tried it on his own table (order on the phone, and then on the laptop through the vulnerability) and avoid having to a) bother others, b) waste food. The result would have been the same.
They are not slow, but it's faster in Japan, still. At least in the Taipei MRT.
The Taoyuan Metro is way worse, though. If you keep walking while going through the gate and the card doesn't scan fast enough, it'll error and tell you to step back outside of the gate area (the in-between part) and scan again. It slows traffic down quite a bit.