What’s the benefit of a phone-sized e-reader? I always have my phone with me, and I do most of my reading on that.

I would like a larger e-reader, so I didn’t have to flip pages so often, but not enough to pay for it.

How do you market an encryption platform exclusively to criminals?

Apparently through word of mouth and suggestions by undercover agents.

innocents that downloaded this as a secure messaging system

The app wasn’t made available for download. The FBI bought a few thousand Pixels, flashed a custom ROM onto them, and then installed the messaging apps. In theory they cost thousands of dollars to buy.

It’s entirely possible some innocents used the system, but it’s unclear how selling rooted hardware to alleged criminals would induce them to commit crime.

See https://www.npr.org/2024/05/31/1197959218/fbi-phone-company-anom

Entrapment techniques like that make me sick.

What was the entrapment? The FBI sold phones to suspected criminals and monitored the conversations, didn’t they?

I have vivid memories of sitting through the copyright banner/FBI warning, waiting for the janky menu to load, trying to figure out which button had focus, starting the movie, sitting through ads for movies that came out years ago, and then the movie would play.

Maybe my memory isn’t accurate, but I don’t miss DVD menus.

I feel the same way. I like the streaming/VCR experience of hitting play and seeing the media. Those old DVD menus that wanted me to mess with extras sucked.

Doing this on-device is pretty awesome.

There are so many great reasons to hate on Disney. This one is so incredibly over the top.

Considering the lawsuits, now seems like a good time.

Our volunteer ambassadors will attend local Linux and open-source events, meet with other Framework laptop users and potential community members, answer questions, gather feedback, and showcase Framework laptops and parts to those interested. Ambassadors will be in close touch to Framework employees and they will represent the Linux community, feedback and requests directly to our engineers and to our internal Linux team.

That sounds way too close to unpaid labour. I’m all for recognizing community members with perks, merch, and other freebies; but this looks more like soliciting volunteers for unpaid PR.

UWB? UwU

Keeping the thermometer in the 9 Pro seems like the most interesting part of this story.

I’ve started using the thermometer in my P8P. The UI is terrible. But sometimes I want to know how hot something is.

I think this misses the cultural shift around the popularization of the web/Internet.

There used to be a high barrier to entry for creating content. The folks who were capable and willing to surmount that barrier posted stuff that nerds like us enjoyed. It was really hard to monetize (unless porn), so it was typically free.

Then social networks came along and made it easy for everyone to post. Just like normal society, the non-nerds started drowning out the nerdy early adopters.

Certain networks became cool (Twitter, Medium) because cool normies were on there (aka the network effect), and that pulled many nerds of self hosted software.

Other social networks were monetizable and incredibly accessible (YouTube), which pulled many other nerds off self hosted software.

Proprietary networks suck morally, but they’re incredibly easy to use and democratizing. That cranks their network effect to 11 and makes the old school web less rewarding.

It was one of the reasons I went with a Pro. Okay, it wasn’t a significant reason, but I was thinking about it.

I was pretty disappointed when Google’s Find My Network didn’t support UWB on release. Here’s hoping they finally support it if/when they release their own tracker in the fall.

Didn’t the last few Pixel Pros have UWB hardware? Is that enabled yet?

finally, that feature nobody wanted

I have no idea if I’ll ever use this, but it sounds like a great feature.

no no everything the government does is bad and malware and spyware and not foss and you should install graphene

• Android 15 could revamp the lock screen and notifications panel to look better in landscape mode on phones.
• The lock screen can’t even be rotated into landscape mode on phones right now.
• Meanwhile, the notifications panel can be rotated into landscape mode, but the layout sacrifices a lot of space.

• Android 15 allows watch companion apps to control the media output of other apps.
• This could let users change the device their phone is outputting audio to right from their watch.
• Google could introduce this feature to the Pixel Watch in a future update, but we don’t know if or when that’ll happen.

Dimmererest