qupada @ qupada @fedia.io

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1 yr. ago

Mine (also Ubuntu, also Intel, but Sony earbuds) also works great.

Almost the only time in recent memory it hasn't is when I'd accidentally kicked the cable out of the WiFi access point closest to the couch. My laptop was connected to one at the other end of the house, and it turns out that trying to stream video over 2.4GHz WiFi while listening on (also 2.4GHz) Bluetooth headphones isn't a match made in heaven.

Now Windows on the other hand. My work laptop (also Intel Bluetooth adapter) starts out fine after a reboot, but over the course of a week will go from taking 2-3 seconds for the headphones to connect once powered on, to 30-40 seconds. Sometimes the headphones will connect, disconnect, and then connect again before actually making any sound.

The one thing the two OSes have in common is switching between 2-way voice (HFP) and high-quality music (A2DP) modes is a problem. In Linux it's fairly reliable, but completely manual. In Windows it's "automatic", but frequently gets stuck in the wrong mode, or disconnects entirely when switching.

Unclear why weight is the metric they chose there. For things you're stuffing into a landfill, surely that's primarily a volume concern?

My city council has (for the entire 20 years I've lived here) used user-pays rubbish collection; you buy branded plastic bags at your local supermarket / corner store (60 litre bags, about $3.50 each) which covers the cost of the weekly collection from the roadside. Not enough rubbish to fill an entire bag that week? No problem. Had a cleanout of your house and need three bags? Also just fine.

It was the 3TB ST3000DM001 that was the really terrible one.

(so bad it has its own Wikipedia page)

I know WoW used bittorrent for game updates, it was built in and was the "standard" download mechanism.

https://worldofwarcraft.fandom.com/et/wiki/Blizzard_Downloader

I'm sure it's far from the only game that did.

And don't even get me started on getting back from the Mun, when if you do survive the landing.

Sorry Jebediah, that was a one-way trip.

Alternate panel 4: "I want to dill myself"

Old-timey doctors had a word for that procedure... "lobotomy". Cleaned your mind right out.

Would you also like some heroin or cocaine?

It would be the other way around, if at all.

"First-surface" mirrors where the reflective layer is on the front of the glass are quite fragile, so wouldn't typically used for residential applications (you'd remove the reflective coating by cleaning it).

A regular mirror has the reflective surface on the back of the glass (which is then is further coated with a protective paint), leading to the effect you describe.

I don't however know enough to say one way or the other whether a surveillance mirror would becessarily be a first-surface mirror.

The mod makes the repairable thin-and-light laptop significantly thicker

While I love every bit of what's going on here, "significantly thicker" doesn't even begin to describe things 😆

Yes and no.

Taking advantage of the very real waterproofing of the phones I have owned (past and present), I will just wash the damn thing off under the kitchen tap if it gets dirty, which I have with one of my previous phones done with a high-pressure restaurant-sink-style spray nozzle (I was making beer, and boiling the wort kicks a lot of sticky crap into the air).

That phone was fine afterward, and continued to work for several years after.

Also at a more basic level, it is (at least in theory) an assurance that they actually tested the damn thing, and didn't just slap a largely meaningless (and as already noted, "bigger number better") rating on the thing, as is largely the style of our times because consumer protection is dead and regulations are meaningless.

This is exactly the kind of should be done properly, or just not at all. Test it and rate it for the people who do care, or STFU, put the unqualified but perfectly reasonable label of "water resistant" on it, and the bulk of people who indeed do not care (or will be confused) will be no worse off than they are now.

Anything else is just annoying.

Yes, but I also get into a rage about manufacturers being dicks about it. People by and large don't seem to understand the IP rating scale is in fact two largely-unrelated scales, and companies slapping IP ratings on their products use that in what I feel are underhanded ways.

The values IPx1-IPx6 correspond to varying levels of resistance against directed streams of water. IPx7-IPx9 are degrees of resistance to submersion. The latter does not imply the former, not even a little bit.

It is in theory entirely possible to build a device that could withstanding being put in the bottom of a swimming pool that's being slowly filled with water, but failed from the higher pressure of a small amount of water falling on it from a certain direction.

But you still see phones listed just as "IP68", which tells you nothing. The better manufacturers will explicitly write the likes of "IP65/IP68"; showing that it reaches the 5 rating of "water jets 12.5litre/minute" but not the 6 rating of "powerful water jets 100litre/minute", but also IP67 "immersion <1 metre / <30 minutes" and IP68 "immersion >1 metre / >30 minutes".

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IP_code#Second_digit:_Liquid_ingress_protection)

The first one just needs to be retitled The Second-to-Last Witch Hunter, and everything will be fine again.

I've always heard this as

"the two hardest problems in computer science are naming variables, cache invalidation, and off-by-one errors"

Yours is a nice subtle variant, I like it.

Fair point. Games clearly need to start decoupling the UI scale/resolution from the general screen resolution.

In a somewhat parallel issue, I've found that playing games on the couch (usually with Steam in-home streaming, from a PC elsewhere in the house) I have to reduce the resolution because the game's UI is far too small at TV-watching differences.

There are two kinds of people who would like a refreshed Steam Deck, in my experience:

1. People who seem to think it needs to be faster. Since it appears to be crafted to provide suitable performance for the 720p display it has (which I don't personally think needs to be changed, considering the whole "portable" use case), this seems to just be a "bigger number better" argument and those people should probably go out and buy a Lenovo Legion / ROG Ally / whatever.
2. People who are otherwise happy, but think it should have a newer, more efficient processor to get longer battery life, and make less heat/noise in the process. There's a measurable gulf between the current Zen2/RDNA2 CPU and a theoretical modern Zen5/RDNA3.5 (or even RDNA4) model in that regard; it could be tuned to deliver roughly the same performance as the original (or a little more, for the handful of games that tend to miss their performance target slightly) but deliver longer battery life.

We got a hint at 2) with the OLED model's CPU using a newer manufacturing process improving thermals and battery life (of course it did also have a bigger battery). I think the number of people willing to pay a bit extra for what could be an even larger improvement in that area is probably more than some would like to admit.

(I personally fit in that latter category. Considering a full work day including a public transport commute and lunch break, not a whole lot of extra battery could well be the difference between having to carry a charger and not)

You're correct, it did... to "Edge WebView2".

Aka, basically Microsoft's in-house version of election. A change, certainly. Just not really an improvement.

That's "missing" as in "an additional problem that's not on your list", I brought it up as it's one I've run into myself with online installers; not actually delivering the version of something that you'd asked for.

You're missing one massive issue here, which is that - irrespective of the version you think you downloaded - they can use this tactic to force the latest version to be installed instead.

Need an older version, because they broke a feature, changed the license terms, made something that was previous free paid-for, or otherwise? Too bad. That installer is only ever going to do one thing, and it's the newest version (if, as you say, it continues to work at all).

They did, but I honestly preferred the old version. I swapped recently from a 1ii (21:9) to 1vii (19.5:9).

I now can't reliably use the phone one-handed and reach the entire way across the display with my thumb, which feels like a much bigger usability issue. Being unable to reach the top was mitigated by side-of-screen gestures that allowed access to the notification bar without reaching to the top of the display, so it was never actually a problem.

While I can indeed now reach the top of the screen with my thumb, the phone is wide enough that I can't firmly hold it while doing so, which really isn't an improvement if I'm liable to drop the damn thing.

And to be clear, this is with a very small real-world difference in size. If you look at GSM Arena's size comparison tool, the actual difference is only 3.1mm (1.9%) shorter, and 2.9mm (4.1%) wider: https://www.gsmarena.com/size-compare-3d.php3?idPhone1=13843&idPhone2=10096

The other thing I can also no longer do is watch a video and use another app at the same time; previously you could have a full-screen-width 16:9 video at the top of the screen, an app with an actually usable amount of height in the middle and the keyboard at the bottom and interact with everything. There's just not enough room for all three with the shorter aspect, the video always getting scrolled halfway off the screen when opening the keyboard.

Curiously, have you actually owned one of the earlier 21:9 models? Because I've noticed the absolutely overwhelming majority of "complaints" come from people who've never actually tried it, but my experience is you hand someone your (21:9) phone and every time they make a positive comment about it.

Losing these "unique" features is also the thing that is probable to kill Sony phones for good. Without some point of differentiation they'll become another "also-ran", selling devices that are otherwise similar to their competitors but cost more. That isn't sustainable long term. Just ask LG, HTC, or any other non-Samsung Android manufacturer who's no longer with us.

Carrot sticks and hummus are my go-to for this situation. It might not be the lowest calorie option, but still healthy without at all feeling like I'm torturing myself in the process.

Like so many things, there are degrees. Yes you can sit down with a big bowl of celery, but making yourself miserable isn't going to help you keep up the good habits.