I personally like large screens due to being able to see more (do have to mess with scaling and font sizes to force browsers). Though I do find that I can only do “serious” work with actual PCs (even tablets don’t “feel” right). Some things make more sense as having a mouse and keyboard are easier to just do things. But other times I can only describe trying to use small screens (including my large phones and tablets) as kind of a digital “claustrophobia” of sorts. Though some of that is because of touch interfaces/UX can’t show as many options/menus and the keyboards take up more of the space.

Though I do hate that we don’t see more compact flagship level options for folks that like them or need them. Apple is like the best option as far as losing fewer functions, and Samsung does still make a point of having a non-plus version of their main yearly releases.

As far as the screen size impacting battery. I think that the opposite is seen from the times I have heard it brought up. The larger body allows for more battery space. I believe that when I was looking at smaller phones for a friend that was thinking that a small screen would help reduce his desire to distract himself from being always on his phone. That one thing I saw people/articles mention was how one down-side for smaller phones was literally how they needed to charge more often to make it through the day. I think the resolution and refresh rates make the most impact on battery. As I remember my S8+ could do like 2k resolution, but in the settings it would mention that battery life might be less than if I picked 1080p. Which would still be an issue if I had the non-plus version.

It is more leeching than sharing, but if it is actually torrenting then it should also be uploading while the “stream” is playing. So kind of like PeerTube. Just really depends on both how it is setup, and how popular the video is at any time. Though it sucks that there isn’t a good way to make sure connections happen.

There are lots of times that I get torrents the regular way that I would like to have uploading to other peers at the same time. But will notice that I get few to zero peers for uploading with popular files. There are times that I will leave it seeding for weeks without any uploading. So I end up deleting the torrent so I can move files or free up space because I already made a second copy to sort. Not always the case, but frustrating to not even see a few MB go to anyone. With PeerTube I see my upload working more consistently, but main issue there is just not often that I am watching something that a lot of others (or any others) are also watching.

Even with the small amount per user, they better be forced to pay in real checks or similar. Not in Play Store gift cards/credits, as I imagine that is what they will want to do if their appeal fails.

The article is interesting, but they really went hard with the title just to only talk about it for like two sentences. I was hoping for more since it seems like a pretty fun topic.

That would be the real “wildcard” out of nowhere mobile OS, and would be amazing. For some reason I thought of it like a pro-wrestling “pop” where Android betrayed their long-time friend Linux mobile while fighting iOS. Just to then have “WAIT what’s happening?!?” then OpenBSD mobile’s music hits and runs down with a steel chair, and the fans lose their minds! lol

Good to hear that dd did the trick for you, and I will keep that one in mind the next time I need to re-install an OS on a drive that might be having the issues. SpinRite works by going sector by sector reading and copying the data, erases the sector, and then writes the data back. Not like something you would want to do all the time for sure. The creator of the program also said he will have the code go FOSS when he dies (pretty old but in good health). I am hoping that he is able to complete the full re-build he has in the works to have it work with how modern motherboards and controllers work (the current code-base is extremely old and requires turning off both Secure Boot and UEFI (or at least enable CSM) in order to boot the live USB (I think it still uses FreeDOS as the environment). There are ways to run it in a VM correctly, but I haven’t messed with trying that yet.

I also agree that it seems that really old cards and drives tend to not have the same issues as newer ones. Hell, I have even found that my floppies that are from the mid to late 90s and very early 00s tend to have a better chance of me still getting data off them. More of my mid to late 00s disks have issues with corrupted data. Found that out when going through a bunch of disks I had forgotten about, to get whatever I could last year.

I wonder if it was more like folks putting stuff together to just work (likely with demands of it getting done really quick). But then the folks that got it implemented forgot to change the default/placeholder stuff (at least for the passwords). Just like how basically all routers used to have the same log-ins that never got changed by the end-users because it “just worked” out of the box (even if the labels and setup clearly said to change them first thing). I really hate how companies of all sizes seem to think of IT/sec as something that is just a drain on money that could be used for making profits look better.

Mostly just a small-ish info dump in the event it helps anyone. All flash and nand media can self-wipe if not used for a couple of years (though nand can last longer but may start to slow down to SATA and slower). Even if in an active PC, the parts that are only read but not written this can happen. Learned that from some episodes of “Security Now” podcast and personally saw it happen with a PC I was trying to fix for someone. On the show one of the hosts has a commercal program called “SpinRite” that was made to help with HDDs that have non-moter/actuator issues revive sectors.

Some testers using it found that it also helps with nand that has drastically slowed down from reading spots that never really get writes come back to normal speeds. In my case, I tried it on the PC I was working on and it really did help (the OS was already borked so it wasn’t going to hurt trying it out) with it loading much faster. Obviously the cheaper the flash/nand the faster issues will happen.

I have seen some random motherboards offer basically a pre-erase on SSDs that are acting slow before you re-install the OS to make sure a more complete flipping of cells happens and not just a basic formatting that just zeros the first parts of data and leaves the other cells alone. In that case the data/OS isn’t the focus and wouldn’t need a special paid software (I am only aware of SpinRite just because of the podcast and bought it to support the host that makes it). I am not sure of any free/FOSS software that does the same full drive cell flips, but I imagine there are some (or will be as flash/nand is used more and more).

Main take away is that it is important to make sure to not just let flash drives/SD/nand drives sit without at least hooking up to a PC every now and then. My PS Vita fell victim to just sitting around dead for a few years along with the Vita card I had in it. Fortunately the ROM with the OS is still working and I was able to at least set it up again.

Not the channel you where talking about, but if you like fake tutorials. Then this one has some funny ones. https://www.youtube.com/@infinitesolutions

Only a few days after you for me.

The “dumb TV” options are few (there are some but doubt their panels are as good), so the only “real” options are to go with the second option you gave. Depending on the size needed, PC OLED/AMOLED monitors are probably the best option pared with a HTPC or whatever other box. Sucks that a lot of the larger ones are also becoming “smart.”

I think that Snowden (and other leakers) would argue that the US is much much less transparent. Though it is best to just assume that all major govs are spying on everyone (even if it makes an ass out of u and me). Though we can agree on open source hardware.

Same here. I prefer to avoid Chromium-based browsers whenever I can. A lot of them are better than Chrome, and I do like to mess with them from time to time to stay aware of features and test things. But Firefox on my phone has access to uBlock Origin and all my other extensions, after activating the hidden debug menu/dev mode that you turn on in a similar way as activating Dev Mode for the Android OS. I only mention that last part because it seems a lot of FF Android users don’t know about it and allows for installing xpi files just like you can with desktop. Freaking game changing for me. It really sucks that the main-line Chromium-based browsers don’t support extensions, even in the limited options way FF used to before allowing more to officially work (even without the debug menu/dev mode trick.

For those that might want the instructions for the hidden debug menu/dev mode. Some extensions still might not work correctly as they might not play nice with the UI/layout of the Android version. I would imagine that some of these might be things like the third-party tab-tree extensions for example.

Open Firefox App

Go to the settings menu.

Enable Developer Settings: You need to tap on the Firefox logo five times. This action will unlock an additional debug menu.

Find “Install extension with a file” option in Settings

Look for the option to install an extension from your own storage. And pick the xpi file. Also will just work using the extensions page on the FF site.

No Zen-Browser (though I am not sure when this vid was made), and Pale Moon should be in the “Not ideal for a normal human” at best.

True, but if the option to start using it isn’t there. Then it also won’t have data to even get started. I remember when I first started using Waze back on my Galaxy S3, it wasn’t super helpful (for both the traffic and in some cases the map data). This was mostly due to it not being used by many people in my state at the time (the friend that told me about it used it in a much larger city with more “tech” people around). So even if it doesn’t help me directly right away, I am more than happy to start using it daily to report what I can.

I haven’t heard of that one. Will look into it just to have options.

Good to see devs willing to do the work needed in order to draw hard lines on the capitalist leeches that divert money away from the project. I am looking forward to the traffic system that they mentioned as a future option. Would allow users that are okay with turning on those features for adding crowdsourced traffic data and stuff like marking cops posting up to get their quotas.

Literally the only thing that keeps me on Waze is that stuff. I have to deal with a lot of interstate travel to and from work and knowing that a big crash happened so I can re-route before getting stuck is crucial. I will still make sure to have this installed just like I had Organic Maps as a good option. And to see what stuff I go to that needs to be updated on OSM and StreetComplete. Had to add all of the addresses on my street on OSM a while ago just to be able to correctly enter my address. One of those addresses that is listed as one town for mailing and is technically within the borders of a smaller one with regards to utilities and plots of land.

Do you have DOCP/XMP/Expo (whichever your board may call it) turned on? If so, you might want to try turning it off and see if the crashes stop (or at least get reduced). RAM could be fine but just not stable, which a BIOS update might help. Also might help in the event that your board is one of those that have had issues recently with the X3D CPUs. There is always a chance that the GPU might be faulty. Which I don’t know how to best test for that short of just trying an old one (or a friend’s if they have their old one).

No problem!

Does it have support for the P2P part of playing the videos? I know it can cause issues for data caps if it does. But if it doesn’t have that part, would love to see it show up in the settings to turn on and off to help share if on WiFi or if not on a cap. Would be great at least if running it on an Android based TV box to be able to not be a complete leech.