Shurimal

How does one find out what chips are in what USB sticks? Manufacturers don’t make this information available. At best you just find read and write speeds, usually just the max possible read speed and nothing else.

Third party apps: “OK. We’ll show ads. Muted. Behind a black overlay. If we really can’t find a workaround.”

In 2006, it became possible for anyone to search WorldCat directly at its open website [REDACTED], not only through the subscription FirstSearch interface where it had been available on the web to subscribing libraries for more than a decade before.

So how is this “hacking” if the information is publicly accessible for all?

Saying that AptX is lossless since 2016 is blatantly false. And yes, just like with HDMI and USB, AptX standard naming and Qualcomm feature naming schemes are a misleading mess.

There are 4 flavours of AptX (linked article states this as well), and only the latest supports lossless, but is available only on very few chipsets and devices so I even forget that it exists, because for all practical purposes it doesn’t.

Denon Perl Pro, Bose earbuds and Cambridge Audio M100 are the only non-chinese earphones that I know of that support AptX lossless and the latter are not even listed by my local importer. Plus, you need a very specific (expensive) phone to use them because AptX Lossless is not available for all chipsets. Basically, Asus ROG 8 or Xiaomi Redmi K70 Pro for ones available to buy for me, and then it’s not available at every retailer, either, and the b2b wholesalers I have access to through work only list ROG Phone 8 (~1200€ retail).

In conclusion, to make use of lossless AptX you have to jump through many hoops and spend a lot of money—700+€ phone and the 200+€ earphones. The standard is far from being, well, a standard; common and widespread. 99,9% of devices on sale and in use by people only support older AptX standards, mostly AptX HD (which is not lossless!).

No, it isn’t. It just has higher bitrates, but still not enough for lossless.

Counterpoints:

1. Good IEM-s don’t really need ANC. If the silicone tip doesn’t isolate enough you can use foam tips that basically function like hearing protection earplugs.
2. No battery is even better than replaceable battery.
3. Wired IEM-s never get obsolete. At worst you’ll need to replace the silicone tips from time to time, or the cable and today even 20€ Chinese IEM-s have replaceable cables. With good care wired IEM-s can last decades.

Nothing to do with ADA conversions (and digital-to-digital, eg SRC or bitdepth conversion, is completely transparent if done even remotely adequately). Small drivers close to eardrum with good seal just seem to be easier to manage when it comes to frequency response and distortion. Most open circumaural headphones, for example, seem to have deficiencies in lower end no matter the price.

In-ear phones have the potential of having the highest fidelity of all headphone types. So, no, being a “codec snob” is completely justified. Though I personally won’t be using BT phones before we get lossless connection as a standard. Wired are cheaper, last longer and have less environmental impact during production and after EOL.

Looks pretty and is stable, but two fatal flaws:

1. Browsing by genres displays individual pieces/songs, not albums. Browsing albums or artists doesn’t allow any filtering by genres, years or any other metadata. Haven’t found a way to change that behaviour and as someone who listens to albums, not songs, and has thousands of albums this is a complete dealbreaker for me.

2. No support for UPnP/DLNA to stream from my phone to my stereo (or, for that matter, any modern AV receiver/streamer/network stereo receiver all which support UPnP/DLNA).

Most entry level and midrange phones are still USB 2.0, even if they use USB-C physical port. USB 2.0 is 480 Mbit/s max, even old Wi-Fi 5 allows 1 Gbit/s speeds or even more. At this point the limit will be the writing speed of eMMC/SD card so even USB 3.0 becomes superfluous. After setting up my NAS, Jellyfin, Navidrome, Syncthing and Tailscale I haven’t ever connected my phone to a PC for file transfer—photos get synced automatically, music/videos get streamed and if I need to move files manually I can just do it from/to the SMB share over the network.

Counterpoint: my eyes are not what they used to be 20 years ago and 6,5…7" screens hit the sweet spot for useability. Especially since bezels are super thin these days so a 6,7" phone today is barely larger in total dimensions than a 5,5" phone 6 or 7 years ago.

The perfect catch-22. Carrying a smartphone? It will be seized, searched and used against you. Not carrying a smartphone? This fact itself is used as evidence against you. This is something straight outta NKVD playbook, Beria would be proud.

Or many service providers competing on price, quality of service and features, not competing on exclusivity like they do now.

Like grocery stores. Imagine if only one chain has the exclusive rights to sell potatoes and another one has rights to pasta. They can ask whatever price they want, because what you gonna do? Go to another store to get your 'taters cheaper? Hah, you’ll cry and you’ll pay what we ask! (BTW, growing your own potatos and sharing them with your neighbor infringes on our rights and is illegal. We’ll sue you to oblivion if we catch you doing it.)

Set up Tailscale as exit node to your local network.

Make sure that your network is not standard 192.168.0.x or 192.168.1.x IP address range, but something like 192.168.101.x so you don’t have IP conflicts when accessing from a friend’s house or workplace wifi.

Set up Nginx to redirect your home server IP (eg. 192.168.101.5) to the correct port for your dashboard like Heimdall or Dashy.

That’s it. Works like a charm for me if set up this way.

Addendum: if you have trouble on Android, disable MagicDNS.

For a publicly traded company the people who buy their products are not the customers for whom to create value.

Shareholders are the real customers.

People who buy the products become a resource to extract value from.

I agree, a 6,6" screen isn’t that big, but it sure is and feels bigger than the 5" screen of my old phone. As I said, just big enough to not feel like trying to use apps through a keyhole.

With a 6,6" phone I don’t need a tablet for everyday carry because the screen is just big enough. Back in the day of 5" screens I always had a need for a tablet. Nevertheless, tablets are great for certain professional tasks.

Like taking inventories, putting together orders and other warehouse tasks where I need to work with spreadsheets on the go but a laptop is just too unwieldy.

Tablets are also absolutely great for live mixing with digital boards—you can walk around in the audience and adjust the sound on the spot. Same for adjusting the system settings while doing installations. And for small gigs, the mixing board can be tucked away in a stage corner and not clutter the floor.

Pilots use tablets as digital kneeboards for checklists and other necessities.

Tablets also make great POS devices and there are many specialised models for just that task.

Tablets are simply fantastic for wallmounted or desktop control panels for smarthomes. You can even use the front camera for motion detection so the screen comes automagically on when you approach it. I use WallPanel, but Fully Kiosk Browser is also very popular.

Honestly, the title confused me slightly—wasn’t sure if it was about a workstation PC, GPU, ARM based microserver, gaming laptop or what. 24 GB of RAM and 240 W charging seem completely ridiculous for a phone.

Organic Maps FTW!

IP-ratings might suffer, but I’d wager that a global reduction in e-waste is more important.

Nokia made water resistant phones that had replaceable batteries 20 years ago. I owned two, both survived several water immersions.