dual_sport_dork 🐧🗡️

Who’s gatekeeping? You’re putting an awful lot of words in my mouth. I’m pointing out that a lot of people are effectively gatekeeping themselves.

I think you rather missed the point.

Everyone has fantastic resources available to them through the internet that didn’t exist in the early 1980s, or whenever. And yet, people with four kids and cars and mortgages and taxes managed back then. It’s even easier now. The only obstacle to anyone is apathy.

Sony got big enough to see themselves become the villain. They’re no longer the plucky company pushing technology forward by releasing off the wall or risky products that become groundbreaking. Rather, now they’re the highly conservative greedy assholes who are always last to market with anything, are obsessed with trying to make their version of everything proprietary (cables, memory cards, batteries, software…), try to install rootkits on your computer if you want to listen to music, and sue people for watching a Youtube video.

Sony deserves to crash and burn, so any talented employees they may have left can be released from the shackles of lifetime employment at a massive Japanese conglomerate and freed to work somewhere where they might be able to make some positive contribution to society again.

Fuck Sony. Never give Sony a single red cent.

The LSTC IoT editions also have it built right in, and come without the ancillary Windows bloatware (except Edge, which you’re stuck with) for niche applications that require running Windows-only software that can’t be avoided. Even on lower end hardware.

And the thing of it is, back in the good old days you actually had to learn how to use your computer. This took effort, comprehension, and skill. And probably reading some manuals. Like, actual words printed on dead trees, bound up into a book. This was normal and expected, and you would build up your skillset to operate the machine you probably paid thousands of dollars for. No one had a problem with this then.

Learning to use Linux is no different, but nowadays everyone just wants everything handed to them and they’ll steadfastly refuse to put forth any effort while simultaneously failing to realize that figuring out whatever the next workaround is to get around something that Microsoft broke for them in the last update is basically exactly the same thing. Think back when you were learning to use DOS or trying to install your VESA local bus video card drivers in Windows 3.1, or desperately fiddling around with EMM386 in your config.sys file to try to get enough conventional memory freed up at startup to run Doom. If you had the amount of online resources we have now to just get the answer and not have to call tech support (and probably pay for it), or paw through a manual, or just be fucked and have to figure out by trial and error on your own, we would have all been stoked.

Entitlement breeds complacency, and complacency leads to the Dark Side. If you go out of your way to teach yourself to be helpless, you will be helpless.

Back then you owned your computer. By and large outside of some specific special purpose fuckery with licensing dongles you physically possessed the software you ran. Like, on a disk. You controlled what you ran, not some outside source. With all of the commercial operating systems (this includes OSX and iOS, Android, and Windows all to various degrees) this is now actively being taken away from you. The only way to claim it back is to run one of the open source platforms.

No it doesn’t.

https://massgrave.dev/

This was an actual response that Google’s stupid Gemini LLM really gave somebody. The notion was lifted from a satirical Onion article which the LLM regurgitated as if it was an established fact.

The 7th gen iPod Nano which you’re referring to (not the 6th gen the commenter above posted, which had a rated 24 hour battery life) had a 200 mAh battery.

A lowly Garmin Forerunner 230 like the one strapped to my wrist right now has a 150 mAh battery and achieves five weeks of battery life with notifications enabled (which I did not “forget”) and the BLE radio twittering away all day, GPS time and position updates, activity tracking, and the screen displaying content all the time. Not 30 hours. 840 hours.

Just acting as a plain watch with the connectivity turned off Garmin claim it’ll last 12 weeks (2016 hours).

I should not have to point out to anyone that it is physically impossible for an iPod to achieve a significantly shorter runtime on a larger battery without consuming more power in the process.

Given that an iPod nano only lasted a few hours on a charge and most smartwatches can last multiple days, I’m pretty sure that’s not so. Even if they had apples-to-apples identical functionality I think a modern device would consume less power simply due to current chips being more power efficient via using smaller dies and lithography processes.

Plus, an iPod has to crank its weedy little processor full time as long as it’s playing music. Your smartwatch pretty much only has to do anything when an external stimulus wakes it up, be that pressing a button or tapping its screen or receiving an alert or whatever. I’ve developed software for some of the Garmin models myself and I can tell you that the power consumption and processing time limitations imposed by the system are extremely stringent. The majority of the time even in a second-by-second basis your watch is completely idle, specifically to consume as little power as possible and conserve the battery.

It does not work with either my Fenix 6 Pro Solar (specifically that one, other Fenix 6 variants are listed as working) nor the Forerunner 230 that somebody just gave me. Both of which are a drag, and I can’t be arsed with learning how to add my own support right now at this minute.

Honestly, I’ve just been using my Fenix unconnected and it’s really surprising all it can still do. The only function I don’t have that I cared about was receiving notifications. The sensors and topo map and all still work fine and you can even still track rides and hikes, but you have to offload thr GPX tracks via USB and figure out what to so with them yourself.

It’s almost like the dumbass limitations of the app are all just artificial, to the surprise of absolutely no one.

I don’t know about the lesser Garmin models but I have a Fenix 6 Pro Solar and there isn’t enough panel surface area on it to indefinitely power the watch. Garmin only state that it “extends” the battery life by a few days. I haven’t tested it to see if you power the thing off completely if it will refill the battery from dead by any meaningful amount but I suspect not.

Not all of them have the solar option. In fact, very few of their lineup do.

Also: Garmin recently enshittified by simultaneously adding an AI slop component that works by taking all of your recorded fitness and location data and doing gods know what with it, as well as a paid subscription tier to their obligatory smartphone app – the latter after explicitly promising for many years that they wouldn’t. So not only is their hardware expensive (and their owners are now rightly pissed), they’re also liars. I would not give them any money until they shape up, if I were you. Assuming they ever do…

The original Unreal Tournament (or UT’99, or whatever) is also one of the very few modern-ish full screen games that had a drop down menu bar like you’d expect on a typical Windows application. The other one I can think of off the top of my head is ZSNES, although in that case they rolled their own solution. Not least of which because the original ZSNES was a DOS program (with huge chunks of it written in x86 assembly!) so they kind of didn’t have a choice.

If I remember right UT’99 actually did use Windows style accelerator keys in its menus, i.e. hold down Alt and press a letter to perform an action, which might just make all this malarkey peripherally relevant.

It’s deliberately to fuck with AI scrapers, per their bio. At the very least, I can respect the dedication to keeping up the shtick.

I still have two of them in a desk drawer. Both still boot, although the batteries are definitely toast. I have no idea if you can find a new-old-stock battery for one of these that is not likewise also knackered. But fun fact, an S5 will power on and run indefinitely with no battery in it at all if it’s connected to a sufficiently powerful USB power source.

Why pine for the past when you can have one again right now!

What? No takers for a phone that’s stuck on Android Marshmallow?

For the purposes of disposing of a janky battery before it goes off bang and replacing it with a fresh one, that is probably quite sufficient.

I don’t think even power users these days are going to be strutting around hot swapping batteries from the little holster of them they’ve got on their belts like us turbo-nerds were doing in the PDA era. It would be rad to be able to do so, sure, but I think that will wind up just being a side effect models of the next wave of user-replaceable battery phones on some models.

Mountains and mountains of janky spaghetti code VBA macros. That’s the only answer left.

That, and nobody legitimate ever asks you to do anything with accounts/passwords/money/banks and ends the message with “warm regards.” Really? That’s right up there with “calvary greetings.”

This is musical chairs, and everyone involved is desperately hoping that they won’t be one of the ones left without a seat when the music stops. Anybody with a plural number of brain cells must know deep down inside that infinite growth is literally impossible, but they all think they’ll be smart enough to cash out before it all collapses.

There’s a problem with that, though: Money has a notoriously poor nutritional value.

I have a Dell Axim X50v in a box somewhere. I imagine the battery is toast and I’ll probably have to keep it in its cradle to remain powered. It was a hell of a machine for it’s day.

I went through a succession Windows CE/PocketPC machines back in the day, starting with a Casio Cassiopeia E-115, then an Audiovox Maestro which was a rebadged Toshiba, then an HP iPAQ 2215, and finally the Axim.

The displays on the Maestro and the Axim were really something, and I wish someone would bring these back for a modern smartphone. They were rotten at color accuracy, but both had transflective displays that were fully readable even in direct sunlight. The Axim X50v also had a full 480x640 screen resolution which blew the first few iPhones out of the water on pixel density and even gave the iPhone 4 a run for its money. “Retina” display, my ass.

I had a Microdrive bunged into the CompactFlash slot on my Axim which was… several gigabytes, I don’t remember how many. I kept it packed with MP3’s, and I had a custom wallpaper with a white-on-chartreuse silhouette of a pacifier on it with the legend, “All 10,000 Songs On Your iPod Suck.”

But then the entire PDA market got swallowed in one gulp by smartphones.

I’ll bet you a shiny penny that’s what it is. The backend recompresses things to some other format, probably a low bitrate JPEG, in order to save space and/or in case some joker uploads a 90 megabyte uncompressed TIFF image to use as a profile pic, or something.

Those are displayed in browser, right? The only reason that would be happening is if Piefeed is recompressing images and their code is not smart enough to identify an animated .gif and act accordingly.