Em Adespoton

The phone isn’t going to end up in China from people passing them hand to hand; they’re going to be collected somewhere and bundled for shipping in an EM-protected covering of some sort. The record of the route they took right up until they go silent will be available for every phone. Looking at an aggregate map of this data should give the police a pretty good idea of what’s going on.

I suspect the difficulty is that the police need to get a data release from each individual involved and then get Google/Apple and/or the owners to voluntarily share the historical location data with the police… which most people aren’t willing to do out of an abundance of caution.

Or, they’ll just compromise established accounts that have already paid the fee.

GPTs are designed with translation in mind, so I could see it being extremely useful in providing me instruction on a topic in a non-English native language.

But they haven’t been around long enough for the novelty factor to wear off.

It’s like computers in the 1980s… people played Oregon Trail on them, but they didn’t really help much with general education.

Fast forward to today, and computers are the core of many facets of education, allowing students to learn knowledge and skills that they’d otherwise have no access to.

GPTs will eventually go the same way.

…one step at a time.

Wait… Star Wars has feet?

Let’s re-title that to “Owners are losing access to smartphone app updates and product features when companies go bust”

It’s exactly how Cloud SaaS is designed. It was a bad idea to do it with your smoke detector and smart lock, and it’s still a bad idea with automobiles.

I think they just left out “…in the lab.”

The research is great, the article is horrible in many ways; it was obviously written by someone who didn’t understand what they were writing about.

Even leading with a high power laser array image when the article is about heating plastic with a low power non-visible radiation….

Yeah; just set your article to 2x speed :D

I kid; all this video is going to vanish one day, and the text will remain.

And for most things, text is a highly superior format. Sometimes you need a few images or a video clip to supplement it, but I like to ingest information while my ears are otherwise occupied. I keep my phone and computer muted most of the time. I often watch videos with closed captioning enabled on 2x just to scrub through and find the 10 seconds of actual information in the 15 minute video.

Ah, so you went for a phone battery in the end.

Isn’t there just a video we could watch?

I just imagined what would happen to their GPUs if bricks were used :D

You know those “do not lick the flagpole” signs?

They’re not there because the building owners think YOU will lick the flagpole. They’re there because someone else already HAS licked the flagpole.

MS adds these things because there is legal consequence to them allowing certain groups to use their software. So they explicitly call out that those groups cannot legally use their software.

That way if an Iranian arms dealing pedophile is caught using their software, Microsoft doesn’t get sanctioned by the US government.

Yes, at the point where the only thing hindering free software from running on a device is the policies of the organization SELLING the device, it should be the policies that change, not the ability of software to remain free.

I choose iOS because of the walls, but I also sideload software. That sideloading is limited in the number of products I can sideload at a time, and it requires a sync connection with a computer. I kinda sorta agree with Apple’s restricting of sideloaded software to a limited number of apps, but the computer/XCode requirement could easily be solved in other ways.

The goal is to make it difficult to trick someone into installing a malicious payload; Apple should allow individuals to self-sign software and run it in a sandbox— just like they do with Progressive Web Apps.

I mean, if I can download and run a PWA of a Palm emulator from a web page, why can’t I do the exact same thing with the same levels of protection with a native app? Only thing stopping me is an Apple App Store policy.

I’d also highly recommend reading https://endsoftwarepatents.org/2023/04/googles-decision-to-deprecate-jpeg-xl-emphasizes-the-need-for-browser-choice-and-free-formats/ — more than features and future proofing, the big issue here is patents. Google controls the patents for AVIF.

Then again, I use HEIF, which is alternately patent encumbered, and default to PNG and SVG for web-facing graphics.

Big question is: who’s storing the email, you or them? Your mail clients handle POP3 and IMAP as well as SMIME and GPG so the server doesn’t have to have any special features itself.

Since you want something your wife can manage, stay away from the forwarders. Whatever you choose, check Spamhaus and SURBL to see if the provider has a history of getting on their lists.

Make sure you select one that can stay in business providing email service, so you don’t have to worry about the company collapsing/being bought out/pushing ads/selling PII/bundling mail with some more lucrative service.

I’ve been using vim/GVim for over 30 years; with only minimal tweaks I’ve used it with maybe 15 different programming languages/compilers, a few of which needed custom configurations written to do anything useful.

While everyone else is struggling to get on with the IDE du jour, I just get stuff done without having to learn anything new other than a new syntax and library set.

GVim is available pretty much everywhere? And it’s infinitely customizable.

It does have a learning curve, but then you get to use that knowledge for the rest of your life.

Color blindness perpetuates structural racism. On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a goldfish.

There’s the cultural issues, but those aren’t limited to African Americans vs White Americans on the Internet.

Your rules should apply to everyone, including those two groups. The trickier part is dealing with privilege.

Depends.

Calligra has a great interface.

I’m unsure however how it does with importing/exporting documents, and how well it works with OpenDocument formats.

LibreOffice can edit my ClarisWorks documents from 35 years ago and can also open and edit my OpenOffice documents and display them exactly as they were 19 years ago.

I’ve used Mac OS since 1988, BSD/UNIX since 1990, Linux since 1993 and Windows since 1995.

Due to my expertise with all these operating systems, I make enough money to have a life.

I predominantly use Apple hardware, partly because I can easily run all these OSes on it.

With an Epson, HP, Lexmark or Brother printer?

I sense another meme coming on….