Back in the days when you could dial numbers using the hook. Great for those taxi phones in supermarkets that had the keypad covered over.

YES THAT IS CORRECT AND NOBODY NEEDS TO SAY ANYTHING ELSE.

Waaaaaaaaay too expensive, but I’d love it if big eink displays became a thing, even with shit refresh rates, mostly because I want some for displaying Home Assistant dashboards.

This still works. Most debit and credit cards can still be used to authorise offline payments up to a set limit, though it’s kinda of moot if the PDQ’s battery is dead.

This depends on where and why. I know that in some parts of the Carribbean, for example, most towers will only last a day or two, but there are some that can last weeks with satellite backhauls providing minimal service to large areas.

There’s a particular BBC comedy that you can mine for insults once you’ve established no-one else present has seen it.

• He’s so dense light bends around him.
• As useless as a marzipan dildo
• As useless as lube at a funeral
• I’ve never seen anyone look so fucking ugly with just one head
• Do you know 90% of household dust is made of dead human skin? That’s what you are to me.
• Watching him work is like watching clown running across a minefield.
• He’s here, depriving a village somewhere of their twat.
• I’m like flypaper for dickheads today.
• Sorry I’m late. Traffic was an absolute bitch. No offence.

My personal variation, “couldn’t organise a pissup in a pissupery”.

Oh. Duckspeak. Ungood bellyfeel.

Entire confection 👅

“Here’s your WiFi. Oh, you want the password? Next you’ll be asking for DHCP.”

Austrian Audio Hi-X25 are excellent open-back headphones available with or without Bluetooth. They punch above their weight for the price, sounding - to my ear, at least - as good as headphones double the price.

“Bluesky” itself is trademarked and all the rest, but it uses AtProtocol which is a completely open federation protocol. AtProtocol doesn’t have the support of ActivityPub because it’s much newer and also more complicated (for good reason, but still).

The hardware is good and I like the idea in principle but Fairphone’s support and software QA is dreadful and you need to hope you never need the former because of problems with the latter. My FP5 was bricked by an update they pushed out and after six weeks of trying to get a solution from their support (four weeks of which they didn’t respond at all) I ended up claiming on insurance and buying a Pixel. According to the forums this problem is far from unique to me.

A firmware update from Fairphone bricked mine last year. Not impressed. Apparently it’s happened to a lot of people who went to an alternative OS (Lineage) then back to stock. I just woke up one day to a paperweight on my bedside table and the support was horrendous: it took over six weeks to get any response and after another month of back-and-forth with responses taking a couple of days at a time I ended up just claiming on insurance.

I was taught to use the Oxford comma by my parents, Ayn Rand and God. I had a strange upbringing.

For your Steam Deck. And your Linux laptop. And your Windows desktop. And your next handheld, which might be an MSI Claw or Lenovo Legion. And so on…

Right. “10% of a million versus 50% of a thousand” type situation. Plus, Steam’s pretty good at promoting the better games, even the obscure ones.

Proof (as if it was needed) that just running a reasonable storefront generates more than enough profit.

I will never forgive Apple for fucking over the open web. When the iPhone launched it was web-only. You could ‘install’ web apps, and any device APIs - accelerated graphics, hardware sensors, location, offline storage, intents, contacts lists, push notifications - were user-selected and presented as standard JavaScript interfaces. One app, literally every platform, and iPhone was there first. It was in a period where every platform was rushing to support web applications with high-performance browser engines and Apple looked like they were going to do for websites-as-applications what they had done for USB ten years earlier: recognise it as the best way forward and push it hard, compatibility be damned.

Then the iPhone started selling well and they got fucking dollar signs in their eyes, realising how much money there was to be made forcing everyone to develop on their platform, in their language, for thier devices. Apps, distribution channels, operating system, services, devices, development, all of it on their terms and on thier platforms. The second they became mainstream they started locking everyone into their vertical ecosystem and wringing as much cash out as they could, exposing their hipocracy and showing that they were as anti-competetive and destructive as Microsoft at their 1990s worst.

In 1980, a large number of experts in business and general tech predicted that by 1990 most written communications would be fully electronic, something akin to email. What they didn’t predict was the appearance of the fax machine, which was novel enough to be exciting but simple enough to be understood, and people flocked to it. As a result, electronic communication was stalled for about twenty years. I have no doubt that at some point in the future, Apps will be seen the same way but I think it will take a lot longer to get there.

Ja. Ich habe Deutsch gelernt. Kaffee mit Milch, bitte.