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Never seen any of those Firefox problems in 5 or so years on multiple Android phones including Samsung, and using the native back button/3-icon setup instead of gesture nav. Also using a light combination of privacy plugins. May want to check your phone OS settings and make sure there isn’t a third-party app running an unknown display overlay that is screwing with things.
May I introduce you to what already existed at one time? (Motorola Atrix 4G from 2011 with Ubuntu desktop when docked.)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beast_Games_lawsuit
One of many terrible things you can read on that terrible sub-human.
The Dollop is an American history podcast. Each week…
Both that and Behind the Bastards are podcasts on history stuff. Dollop trends more towards comedy while reading about terrible things to lighten the mood. Dave reads to Gareth (most of the time) who hasn’t heard the thing before, and plays off his reactions.
Basically, because we don’t own our devices. We are allowed to use our devices by the good graces of the manufacturers that charge a premium for them.
This really needs to change. I remember the preinstalled app antitrust suit(s) in the early 00s. Those need to happen again, but likely the EU will have to as the US is entering a dark age, and the US will continue to have inferior everything to the rest of the world for the foreseeable future.
Have they…have they ever used a Google product? I dunno, like google’s old SMS app, or Allo, or Hangouts, or Talk… There will be a new Google messaging app to conflict with Google Messages in no time. Probably also called Messages, or farquad fandango turtle trumpet, or whatever other goofy name they come up with.
They do, just for some reason not effectively. Like, blocking the VoIP providers that allow scammers would dry all that up.
Weird thing is, this just drives more people to not use voice calls. They’re killing their own racket. (Although long-term, likely phones will be all IP with no carrier-managed services.)
Over the years I’ve found, in the grand scheme, unless the CEO murdered your family, who cares? I didn’t buy Sony products for a couple of decades, right now I don’t even remember why I stopped. I think it was around shit warranty handling. Meanwhile, I was removing viable options from my purchase pool.
More recently, I’m just trying to make my purchase decisions like I’m a business. Does the item at a given price fill the needs of the role? Does buying the year-old model at heavy discount fit the need? Avoid the top-tier release-day buzz, buy at a discount, use the tool as long as possible. These techniques collectively will stifle all the “economy” they’re trying to make a profit from.
Vendors that are truly terrible will lose customers. One person’s soapbox won’t affect them, however, despite best efforts.
Also Ford’s CEO: kills sedans in the US several years ago.
https://fordauthority.com/2024/06/ford-ceo-jim-farley-says-company-lost-billions-on-sedans/
Everything mobile manufacturers have done since smartphones finally became popular in 2007 seemed like temporary solutions due to moving so fast. It’s clear now that it was all an attempt to paradigm-shift compute into leased property.
It really needs to end, along with the terrible disposable hardware designs. Even if we were not in a climate crisis, it is about as bad as the US was in the 1950s throwing trash everywhere.
On some level, especially now, want to find an alarm clock or an mp3 player or even a camera? It’s getting harder and harder. Old phones with their battery removed or replaced are perfect for those roles.
Similar history including gentoo and distcc to speed up openoffice and x11 compiles with a pile of old computers.
Put linux on a PC laptop and it just so happens the NVMe controller in conjunction with the kernel driver has some glitch that causes the hard drive to fall off the bus forever. No big deal…
It’s great seeing a bunch of nvme nvme0: I/O (number) (I/O Cmd) QID 10 timeout, aborting then reset controller then removing after probe annnd data loss. Didn’t have the patience to figure out the bug in the driver right now. Maybe someday.
Most of the software updates you see are a result of CI/CD processes. The industry claims it makes good design patterns to get features our faster and more reliably. In reality it is just a rushed shitstorm that results in half-assed Friday releases that aren’t fixed until the following week.
I’ve long turned off auto update of my apps. Too many times I’m on a trip or other scenario where my tool is meant to be a tool and not some tech bro’s rented wet dream, and the tool is broken.
But here’s the kicker. CI/CD exists for another reasons or so:
- Frequent updates tend to reset review rankings in app stores. Not only does it offer plausible deniability to the app company, but it also screws with the review scores in their favor, as well as other rankings.
- Great way to help nudge along planned obsolescence. All that pointless rewriting of flash storage on a daily basis.
- Psychological manipulation, it gets notifications in your face to try and increase app engagement, which ensures it is fresh and running gathering user telemetry to sell as a side-hustle, as well as direct-interaction telemetry and getting more ads in your face.
It’d be better if we all just went back to landline phones some days. Modern tech is too noisy, abusive, and intrusive.
They are blind and lost. Nest hasn’t had a feature update since they acquired them 10 years ago. Their thermostats don’t even have a “its freezing outside and the air conditioner shouldn’t run” feature. Fi rots on the vine. Their camera service is terrible and they just raised the rates. Garbage company anymore.
There’s some slight technical reason for it, but I think they swung a bit too far in the asshole direction with blocking too many.
The LTE rollout was completely botched from the start. LTE voice is technically supported on all LTE chipsets, but early on the voice spec changed. Early phones used LTE for data and 2G or 3G for voice.
Complicating matters further, AT&T and Verizon both have separate and slightly tweaked versions of the spec, as they didn’t want to wait for it to be finalized, and of course they’re both different in different ways. It’s also why T-Mobile allows so many devices. They just rode their very fast for the time HSPA+ network until LTE was finalized, got generic hardware on the network, and flipped the power switch.
To top it off, AT&T was sued at one point for 911 not working due to a handset bug and they got very controlling at that point to avoid future lawsuits.
VoLTE is ostensibly VoIP over cellular data at its core. All phones have to talk with the correct SIP signaling on VoLTE for voice calls to work. With 2G and 3G, the circuit-switched method of signaling was much more standardized (although not necessarily simpler, WCDMA at its end spanned literal volumes of books.) This made it so phones and networks were more easily compatible for basic things like voice, 911, etc.
Now, on top of Verizon and AT&T thinking that rolling their own flavors of LTE was a good idea, every phone maker also had their own idea about how the VoLTE SIP signaling was supposed to work. Due to flaws in the LTE spec, carriers going rogue, and companies interpreting things wrong, it has turned quite literally into a clusterfuck.
TL;DR: It took a long time for LTE to standardize enough across product lines, and there are a whole bunch of phone models that don’t talk the language quite right. So carriers chose to ban rather than make workarounds or work with the vendor to roll a software fix to the phone.
The S22 US version used snapdragon 8 gen 1 (in the US) and the chip was prone to performance issues. It worked, but it was rough, ran hot, and ate power for lunch. I’m not sure if that was a year that the international variants had an Exynos, but their performance is generally worse.
So seeing a simpler phone with basic android seem to do fine versus a flagship with super bloated Android on a first gen apps processor makes a lot of sense, really.
LLMs have improved my education, work life, and general knowledge search. I get more time to spend living my life and less trying to find one dude’s stacked change post from 2009 that fixed my problem.
They allow me to access information the way I learn and operate in a way that textbooks, college education, video courses, or online classes have never allowed me to do in my entire life.
That being said, the general AI buzz and buzzwords need to die, the real positives need to be celebrated.
Don’t feel like you have to race. It took about a year to shift e-mail addresses last time I did it. Keep the old one as a harvesting point until you move over what you want. Then just leave the old one around to use up space on Google’s servers if you really want to softly be a dick. (They eventually close them after some period of inactivity.)
Basic steps for a slightly more thorough method that also preserves old e-mail: