qupada

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qupada,

It looks like it goes away (I went into the settings for one contact, where there's a toggle to switch back to SMS/MMS).

Unfortunately, I can't figure out how to change it back to RCS for that conversation now.

Also, on a more personal note: the baby blue background is ugly AF. Like actually just heinous. I'd rather it wasn't there, you get a perfectly good indicator RIGHT ABOVE THE TEXT INPUT FIELD what it's about to send.

qupada,

I recently bought a Boox Palma, which is a phone-size Android device with a real E-Ink display.

It's not a phone (WiFi/Bluetooth only, no mobile radio), and with 4-bit greyscale it's definitely an adjustment to use with a lot of apps (it has per-app DPI & contrast controls to help), but they've done a lot of work on the refresh rate to make it feel responsive.

It even has midrange-phone specs (SD 6xx series CPU, 6GB RAM, 4Ah battery), with full Google Play, so it's a quite usable Android device overall. Like most modern E-Ink devices, has a CCT warm-to-cool frontlight, so great for night-time use.

Now would I want to use it as my only, everyday device (if it was a phone too)? Probably not. Could I? Almost certainly.

Colour E-Ink is still quite limited (in contrast, and resolution), but I expect the patents on that are quite a bit newer and we won't be seeing so much movement in that area so soon.

qupada,

I'm more disturbed that the labelling on the box is in comic freaking sans.

qupada,

This one's tough, because I like James Spader's ridiculous character in season 8 a lot, but think the rest of the story had long since run its course.

The whole retail store story arc was quite a damp squib, and it feels like the show never really recovered.

Finding room for carry-on baggage has become 'the Hunger Games' of air travel, analyst says (www.cbc.ca)

Airline industry insiders say passengers have become carried away with carry-on baggage, leading to costly delays. That’s prompting calls for changes to how airplanes charge for baggage, with some discount airlines like Sunwing and Spirit already beginning to flip the fee structure so passengers pay for the privilege of...

qupada,

Also don't forget this decade's follow on:

People started putting Airtags in their suitcases because they wanted to know where their luggage was and call the airlines on their BS, so they banned those in checked bags too.

Zero attempt to remedy the root cause, but damned if they aren't going to stop people trying to cure the symptoms.

qupada,

And even apparently from name brands.

My sister bought a low-end Samsung tablet (some years ago admittedly), and it NEVER received a software update in the 3 years she owned it. Not a major update, not a security patch, nothing.

I'd hope they've gotten better about that, but I wouldn't hold my breath.

qupada,

Those of us who had to develop websites and make them even vaguely functional in IE6 haven't forgotten.

Dark times, those were.

qupada,

Except that they've ruined that too. You now need an account to view anything, so the reach of announcements is greatly diminished.

At this point leaving shouldn't really be too difficult, since a large portion of your audience already has; because they've been shut out, or have quit voluntarily.

qupada,

Also - and I realise this might be contentious - but I'd suggest one that takes normal batteries. Mine takes 4× AAA.

With Eneloops (or similar low-self-discharge rechargeables), can have a 2nd set that gets you back up and running in under 30 seconds, and if you get really stuck they're sold in every corner store in the world (heck, throw a pack of Li-FeS2 batteries in the emergency kit, 20 year shelf life).

No worrying about having the right charger cable (commonly a Micro USB, something I don't tend to carry anymore), or remembering to charge the thing lest it go flat right in the middle of what you need to do.

qupada,

This video about ex-Soviet RTGs of questionable radioactive source choice is quite a good watch

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NT8-b5YEyjo

NASA apparently used RTGs for deep space missions only, while in the same timeframe the Soviets scattered them all across the countryside, then promptly forgot about them.

qupada,

Genuine question here: wouldn't the "thoughts & prayers" truck be filling up at the landfill, rather than emptying there?

qupada,

T'ain't enough. Gotta block everything they do, everywhere on the internet.

As someone so eloquently put it: you might not have a facebook profile, but facebook has a you profile.

If you've ever seen a "share on facebook" button on another website, they've been watching you.

qupada,

Heh, came here to post that and you beat me to it by 40 minutes.

Other user's comment up thread about "churning vomit water"... accurate.

qupada,

Something not so far mentioned is Tree Style Tab.

If you habitually have a lot of tabs open, you'll probably know how annoying it is finding things when each page title has been condensed down to 4-5 characters. On widescreen displays (especially 16:9), vertical pixels are also a lot more precious, while horizontal ones are plentiful.

For me (3840×2160 display, 200% scale), its vertical tab sidebar fits about 30 tabs before needing a scrollbar, and you get a full width title for each and every one.

It can be a bit of an adjustment at first, but I've been using this since the pre-WebExtensions days (since around Firefox 4.0), it's definitely one of my must-haves.

qupada,

As of USB-PD 3.1 there are now nine fixed voltages - 5, 9, 12, 15, 20, 28, 36, and 48V - and two variable-voltage modes; PPS with 3.3 - 21V in 0.02V increments, and AVS with 15 - 48V in 0.1V increments.

Combined with a few different current limits, some of these features being optional, and then doubling down with what your cable does or doesn't support, amazing anything gets charged at all.

qupada,

You monster! It's clearly "gif".

qupada,

But also

mysterytool --help
mysterytool: unrecognized option: '-'

ok then...

mysterytool -h
mysterytool: unrecognized option: 'h'

qupada,

Not OP, but genuine answer: because I loathe being forced into their way of doing things. Every little thing on the Mac seems engineered with an "our way or the highway" mentality, that leaves no room for other (frequently, better) ways of achieving anything.

Adding to that, window/task management is an absolute nightmare (things that have worked certain ways basically since System 6 on monochrome Mac Classic machines, and haven't improved), and despite all claims to the contrary, its BSD-based underpinnings are just different enough to Linux's GNU toolset to make supposed compatibility (or the purported "develop on Mac, deploy on Linux" workflow) a gross misadventure.

I just find the experience frustrating, unpleasant, and always walk away from a Mac feeling irritated.

(For context: > 20 year exclusively Linux user. While it's definitely not always been a smooth ride, I seldom feel like I'm fighting against the computer to get it to do what I want, which is distinctly not my experience with Apple products)

qupada,

Happened to me once.

I hit the home button on the headunit to dump out of Android Auto back to the headunit's UI, went back into AA, and it reappeared.

Hasn't happened again since.

qupada,

Agree with all these points about the Nexdock.

We bought a bunch of them at work to be KVM consoles for computers without network out of band management, and at that they excel.

That said, I don't think I actually knew it had speakers, wasn't really part of my use case :)

It also makes me wish that USB-C connectors on GPUs hadn't been such a short-term deal, the one-cable hookup is definitely a great thing.

qupada,

pull out your old phone jacks and follow them through with CAT6

If you're lucky, you may not even need this step.

Buying 4-pair cable in Cat5e-or-better spec has been cheaper than 2-pair Cat3 "phone cable" for probably around 2 decades now, due to the vastly higher quantity of it being manufactured, so in plenty of newer houses the phone lines are wired with it.

You could still get unlucky and find the jacks are daisy-chained, but having a central wiring panel where they all connect to became popular in a similar timeframe.

Bit of a long shot, but in the best case scenario all you need to do is replace the jacks.

What are some good somewhat older smartwatches that have a heart rate sensor and work with modern versions of Android?

I have been using a Pebble Time Steel for years even after their acquisition by Garmin Someone corrected me it was FitBit not Garmin thanks to Rebble, a modded firmware that gives it new life, but I would like a smartwatch that can track my heart rate....

qupada,

I'm curious if this $69 watch turns out to be any good:

https://intl.cmf.tech/pages/watch-pro

https://www.theverge.com/2023/9/26/23891328/nothing-cmf-buds-pro-watch-charger

Claims more than a week of battery life, and while not offering 100% of the features of a Wear OS device, if you're used to a Pebble it might be a comparable feature set.

qupada,

I thought it might be sensible on Linux to use MS Edge for Teams (the PWA version).
Nope, it's just as shit in Microsoft's own browser. There is apparently no saving it.

qupada,

Frankly even if (4) was your only goal here, that feels like more than enough reason.

Not sure how it goes where you are, but where I'm from (New Zealand), FTTH is widely available but the exact locations within houses where ONTs get installed often leaves a lot to be desired.

If you don't want your router in one corner of your house where it only provides WiFi signal to half your rooms, you either have to have an installer who'll tolerate your request (due to the way they're paid for installations if you suggest something that takes more time you'll often meet some resistance), run cables of your own from the ONT to a better location for the router, or go with better access points.

qupada,

That's great, unless the store you're in is a giant concrete bunker.
Mobile data barely works in my neighbourhood supermarket; even text-based communication is frequently dicey, but you want to send someone a photo of something as a "should I buy this"? Fuhgeddaboudit.

qupada,

Sadly not so much on the CM4, which is what a lot of people are after these days.

Seem to be plenty of special-purpose bring-your-own-Pi carrier boards (like the Home Assistant "Yellow") that people haven't been able to get CM4s for in going on a year at this point.

qupada,

Variations on the theme also allow me to exercise one of life's great pleasures, which is slipping words with multiple apostrophes into serious business communication.

"Y'ain't" is one of my favourites, but "y'all've" is equally good.

Why don't laptops have proper low power states where useful stuff like downloads can run during sleep/with the lid closed?

Basically every laptop I’ve owned I’ve had to disable sleep when the lid is closed as I often leave them plugged in and want background tasks like downloads or updates to be able to run while I’m not using the machine. However, I don’t think PC laptops have a way to switch to a super low power state and just run...

qupada,

and the people who do still download, wouldn’t care about doing it while on battery

Very much this; I've got a whole army of machines I can SSH into to launch a long-running download, which frequently additionaly cuts out a 2nd step of copying the file to where it needs to be after downloading it (a action which would normally cause additional battery usage on the laptop).

And I thoroughly agree with you; I want the laptop to go to S3 sleep immediately when I shut the lid, and then pull it out of my bag a hours later with only a couple of percent of the battery consumed in the interim.

qupada,

What protocol?

Solid Explorer works fine for me through a VPN with SFTP. I've not tried SMB though.

Speed isn't amazing (was only getting 600kB/s testing just now), but it does work.

qupada,

Unfortunately Firefox doesn't have a replacement for the "Android System WebView" component, so any app that embeds a browser component (and oh boy is that a lot of them) will still be using Chrome.

There's a relevant ticket here: https://github.com/mozilla/geckoview/issues/167

It should be possible to have a shim that allows Mozilla's "GeckoView" component to implement the API, but - per that ticket, at least - most Android ROMs won't allow alternatives to the Google one.

The Firefox browser is genuinely great, but it's so far from possible to replace Chrome with it everywhere a browser is used.

qupada,

I've always been lambasted for this opinion, but I feel the same way about the charging cable and charger.

I do not want yet another 1 metre (if they're even that, most likely 3 foot) USB-C cable that barely reaches from the charger on the floor to the bedside table - and largely precludes actually using the phone while in bed - nor particularly the included charger. So many things need to be plugged in these days that single-output chargers are also basically e-waste.

Of course because some business genius had the idea that making the USB cable 0.9 instead of 1.8m saved them $0.06 per unit shipped, we all got lumped with those useless cables.

Now of course there will always be people for whom it's their first phone (or whatever situation), who do need those accessories. But all that requires is there to be a retail bundle with the now-accessory charger and cable. Preferably that bundle costs the same as the phone with them included does today and you get a token discount for the phone without them, although we all know it would never work that way :(

qupada,

Sony listened to their customers complaints and brought back the headphone jack for the 2nd generation Xperia 1.

Their phones continue to feature some of the best waterproofing (real world performance, and not just the rating they slap on it) in the entire industry.

That has never been a justifiable argument against the headphone jack, despite being an all-too-frequent one.

qupada,

Worse still, a lot of "modern" designs don't even both including that trivial amount of content in the page, so if you've got a bad connection you get a page with some of the style and layout loaded, but nothing actually in it.

I'm not really sure how we arrived at this point, it seems like use of lazy-loading universally makes things worse, but it's becoming more and more common.

I've always vaguely assumed it's just a symptom of people having never tested in anything but their "perfect" local development environment; no low-throughput or high-latency connections, no packet loss, no nothing. When you're out here in the real world, on a marginal 4G connection - or frankly even just connecting to a server in another country - things get pretty grim.

Somewhere along the way, it feels like someone just decided that pages often not loading at all was more acceptable than looking at a loading progress bar for even a second or two longer (but being largely guaranteed to have the whole page once you get there).

qupada,

Mmmmm hmmmm
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CSM3x9G7eTQ

qupada,

Ok, but why is the floor wet? Did they just finish mopping up the blood from its last victim?

qupada,

It was obvious right from the outset that Reddit's assertions as to the costs and motivations were not remotely genuine.

There was a comment early on to the effect of "it should only cost about $1 per user per month". Were that in fact the case, they could easily have added their own payment method to collect said dollar directly from users, allowing API / 3rd-party client access on a per-account basis. No weird limitations, just the experience you were already enjoying for a nominal fee.

The whole principle was from the outset pants-on-head idiotic, and it's clear the few times I have been to Reddit since that both the quality and quantity of content has noticeably reduced. Who could have predicted that the "freeloading" 3rd-party app users were the ones providing the bulk of the content (y'know, that content that, for all purposes, is Reddit, and they get to sell ads against).

qupada,

The OpenTF site itself provides a view on that point: https://opentf.org/#regular-user

And they're right; while you might consider yourself compliant with today's version of the license, they can change those terms whenever, and however they like in the future.

I weirdly do remember Hudson from my previous roles as a software developer, but like so many products forked that way it's barely a footnote in history at this point.

qupada,

His might be the most level-headed take on this whole drama. Disinterested and dispassionate, just stating facts as facts, and opinions as opinions.

Honestly, some of the other "players" in this saga could learn a thing or two.

(Now perhaps 94 minutes is a little much, but that's a separate issue)

I also have to say it's mildly ironic to criticise the "late" posting of the video, when one of the points raised is that of "post quickly / dubious accuracy" first-mover advantage content creation.

qupada,

The outtakes for that episode are fantastic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bh7Nz4bIwss

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