My Fairphone 5 lasted all of six months.

I installed LineageOS on it, but then went back to stock when I realised my bank’s app didn’t work. All was good until the next OS update utterly bricked it - and I really mean bricked. Loads of people on the forums had the same issue, and apparently it’s happened many times before. It took well over a month for FP support to send an automatic reply to my messages, then another two weeks for them to tell me I’d be expected to pay for the repair. I ended up claiming on insurance and buying a Pixel, which happily jumps back and forth between stock and GrapheneOS.

So, how about “How to test a firmware update 101” or “How to support a phone 101” instead?

Did they forget the “to”?

I can also explain Microsoft’s straglehold on enterprise/government/institutional IT in two words: Group Policy. Nothing - absolutely nothing - from any other OS maker comes close to the granular level of configurability, customisation and flexibility that comes with Group Policy, not even ChromeOS or iOS.

Modern birds are more closely related to tyrannosaurus rex than tyrannosaurus rex was to stegosaurus. Modern birds are, by any reasonable definition, dinosaurs and sometimes they act like it.

Clever girl.

I used to have an iMac that I loved (screen was excellent) but it quickly became a shitbox (because Apple) so I turned it into a X Server for my far more powerful Linux box. Is there a modern equivalent of that? Basically turn it into a thin client?

Edit: for kiosks, Windows 10 can be quite happy on 1GB RAM, but that 16GB storage is a problem.

UK here. It’s just not a thing any more. I regularly drive - or am a passenger - on a ~200 mile round trip and insect strikes just don’t happen.

That said, I recently drove from the North of England to the South of France. Almost as soon as we crossed the Channel we were instantly getting insects splattered on the windscreen to the point we had to refill buy some bright pink no-nonsense washer fluid at the next services. So I assume some counties are more responsible than others with their use of pesticides.

I recently drove from the North of England to the South of France. Almost as soon as we crossed the Channel we were instantly getting insects splattered on the windscreen to the point we had to refill buy some bright pink no-nonsense washer fluid at the next services.

Sheēble pārpmpā rpm gek dē parp ¡cheese! flurdle,

Not that I’ve seen and I’d take what Purism say with a grain of salt: they’ve acted like pretty shitty gatekeepers themselves. Nothing they mentioned in the article seems too egregious in truth and they’re exaggerating the scale of it: Play Store app DRM exists already, and the restrictions on browser-downloaded apps they mention can be bypassed (albeit by having to go into settings) and don’t apply to apps installed through other apps stores (F-Droid, etc).

No. Unfortunately, ActivityPub just isn’t geared up for that kind of thing. It’s why BlueSky uses a different federation protocol called AtProtocol which is a lot more demanding than ActivityPub but is specifically intended for Twitter/TikTok style services.

100% this. Latency is far more important than bandwidth for most things and I’d much rather have a 50/20 FTTP service than a 300/100 cable or DSL line.

How dare you bring nuance, experience and moderation into the conversation.

Seriously, though, I am a firm believer that no tech is inherently bad, though the people who wield it might well be. It’s rare to see a good, responsible use of LLMs but I think this is one of them.

You’re surprisingly wrong. Landlines exist but there is basically nowhere left in the world where landlines outnumber mobiles (except places like North Korea, obvs). Mobile networks are literally cheaper to run than landline networks and that gets more and more true as the quality of infrastructure drops.

I was once in New York using an AT&T payphone and trying to place a reverse-charge (or “international collect”) call to the UK and the operator REFUSED to accept that UK phone numbers are ten digits long. You better believe I put that thing through it’s paces.

Replace “inside of a highschool” with literally any location with reasonable footfall to get the same answer.

In the North of England that’s called ‘shittin yer keks’.

They tried doing the same thing in the UK with a comedy duo, Mitchell (PC) and Webb (Mac). They were best known at the time for a Channel 4 show, Peep Show, where Mitchell played an educated, qualified, no-nonsense, go-getting, straight-talking realist who was a bit awkward and frumpy, while Webb played an entitled, self-aggrandising, directionless, scatterbrained half-wit convinced he deserved greatness… I forget where I was going with this.

Flanian Pobble Beads

Once we get the Americans to write the date properly we should probably agree on the symbols we’re using as decimal and thousand delimitation.

Your cognitive ability changes with you. Your human thoughts, emotions, memories, reasoning, skills, understanding and desires are destroyed.