Google Now is what the Discover page/feed was when swiping left from the furthest left home screen. It used to be a collection of extremely useful information based on things like date, time, location, contents of your mail box, etc.

It used to just hand you all your reminders, weather info, ticketing information from your inbox, when to leave for an event, etc. It was extremely useful.

So now it's just a blog spam thing, and it occasionally slips in useful info somewhere in the feed. I can't stand it. There was also Google Now On Tap, which was basically what became the Assistant. It too, was better.

I like Jeroba, but the scrolling is still a mess. So, I'm using Liftoff for the time being and peeking in on others as they come up. Jeroba is still installed though, so if that scrolling gets fixed I'll probably move to that.

The GameCube, Wii, and Wii U all use the same basic setup: PowerPC G3 CPU and an ATi/AMD GPU with an upgrade each generation. They are, in effect, very similar to how the PS4 and Xbox One started their own current trends. In fact, the Wii U can run GameCube games natively with some effort, and Wii games out of the box.

Planet Oat has some tasty varieties, I'm a big fan of their Blueberry Oat Crunch. Also, Dole Whip is dairy free as well and is getting more popular just about everywhere.

Otherwise lactaid is always good if it helps you at all and you still want ice cream.

I'm excited for comfort improvements. The Quest 2 is largely fine, but I can't really do longer play sessions like I could with the Rift.

That and clarity improvements. The Quest 2 already doesn't really have much of a SDE, but larger sweet spots is always appreciated.

Depending on how reviews go, I'll probably pick one up and pass the Quest 2 onto a friend.

From what I can tell, Odin should still work on US devices, but I don't think that its been kept current with devices and Android versions. Most of what I'm seeing is support for Android 9.0 and later, which is pretty out of date at this point. That being said, it's not something I've messed with much, so I'm happy to defer to someone else with more direct experience.

Samsung is a separate kettle of fish in that they make things difficult while keeping the bootloader technically unlocked. Things like a lack of fastboot option, or bespoke for Samsung security changes, and a whole mess of other things. Carriers do also impose addition restrictions for locked models.

Most Motorola phones have unlockable bootloaders. The ones in their range that don't are the carrier specific models.

Motorola Moto Edge (2021)

Pros: Moto's classically lite skin with sensible additions that can be turned off if you don't want them, great battery, great performance, really just a well rounded device.

Cons: I think I legally have to mention the update cadence, and lack of long-term support, but honestly it doesn't bother me. Android versions haven't mattered much past, what, Jelly Bean? Though longer security support would be nice. Also, the camera can be a little soft, but I don't take a ton of photos so I'm rather ambivalent on it.

Honestly, I paid a good price for an unlocked device that still holds up amazingly well. I'm very satisfied.

I haven't done much with it in a while, but I'm also not giving up on it, so I suppose it's still valid lol.

I collect LaserDiscs

I got started with the format around 2010, and it was super neat to delve into this old, but strangely good, format. I found that most players and films were super cheap, and as a poor family with really no ability to move to HD yet, the SD format picture was clearly worse than DVD, but not so much so that it was unwatchable or anything.

I spent a lot of time collecting new films, looking at players, etc. etc., but I took a break while in college. Turns out that in that time everything went wild, and now the format is expensive to collect for. So much so that I've basically stopped at the moment. It's still a super neat format though, and I'm not about to offload all my kit just yet.

For anyone looking for info about the format, I'd recommend Techmoan on YouTube. Matt does a lot of interesting tech videos, and the handful he's done on LaserDisc are quite good.

I still do, but not in the same capacity.

With the death of BaconReader I don't scroll as much, and just from looking at my front page, I imagine it's not only the summer doldrums that have thinned it out so much. It's just... harder to find good discussion there, and what I do find is often charged in some way, or very thin. So, I stick around for some of the communities that I'm more active in, but I'm also doing things on Lemmy, and a few other places. Honestly, idk that I'll ever full drop Reddit in the same way that I did, say, MySpace, mostly in that there's probably going to be some value somewhere on the site. But, it's certainly not my main source of idle scrolling or engagement anymore.

Also, yes, I know I can still make BR work, but at this point I'll just keep using Reddit in browser with uBlock Origin.

Coming Soon^TM

But yeah, they're plugging away at it yet. Basically, K-9 sat in maintenance mode for a good while, and while it worked, there's a lot of tidying up to do yet. I imagine they'll have the Thunderbird name on it once it has some of the bigger pieces in place.

I've been emulating this lately as I remember renting it a lot as a kid. For as bad as it could have been, it's actually like, decent as a game. Wild lol.

They've been selling NFT avatars and avatar parts for a bit now. They're not like, $1800 single unit ape pics, but they are a limited run set of digital items purchased for real money. They actually gave most people one for free like 2 years ago or something.

A big thing to bear in mind is that Reddit has been around since 2005, but has only had an official app since 2016. For context, the first Facebook app came out in 2008, and while Reddit certainly wasn't that big at the time, it's still weird that it took so long to actually get an official app out there. More over, Reddit didn't start from scratch. They bought up the Alien Blue 3rd party app, which was the top dog on iOS at the time, and reworked it into the official Reddit app.

The point here being that, for a very long time, 3rd party apps were the only reasonable way to browse Reddit on mobile. Even after the official app came out, Reddit themselves stated there was no intent for 3rd party apps to go away. For a lot of us, those 3rd party apps simply were Reddit on mobile.

To more directly answer you question though, I used BaconReader for 11 years on Android. BaconReader still to this day has a slew of customization and tweaking options that the official app just doesn't have. Even simple features, like color coding the left edge of comment blocks, thereby making it much, much easier to keep track of where comment threads diverge. These things also weren't limited to BaconReader, as most 3rd party apps came to the same conclusions: there's pretty simple ways to improve the Reddit experience by just offering a few extra options and thinking a bit about how people use the site.

BaconReader was light, fast, barely used any data, and just worked really well. By contrast, the official app just... doesn't feel all that well put together. The basic usability options everyone else figured out years ago aren't present, the app is more than double the size of what BaconReader was, it positively guzzles data, and while there's lots of updates and feature adds, none of them do much to actually enhance the experience of... you know, browsing and interacting on Reddit. For me, the official app really isn't any better than just using a web browser on my phone, and that certainly uses less data and is less fussy, so that's what I use now. Certainly cuts down on just endless scrolling though.

They never even updated the API to show ads... Like, you could've worked on that at any time, it's your own API.

Yup. I was plenty happy to pay to keep using BaconReader. Give everyone a few months to set that up and I think things would've been fine. Instead, we get basically the most ham fisted way it could've gone.

I've used BaconReader for the last 11 years, and at this point it's even hard to think about removing it from my phone. I know it doesn't do anything anymore, but it's probably been the most consistent app on every one of my devices since starting with it. Just feels weird to think about uninstalling it.

Just a heads up OP, Capcom did improve the multiplayer experience in Monster Hunter Rise. No more waiting to join a friend till after they've seen a cut scene. Honestly, makes playing with other people a lot smoother. Also, Avengers was kinda rough imo. I picked it up for about $8 a few months back after they mentioned it was going down and all the content was included, found the main story pretty meh, and gave up on getting to the DLC since it would take take a good bit of grinding to get to it. Certainly not the worst I've ever played... but wow does it leave a lot to be desired. Here's hoping you have more fun with it.

As for me: if I'm counting Friday, PowerWash Simulator dropped the SpongeBob DLC on Thursday, so I finished that out. Really fun, super high quality, though a shame it doesn't appear to have the music present. That being said, music licensing is wild, so I don't really hold it against the devs.

Planning to get back into Final Fantasy XIV some more as I've been out of it for months and just kinda wanna play it some more. It has literally been months though, so I'm super terrified of getting back into like, the actual new content. Just gotta shake the rust off I guess, so I've been cleaning up some solo stuff to get the feel back.

And since I've got the 4th off as well, probably going to tip into some Boltgun as I haven't finished it yet. It's good, but it hasn't grabbed me like some of the other boomer shooters I've played lately. Oh well.