Yaky @ Yaky @slrpnk.net Posts 1Comments 109Joined 8 mo. ago
I am curious if there have been studies on how much the slowness/delayed response of the device improves the attention span. (Since the distraction urge cannot be instantly satisfied)
Anecdotally, I find it very easy to get distracted when clicking on app takes fewer than a few seconds to start. When I test-drove the PinePhone, I felt I was much less distracted because bringing up the browser takes good 5-10 seconds, so I would only do that with a specific goal in mind.
Any details on the technology? "Beaming phone signals" doesn't tell anyone much. Would this require a proprietary antenna (thus new, flagship-only models after a few years, like iPhone 15 with its emergency satellite calls) for whatever protocol Starlink uses (unless there is some unified ground-to-satellite protocol by now)?
Satellite phones aren't new, but are expensive for obvious reasons.
Second-hand experience from many years ago when Starlink first rolled out: my friend has a cabin in the Appalachians, outside any cell service, so Starlink sounds great for that. However, Starlink site says there is "no coverage" for that area. Yes, somehow, no coverage for a satellite service. The nearest area with coverage was a town with already-decent 4G. And most large US cities had coverage too. So our inside "conspiracy theory" was that Starlink resells 5G/4G modems for hipsters.
Have no idea if the situation changed since then.
I love the Revelation Space world. Just the right mix of plausible-yet-not-handwaved for me. Some factions but no grand Empire or militaries. No FTL travel, so you are never coming back to the same world you left. Technological nano-catastrophe (and horrors related to that). Semi-intelligent algae that rewires the brain (Turquoise Days is a great short story about it). Galactic-scale projects and space anomalies.
Thank you for telling me about Revenger, I haven't read those yet.
The most memorable reads from this year were:
The Broken Earth trilogy by N. K. Jemisin. While at first, the setting appears to be a fairly standard fantasy, there is a sci-fi depth to the world, its climate, cataclysms, history, and orogeny ("magic power" of the world).
And, if you are a fan of heavy-handed dystopian satire, Venomous Lumpsucker by Ned Beauman. It takes place in a not-too-distant future where a somewhat-apathetic researcher and a corporate scammer are trying to find the last living Venomous Lumpsucker, a highly intelligent fish species. There is climate change, corporate greed, half-baked international agreements, hackers, horrible AI, and, of course, delusional megalomaniac billionaires.
As an Eastern European American, to me, spoken Persian phonetically sounds like Russian (perhaps same sounds and phonemes, but, of course I can't understand it)
This, unfortunately, has been a thing for over a decade. I was excited to discover that Samsung Galaxy S3 (i9300) is/was one of the better-supported phones for custom ROMs... until I realized that the one I have is a Sprint / Virgin Mobile version (d2spr), which looks the same but uses a different SoC entirely.
TBH I don't even understand why Android Auto needs to exist in the first place.
The same (or even better) functionality can be achieved by using a standard video output (DisplayPort, HDMI) from the device to the in-car screen, while the touches on the in-car screen can be translated into USB mouse position and clicks on the device (unless there is a better touch protocol).
I know there are regulations about live video on in-car screens, but 1. That does not stop people from watching videos on their phones while driving and 2. Somehow that does not apply to maps?
I haven't really played since 2020, and have been waiting for 1.6 on the Switch to start again.
And holy cow, there is a whole other game's worth of content! Island, mastery cave, new crops, new bundles, new characters, and new dialog for old characters, and variety in festivals.
There isn't anything you can miss entirely that I can think of. (Ok, maybe some low-level weapons from the mines, but those aren't important)
It's possible to miss festivals, and some cutscenes won't come up until you are in the right place-time-season, but as you said, you can do it the next year.
You might end up needing postmortemOS
On a serious note, you can run without a battery
Tried it on an older Pixel with GrapheneOS.
Can't zoom, can't switch to wide-angle lens. Camera does not balance brightness by the focus point. Otherwise pictures look pretty much the same.
I suppose this was made for specific devices in mind?
Time Management: The Game
Probably the most valuable IRL skill you can learn in a game. Or you can just chill and fish for a whole year, no one's gonna judge you.
Slightly morbid academic one.
My computer science professor (who is from Eastern Europe) was explaining an algorithm that he and another professor (from South America) developed. The algorithm processes a graph by first creating a "frame" around it. Since English was not the first language for either of them, the first word they thought of was karkas (каркас, frame in Russian). English word "carcass" sounds pretty much the same, right? but only later, after the work was submitted, they realized they were creating a dead body around the graph.
Random observation: Privacy friendly apps seem to like similar shades of purple.
Firefox has purple in the logo and in private windows. Proton rebranded to purple a few years ago. FluffyChat (matrix client) has a darker purple as default color. Even Aurora Store uses purple accents and icon background.
Proxies started getting blocked (by some auth-account methods) last year, but libreddit/redlib dev was able to outsmart them multiple times. Now it seems like reddit is blocking IPs (and/or IP ranges). Running redlib from a residential IP still works, but I would not expect it to work from a VPS.
Tried it out a while ago, and found that I prefer GNOME's UX and configurable shortcuts better, and that two side-by-side applications on my laptop is the most "tiles" I would realistically want.
The cars were advertised as reliably getting 80 miles (130 km) between battery recharging, although in one test a Detroit Electric ran 211.3 miles (340.1 km) on a single charge. Top speed was only about 20 mph (32 km/h), but this was considered adequate for driving within city or town limits at the time.
From Wikipedia
Permanently Deleted
I tried out postmarketOS + phosh on a PinePhone about a year ago. For my own needs, it worked fairly well, except (ironically) receiving calls. It was like driving an old car, everything was slightly jank, but worked, and could be tinkered with - see the entire review. I have to give credit that there has been impressive progress in mobile Linux since PinePhone's release in 2019, and a lot of it was developed by unpaid hobbyists.