If Mozilla really starts to go downhill, what are the chances we get a Linux kernel-style community fork that we can rely on instead? Curious why that hasn’t happened before – perhaps because Mozilla has always toed the line of not-quite-awful enough?

I just hope we can keep an alternative browser engine alive. Would be nice if some rich person would just set up a funding model that can pay a few devs to keep it going indefinitely without ads or spyware.

A couple of years now. I messed around with the Secret Menu settings today and I might have solved it; my guess is that there are some “default” ads cached forever on certain settings.

Weird, I’ve had it disconnected since the factory reset.

Maybe I should connect it, let it load new ads, and then cut it off again?

The ad on the right side of the home screen always shows up for me, even with a pi-hole setup at home. I actually ended up factory resetting my roku tv and disconnected it from the inyernet entirely a couple years back for that exaxt reason. Except roku OS 10+ actually gas built-in ads on the right side that show up even if you’re offline.

…so how did you get rid of the ads entirely? Because I’d love to do that myself.

You could potentially match on audio, though – look for the 15 seconds of podcast audio preceding the ad, and the 15 seconds following it, if folks reported it in a sponsorblock way.

Alternatively, we could build a shazam-style database of 30 second podcast ads, then skip them when they’re identified. There isn’t much variety out there.

Hopefully the next Fairphone closes that spec gap. I could easily live with 2022 specs for a long time, giving plateauing performance gains, as long as the phone is supported with updates.

Of course, I would also kill for a headphone jack and a 5.4-5.8" iphone mini-sized screen. It’s so frustrating that I want to buy a fairphone but the compromises are too much.

What are the chances that an IR LED hat would get you run over by a self-driving vehicle? We already know they don’t deal well with anything out of the ordinary, and they routinely slam into trucks and barriers.

Maybe I should start walking at an irregular pace like the Fremen in Dune to throw off gait detection. Since it’s probably trained on an average lazy American gait I suspect an intentionally irregular gait would completely fuck the algorithm. Of course, if you’re the only one doing it you might wind up even more identifiable. But maybe you could introduce some subtle irregularities that most people wouldn’t notice in person but a computer would pick up.

Yeah, roll one out with a 5.8" screen and a headphone jack amd I’ll buy it at a premium. I’d shell out even more for a true iPhone mini-sized phone if they make the battery fat enough for decent battery life – small phones can still be ergonomic and light enough with a little extra chonk.

Giant screen, no headphone jack? No thanks, I might as well buy a $50 android phone at a gas station.

10/10 review of purelymail as a 2 year user.

Cost me $20 so far. Because the service is just a service, not a massive ponzi scheme. We need more devs like the creator!

Plus the M7 had a nicer aluminum unibody. The M8 had plastic on the front. Still handsome, but not the same level of gorgeous macbook-style design the M7 had. Fuck, I’d rock an M7 today if they trimmed the glass bezel down, removed the hardware nav buttons, and tossed in some new hardware.

Citymapper is the gold standard. Osmand is excellent, except for delays. Many countries have third party top-tier apps for transit and train navigation – Trainline comes to mind in the UK, but it varies by region.

The containers UI is damn near unusable, they’ve squeezed so many of those “offers” into the tiny addon manager popup.

I wish Mozilla had management who understood their userbase. But instead they keep pulling this crap which only makes me (and likely most other power users) less likely to use Mozilla branded products.

Saw someone open a PR with this fully implemented a couple of months ago.

Goddamned PM faffed about “UI research necessary before we make changes”, linked them to a bugzilla post closed in favor of a JIRA ticket only internal users could view…

And then closed the PR, denying the change. And we wonder why Mozilla has been struggling so much lately.

Yeah, the small car thing is a perfect parallel. The market doesn’t necessarily fit preferences perfectly: instead, companies optimise for whatever MOST folks will buy that nets them the most money.

They make more money selling a large phone with a bigger sticker price and a bigger profit margin, so they make big phones. And the most phone-hungry people, power users, who buy a new phone every year or so, tend to buy big phones. So they cater to that group.

Think of it this way: when I bought my iPhone SE 2016 7 years ago, I cast maybe $100 of profit “vote” in the marketplace.

Every time someone buys a $1700 folding phone, they cast something between $500 and $1000 of profit “vote” in the marketplace. And they do that every year, not once every 7.

Of course, I’d be willing to spend a lot more on a really decent small phone. But nobody in the market has really experimented with that model yet. And it is admittedly harder to fit components into a smaller phone body (though not as hard as Apple would have you believe – after all, the 14 and 15 literally takes up more space with a useless empty plastic SIM card spacer than the headphone jack used to take.

I’ve looked at the Unihertz phones quite a bit, but the cell bands and camera have stopped me so far. Your Lemmy instance implies that you’re in the EU, so you should give it a shot if you can stomach the crappy camera. I’m afraid no Unihertz phone has IMS or voLTE support in the USA, so it’s an open question if you’ll even be able to use them at all on our networks in a year or two :(

From the article:

“The problem is Apple has exclusive rights to [the iPhone Mini’s] display — so, even with the line being discontinued, [Samsung Display] isn’t going to give us access,” he told supporters last month.

Sounds like we’re splitting hairs: no other OEM is ordering the Mini-sized display, and this line certainly implies some kind of exclusivity. I’ve been following the thread on the Small Android Phone discord as well, and what I’ve seen there aligns with that understanding.

As far as I know, no small manufacturer ever gets displays built specifically for them. Even Pebble, which was a lot more popular than Small Android Phone, used preexisting displays. It just takes a lot of time, knowledge, and money to create a custom display.

Bad summary. TL;DR:

• Almost all phones used to be a lot smaller than the smallest phones today
• Today’s “small” phones are basically all the same size as the standard Apple and Samsung models. There’s nothing smaller.
• Sony and Google’s phones are honkin big.
• Folding phones are really honkin big unfolded, so if you have small hands, you’re screwed unless you never open them.
• Unihertz makes shitty small phones for people who aren’t very picky.
• Small Android Phone, a project started by the former founder of Pebble, is struggling to source a display smaller than the current Apple and Samsung flagships. The best candidates are a folding phone cover screen and refurbished iPhone Mini screens.
• Small Android Phone is concerned that their window of opportunity is closing and many small phone lovers will move to larger phones before they can launch.
• The author, a current small phone lover and recovering physical keyboard addict, was bamboozled into buying a Z Flip on sale. It is both thick and very large when unfolded, and will likely end in tears.
• “AI” summarizers are literal garbage that will make you miss very important details in any stories you trust them to read for you.

I’m definitely a small phone lover. I don’t watch videos on my phone if I can avoid it and tend to consume text-heavy content.

Currently bouncing between an Xperia XZ1 Compact running Lineage 17.1 and an iPhone SE 2016 (!!!) running iOS 15. I get security updates for both, but it’s clear that I’ll have to move to a different phone in the next year or two.

Honestly at this point I just wish Apple would bring out an “iPhone Classic” based on the 4,5, or Mini body. Throw a headphone jack on there, a TouchID power button, and I’d pay serious money for it on launch day. I’d prefer an SD card slot, but if I know the phone will last for 3-5 years, I can pay a couple hundred extra bucks for 512GB of storage.

I just do not get folding phones. I understand that others like them, but I’ve never been a tablet guy. I suppose I would consider one with an internal e-ink screen, so I could combine my e-reader and phone into a single device… but I don’t think I’d enjoy using a phone that’s 1.5-2x the standard thickness of modern phones (not counting those massive camera bumps!). Plus the durability issue – I would absolutely not trust any modern folding phone to last 5+ years, and at the $1000+ price point, it damn well better last 5+ years.

Above all else, I prefer small phones for two reasons:

• my phone can “disappear” into my pocket, even if I’m walking, biking, running, or playing a sport
• I can use my phone with one hand on public transit, or doing one of the above activities if I decide to listen to music during that activity

It’s really frustrating that phone companies don’t bother with small phones any more. But nobody is even trying – and never has tried – to market a small phone that stays out of your way but helps you when you need it. Even Apple barely marketed the Mini at all (and debuted it during a global pandemic when a lot of people stopped commuting and traveling, two of the best times to have a small one-handable phone).

I wonder how much Apple fucked up the small phone market by maintaining exclusive access to the Mini screens from Samsung, as the author mentions in this article.

AOSP deserves to be split out from Google into some kind of open source nonprofit similar to Linux. It’s obvious that Google has no intent of maintaining AOSP in a usable form, they’ve become completely distracted by Pixel software features.

The quick settings tiles and settings app are perfect examples. No custom color picker for the UI either? I HAVE to use one of the “AI”-generated suggestions, or one of 6 incredibly boring barely-different pastel variations? These things technically work, but almost seem designed to piss off the end user.