What about the very, very cheap piano pedals? Those are usually just a on-off switch, which is output over a 6.3mm jack. Connect that to an Arduino or something which emulates a keyboard and Bob’s your uncle.

Usually, logic levels are not a big issue, just saying. You have 5v anyways, all you need for a unidirectional level shifter for low baud rates is a mosfet and a resistor.

By at some point saying ‘OK, enough side quests, let’s move on with the story’. I plan to replay this game multiple times, so I do not mind missing some side quests in my first playthrough.

I wouldn’t call 1tb storate for 4$ and 1tb egress for 7$ “dirt cheap”. Hetzner storage boxes are cheaper.

Luckily, we don’t have that with medical insurance in Switzerland, but car mechanics sure are that way.

Need a fix on insurance? Ooh, that’ll take us 2 weeks of full time work - minimum 5000 bucks. Call them and tell them it’s not insured? Ah, that’ll be 500 bucks.

See Heise for example, they have their own instance for their news posts. It’s great.

You know. I’m Swiss, so a lot of this inflation is very evident to me.

In 2022, 1 CHF was around 0.8GBP. Now, in 2023, 1 CHF is around 0.9GBP.

Guess what, that 8% pay rise was lower than inflation. 8% on top of 0.8 is only 0.864.

Without any more pay in Switzerland, I got an effective raise higher than these ‘great’ 8% in GB

Yup. The only time I pirate a game nowadays is when I can’t get it on steam for the 2 hour refund as a demo.

I mean the whole point that xboxers were making when the ps5 was released was ‘but gamepass!’. Now that ps also has their ‘game subscription’, I do not really see the appeal of an xbox, especially if you also own a pc. PS has exclusives, xbox does not - at least not ones I’d be interested in and couldn’t play on PC.

Yup, that’s my yearly salary range. That’s normal in Switzerland for an electrical engineer with a masters degree.

Even if it’s an hour or two of your salary, do you not think that sync is worth that much to you a year? It takes LJ a lot of time to develop.

Oh, and keep in mind this is with what, 1700 hours of work or something a year. I have vacation, public holidays and so on.

Depends on your country, really.

Yes, in Switzerland you’re also told gross income - yet that’s not the ‘real gross income’. There’s lots of other stuff your employer pays for you when you get hired somewhere. For example, in Switzerland, we have mandatory retirement contributions (not like social security, we also have a pension fund seperately from this), that has to be matched by an employer, 1:1.

It really depends on your country, but say in Switzerland, you have to earn a good 30-40% more money when self employed compared to being employed at a company to have the same net amount of money available at the end of the day.

I wouldn’t call it financially sustainable. It pays for the servers, not for the labor.

No offense to beehaw, they’re doing great work.

I find the pricing totally fair. You’re doing a great job.

Keep in mind lots of the complaints of ‘too expensive’ come from one of two groups - either people from low income countries, or young people.

If you asked me to pay 15 bucks a year for sync when I was 16? Hell no, I’m not paying that much money for it!

Now, at 27, it’s what I earn in like 20 minutes at my job. I think those 20 minutes A year are more than worth what this app offers.

Wow, didn’t know you can link settings. Cool feature.

Wha? A yearly ultra sub is 15 bucks. 1500x15 is 22500. 5000 times is 75000.

And that’s not ‘the same as a full time job’, not by a long shot. Google takes its cut - what, 20%? Then you have income tax, insurances etc, another 20-30% at least, and so on. So, for 5000 subscriptions, he’s left with around 42k at the end of the day.

I usually hate subscriptions that try to squeeze you for money.

In the case of sync, I see it as a recurring donation for LJ. 15 bucks is what I make in like 20 minutes as an engineer myself, so ‘paying’ 20 minutes of my salary to a developer of such an awesome app is no problem for me.

Also subscribed, not because I need the features but just to support this awesome app

Wow. Awesome. I feel so at home!

I’d also be very interested. There’s an m3u playlist you can find very easily on GitHub but that one barely works, stuttering or endlessly buffering most of the time

Im fairly sure they manage because they have so many subscriptions from people that barely use it.

They basically pay out per song played - and server costs are also largely dependent on active users. So they balance out a very active person that might incur 15$ in cost with 5 inactive people that incur not even a dollar.