Pxtl

Pxtl, 1 day ago

Uh, that’s practically all software and games these days.

Pxtl, 5 days ago

The Prius Prime isn’t too different, in that it’s also a compact PHEV although the battery range is a bit shorter.

Pxtl, 5 days ago

Do they have licenses for any of this stuff? I mean, Id/Bethesda still sells Doom 1, you can’t really call these “abandonware” by the normal definition. They’re just “really old”.

Pxtl, 8 days ago

That’s cool and all but they could’ve just made sure the regular-ass search indexer was consistently aware of the video transcripts.

Many times I’ve searched for a video I’d seen using a specific quote I remembered from the vid… And got nothing, and had to painstakingly find the video manually.

Pxtl, 10 days ago

I have one of those Lenovos for reading comics, and they’re great. Nothing amazing but you can’t beat the bang for your buck.

Pxtl, 9 days ago (edited 9 days ago)

e-ink isn’t (edit: good) color.

Tablets are the ideal form factor for things that would traditionally require a large, full-color book. That is: passing around a photo album, reading magazines, textbooks, comics, playing turn-based games like board-games and strategy games. If you use a stylus they’re excellent for things that require free-form pen-and-paper like math homework and creating art.

Now, when they were a $600 luxury item that didn’t really make sense as a product. But now that they’re like $150 for a solidly good tablet they’re absolutely a worthwhile purchase for those use-cases.

Pxtl, 9 days ago

Ahh, yes, well I suppose if you’re mostly reading comics that were made in the '70s and you really want to capture that faded 32-colors-Ben-Day-dot-printed-on-newsprint feel, that’ll be just perfect.

Pxtl, 9 days ago

Fair point. Will correct my above post. But either way: unless you find screens particularly eye-straining or have extreme battery-life desires, I don’t really see e-ink tech as worth the downsides at this point, at least for non-text content. For a watch where I want an always-on screen and endless battery and I’ll never watch video on it? Yes, I want more e-ink and low-power LED tech and the like. But for tablets? I’m good with the vibrant colors of a glowing LED screen.

Pxtl, 9 days ago (edited 9 days ago)

Huh, that’s disappointing. It’s funny how everybody keeps experimenting but nobody seems to have topped the Pebble for watch form-factor: low-power gameboy-ish LED screen and more of an old-school micro-controller chip instead of a phone-like chip and just use the “shake to wake” functionality to brighten the backlight.

Pebble might not have been the smartest smartwatch, but it was definitely the watchyest smartwatch. Always-on screen and week-long battery.

Pxtl, 13 days ago

I had the same problem with my work-issued Thinkpad. No overheating, but frequently pulling the laptop out of the bag and finding battery dead. Solution I found was to bind the power-button to “hibernate”, and just using that any time I knew I was going to be putting it away into my bag.

One problem I ran into writing my first Windows Store application like 10 years ago was that Windows Store seemed to have no interest in mobile-style security where you request permissions one-at-a-time and only the ones you need - the intended workflow was that you either requested no secure privs and let your app be “untrusted”, or you made your app “trusted” and requested all the privs. This was actively recommended by MS.

Of course, this means “wake from sleep” would be something that every app would have permission to do accidentally, even if they didn’t want to.

Pxtl, 13 days ago

Well, I can see useful use-cases. I mean, laptops are often used disconnected right? So if a laptop sitting in a bag can wake up, sync all your emails and do all your patches while it’s in your house and internet-connected, that means it’s ready to go when you’re using it at the doctor’s office where he’s got no wifi and you don’t want to turn on pairing on your phone because every time you do that it somehow blows through all your data.

Obviously the trade-off failed miserably. I’d much rather have a full-battery laptop then a laptop that tried to sync everything 2 days ago then ran down the batteries. But it should’ve been able to work in theory.

Pxtl, 13 days ago

It didn’t have any peripherals, I mean, like, external USB ones.

Pxtl, 13 days ago

Oh, this is about the delay if you’re using a full adblocker? I’d assumed this was about the awful choppy rendering performance I get in FF Mobile when it’s just starting up a vid (which smooths out after about 5 seconds). I just use FF on Android to be able to run YT vids in the background or with my phone-screen locked.

Pxtl, 19 days ago

Kill third party everything. No more CDNs, no more tracking pixels, no more cookies, no more content from anything but the domain in the url bar.

Pxtl, 21 days ago

I’m not sure how feasible that is. Batteries are heavy, and take up space, and there’s only so much room under the hood for battery modules. If you cram it to the max, can the frame take that load all the time? It might work for a short-ranged car - maybe 100km range, to avoid going much heavier than the normal curb-weight.

Pxtl, 21 days ago

Okay. We need to get clarity here – if a product is being returned because it just wasn’t compatible with the purpose I had in mind? Like pants that don’t fit? By all means, charge me for return.

But if the product is defective? No, you pay for that. You sent me garbage, you owe me 100% money back.

Pxtl, 21 days ago

I’d argue that in those cases the product is straight-up defective. I mean it was falsely advertised. Expecting me to pay returns in that case is absurd.

Pxtl, 22 days ago

They should put a little WearOS watch screen on the back of a regular-ass smartphone for that.

Pxtl, 22 days ago

I’d say you get better value and a cleaner experience with the lenovomotos.

Pxtl, 23 days ago

You didn’t even mention some of the best fragmenting stuff with those products. Like now Google Podcasts is being discontinued and rolled into Youtube Music. Or when SMS messaging was rolled into Hangouts… and then split back out into Google Messages.

I own a WearOS device (Galaxy Watch 4). If you want to see Google at its most hilariously incoherent, buy one of those. Youtube Music for my watch is spectacularly broken. I thought it would be cool to go for a run with just my watch instead of having my phone clonking around in my pocket. Lol, nope, can’t download playlists, and can’t download any of my uploaded albums that start with letters after the letter “L” because it can’t list more than 100.

Pxtl, 22 days ago

I mean for people that are providing a moral defense of this? Yeah, no, fuck them into the sun.

But from a legal perspective, that’s kind of the problem isn’t it? Because no kids are involved in the actual production of the images, this creates a huge legal question - isn’t this constitutionally protected in countries that have Freedom of Expression/Speech?

I mean this is obviously vile and this person is a danger to children… but would this be illegal in the USA and Canada and other countries that have freedoms that make it very difficult to prosecute this kind of speech?

There’s also the wrinkle that it’s being made of real people. Not just that it’s kids in general, but real, actual, specific kids. Most countries have some form of “use of likeness” protections, but that’s essentially making this into a copyright dispute, and a pretty grey one at that.

Pxtl, 23 days ago

Anybody remember Nexus Q?

Pxtl, 25 days ago

Because batteries are expensive. So by default you’re targeting a luxury price, whether it’s luxury sports car or a luxury SUV.

Pxtl, 26 days ago

This is overstated.

In the old days, there was a hierarchy of reputability. At the top you had the bluechecks that generally represented reputable sources of information, who had premium billing in the platform. Then you had the normies. Then you had the slush-pit of soft-blocked people that were shoved into the “other replies” box because everybody hated them and they only followed their network of bots.

Now, the hierarchy is reversed. The slush-pit people are now have blue-checks, the algorithmic boost on blue-checks is even stronger, and half of the old reputable blue-checks have left.

This is like saying “Reddit/Lemmy has always been awful” if we made the upvotes/downvotes of all the worst people on the site worth 100X what a normal person’s upvote/downvote was worth. Yes, there have always been problems, but they can get worse.

Pxtl, 26 days ago

Yes.

But here’s the thing:

Reddit/Lemmy: those people have equal voice to you or me. Of course they can amplify that voice with sockpuppets, but still - one account one vote.

Old Twitter: those people have downmodded influence. Twitter knew everybody hates them and treated them like the garbage they are.

New Twitter: those people rule the roost, because they’re willing to pay Elon $8/mo for a megaphone for their jackassery.

Pxtl, 26 days ago

Okay, but the new Twitter reinstated him, and a bunch of Nazis.

I mean, old Twitter was jokingly called “the hellsite” by its users but its new Elongated form is quite a lot worse.

Pxtl, 27 days ago

Honestly I’m wondering what Google’s long term plan for securing their productivity suite is. The amount of spam I get through Google drive share requests is shocking.

Pxtl, 27 days ago

Libertarians gonna libertarian.

Pxtl, 26 days ago

There are monopolistic things about the Play Store, but compared to competing platforms it’s a lot better than most. Android allows you to install apps from outside of the store without any extreme hacks. Contrast that vs iPhone or game consoles.

But yes, the fact that Google doesn’t want anybody else to have official stores bundled on Android/Play-services supported devices is a huge anticompetitive action. Also, the Play Store does get some premium support from the OS.

But I’ve used 3rd-party stores in addition to installing direct-downloaded apps and the workflow isn’t bad at all. I just wish you could whitelist a domain when using the browser, so I could say “I only want to download APKs from HumbleBundle.com since their app is gone” without opening up APK installs from all domain names in the browser. Possibly some kind of store-signature system would be better for this instead of controlling by installing app.

Pxtl, 27 days ago

Is this like the previous theory that Windows 12 would be subscription based?

“The Copilot is like the Start button,” Nadella explains. “It becomes the orchestrator of all your app experiences. So for example, I just go there and express my intent and it either navigates me to an application or it brings the application to the Copilot, so it helps me learn, query and create — and completely changes, I think, the user habits.”

Saying “copilot is like the start button” is not saying “copilot will replace the start button”, the article is dishonest clickbait and stupid.

This is just MS taking another kick at Cortana, this time powered by LLM generative AI.

Pxtl, 1 month ago

Oh good, I thought this was about the Linux distro.

Pxtl, 1 month ago

… We’re gonna get another cookie click-through, aren’t we?

Pxtl, 3 months ago

checks…

Oh thank goodness my PC mobo is a gigabyte.

Pxtl, 3 months ago

No interest in styling, I have docs for that. Big features I’m missing are:

• single-note 1x1 shortcut widget (not the full single note widget – which is nice! But not a simple homescreen 1x1 link to a specific note),
• better management for pictures attached to a note (brightness/contrast/crop, re-sorting them, etc).
• Copy-paste for checklists. How is that not a thing?
• bring back letting me use google Assistant to add stuff to my Keep shopping list.

Pxtl, 3 months ago (edited 3 months ago)

Oh, thanks!

Edit: there must be a trick to it, I just checked and it still sends shopping list entries to that weird Google Assistant List thing.

Edit2: found it! There’s a Google Assistant setting. God damn the UI for this is so awful. First question it should ask when it finds I have no shopping list shouldn’t be “shall I make you a shopping list” but “hey do you use Google Keep to manage your shopping? Should I switch to that?”.

Pxtl, 3 months ago

An important thing to note about this is that as we go up exponentially the error between GiBs and GBs increases. A kiB is only 2% more than a kB, but a TiB is 10% more than a TB. So using them interchangeably is increasingly misleading.

Also, there are many cases in computers where it doesn’t really make sense to fuss about binary. Like, an HDD is a spinning piece of metal, the number of bits it can store has no binary constraint.

Fun fact: the old 3.5" floppies that were marketed as 1.44 MB were neither 1.44MiBs nor 1.44 MBs, but some weird hybrid mash-up unit.

Pxtl, 3 months ago

I like strange tech. I owned a Pebble. I drive a PHEV. I had a phone with a side-slider keyboard way after it stopped being cool. I bought a Moto Z for the Moto Mods. I have a bin full of strange old input peripherals for the PC, like a SpaceOrb I bought for Descent. I still own a Sega Dreamcast. I’m on my third bone-conducting headset.

I like weird gear. I am in the target market for companies making weird gear.

I have no interest in this folding crap.

Pxtl, 3 months ago

Yup. I bought a similar one specifically for comics and manga that I picked up from Humble Bundle, but it also runs all my boardgames well too. Lenovo’s tablets are a bit anemic power-wise but you can’t beat the price and they’re perfect as a bed-side media machine.

Pxtl, 3 months ago

Can they get Samsung to stop using the goddamned watch speaker instead of the headset I have paired to the watch too? Because it’s infuriating when I “Okay google, call my wife” and it expects me to talk to my wife through my watch like Dick freaking Tracy when I have a fancy-ass headset multipoint paired to both watch and phone.

Pxtl, 3 months ago

That oneUI 5.0 turtle looks actionable. Look at the legs. It’s really obvious they traced the Apple one.

Pxtl, 3 months ago (edited 3 months ago)

Bought one for my kid because he’s a little artist. Seems nice. I use a Pixel, but honestly I miss the moto “chop chop to turn on the flashlight” feature from my old Moto.

Pxtl, 3 months ago

Fix the goddamned failover to SMS you morons! My kids don’t have data plans and I usually keep data turned off on my phone (because Canada), I keep having to turn off RCS altogether because if I try to send them a message over RCS it doesn’t failover to SMS (yes, I have the option turned on), it just sits there dumfounded saying “can’t deliver”.

You fail at failing.

Pxtl, 3 months ago

As in “data plans are stupid-expensive here”.

Pxtl, 3 months ago

I’m really cheap when it comes to anything monthly. I only got a data plan really recently and it’s bare minimum - before that I was paying $8/mo for just talk and text. I’m a luddite, I like owning stuff. I’d rather have an expensive phone and a cheap plan than the reverse, and at $40/mo a good deal but that’s still pricier than a good phone after 2 years.