First time I’ve seen it.

What’s with the green line?

Phone specific issues aside, which might well be the root cause, your pager issues might point at an issue that may be exacerbating your experience.

If there’s wideband RF noise around you, many radio services might be affected.

If you have a portable AM transistor radio handy, you can turn it on, tune away from any station and walk around your property. If the noise increases, try to find where it’s coming from. There’s also https://qrm.guru/ - it’s intended for radio amateurs, but we’re a friendly (mostly harmless) lot.

As a volunteer firefighter, you might also have amateurs among you or known to members of your group, who might have local knowledge that I lack.

Happy to exchange email. Not sure what the community rules are about sharing it here. I’m happy to send it via DM, it’s not a secret.

What network connection are you using to get these notifications?

If it’s a telco, they might have modified their network and your coverage might have changed.

If it’s WiFi, your router or an antenna might have come loose, or a neighbour has updated their WiFi network and is drowning out yours

Have you purchased and installed new equipment? It might be causing interference. An old piece of gear, a power supply, inverter, solar panel, could suddenly generate radio noise and stop things from working too.

You might think of wireless communication as unchanging, but it’s constantly updating and reacting to local conditions which in turn can vary from second to second.

Source: I’m a licensed radio amateur

Source?

In my experience, the single biggest bully on the internet are the servers controlled by Meta which in my experience literally perform DDoS attacks whilst crawling, hitting sites several orders of magnitude more than all the others combined.

Actively blocking them was the only option left.

Is this magical chip also fitted with this security feature?

https://bughunters.google.com/blog/5424842357473280/zen-and-the-art-of-microcode-hacking

Export to HTML, use pandoc (or sed/awk) to convert to markdown.

Export to HTML, use pandoc (or sed/awk) to convert to markdown.

Well, that’s “fun” … not.

I specifically backed this up within Google Maps to ensure that I kept this information.

If you turn GPS back on, does the behaviour change?

Have you rebooted your phone recently?

Have you asked your telco?

A piece of consumer electronics does not exist in a vacuum. Other models from other manufacturers are added and removed, affecting its value.

In my experience that only happened right before the new model was announced.

So, its value has reduced, or was it always overpriced?

Can’t wait!

So now I’ll get a special alert when I receive nudes?

Excellent … can’t wait until bot operators find new and exciting ways to use it to get more eyeballs on their scams.

It’s open source and researchers are already duplicating the process, so I’m not sure if that will ever happen.

I’m not sure where my copy of the book is, but “bump” right back at you.

The “I made this” factor is in my experience the primary driver, properly “justified” to management who also wants ownership.

I’m unsure what a fix looks like, given the preoccupation of HR departments hiring process with “young” and “innovative” - that HR speak for “cheap”, vs. “experienced” and “considered” - HR speak for you’re too old and expensive, but mostly too old.

As a software developer I’ve been dealing with UX design since the Apple Human Interface Guidelines hit the technical bookstores in the 1980’s and it’s staggering just how little any of this seems to matter today.

Most of the UX designers I’ve met are consummate graphic artists and designers, very few have any clue about what makes a user interface or understand that you can by definition not make the web pixel perfect or understand the nature of information absorption and screen clutter.

Right now on the screen I’m tapping this I can see 10 lines of text, and that’s counting paragraph breaks as a line. It’s ridiculous.

What are they optimising for, user frustration?

I hear you, but so far the integration of Google Workspace is compelling. That said, being unable to disable Gemini is fast adversely affecting the experience.

I have to say that the UI designers at Google are smoking crack and their designs are becoming less usable by the day.

Here’s some, on standard Android:

• Icons are now all the same shape, using similar colours, causing you to tap the wrong one more often.
• Google Home is now a confusing mixture of pop-ups, tabs, drop-downs and general weirdness, making something I use a hundred times a day (to control my house) a bad experience.
• Tap holding a message in Gmail to select it now moves the list to make space, but only in “All” view.
• Maps are taking up less and less space on the screen, making it harder and harder to see context and relationships between locations.
• Maps are now unusable in broad daylight because colour contrasts are now almost non-existent.

That’s just the tip of the iceberg. It’s an abomination and getting worse.

Well, that’s just not true.

The person receiving the donation receives something of value and the person who donates receives either a good feeling or a tax deduction, or both.

You made me curious.

It appears that there are 180 currencies recognised by the UN. It also appears that there are less independent currencies, the example I saw was the Danish Kroner which has a fixed exchange rate with the Euro.

What I don’t see in this are other forms of exchange. There’s the obvious crypto currencies, of which I’m in no doubt there are plenty.

But that’s not the only way to exchange value. Barter is one, donation is another. I suspect that there are plenty more.

So … like Earth?

For actual RF based radio around the planet there’s websdr and kiwisdr. Both those platforms have actual wideband receivers run by (mostly) radio amateurs and accessible by any web browser. It’s like having access to a collection of shortwave radio receivers.

Broadcastify is a platform where people share internet streams of local radio transmitters, also accessible via the web.

There’s radio applications like TuneInRadio that package some of this up and slather it in advertising.

Source: I’m a licensed radio amateur and this is what I do for fun :)

Disclaimer: I used Steam once.

Has anyone done any research into the quality of these 18,000 titles? What kind of uptake there is, how many purchases/downloads, etc. ?

Not sure how this is relevant, these numbers are routinely shared with clients and suppliers.

What on earth are those in charge of certification standards thinking they’ll achieve with requirements like this?

Link to the actual forum announcement:

https://www.lfgss.com/conversations/401475/

Quote from it:

On Sunday 16th March 2025 (the last day prior to the Act taking effect) I will delete the virtual servers hosting LFGSS and other communities, and effectively immediately end the approximately 300 small communities that I run, and the few large communities such as LFGSS.

The Nokia X20 I’m typing this on is part of the Android One program and the handset is still going strong, so much so that I bought another one.

You could just turn off your phone.

Wow.

If you get that wrong, right to left, it gets deleted.

In the new version, how do you edit the name, since long-click no longer works, and do you have any tokens that are for “Amazon Web Services”, which is uneditable and takes up most of the label space.

Well, mine was updated overnight by my benevolent overlords and it’s still only showing the partial editable text and now you can’t even edit it any more.

Not sure if it’s faster and still no access to the seed code, since not everyone uses a QR code.

Enshitification has well and truly set in.

Does it still take forever to launch if you have more than a screen full of tokens?

Does it still only show four characters of the editable component of the name?

Does it still refuse to show the secret as text if you load a QR code?

To enjoy yourselves doesn’t require that you all buy the latest gaming rig or even something new or identical. As long as what you decide on has games in common, you’re good.

“The beatings will continue until morale improves.”

I am not privy to your financial situation, but can you three pool your resources and find a common platform?

It’s a Nokia X20, running stock Android, currently 14, but it’s been that way on Android for as long as I remember.