culot

Don't underestimate the convenience of having a decent small camera. Since it also is your all-purpose pocket computer and communication device it is super convenient. Having to grab an interchangeable lens camera out of your bag for every shot gets annoying.

Sometimes you just want a quick snapshot, sometimes you don't want to carry several pounds of camera gear at all times.

- Unlocked: https://swappa.com/buy/samsung-galaxy-s9-g960u1-unlocked?con...

$600 looks to be the most reasonable price for a sealed new unlocked Galaxy S9 [in the US]. The lower priced 'new' copies on Swappa look open-box, which are likely not new, but a refurb/return, or someone selling their used device as new. Most of the new copies on Swappa are apparently open-box units, as are most of the new units on Ebay. Definitely hard pass there.

Best Buy has new copies for $700 - that'd probably be the... best buy. Maybe you can find a like-new refurb for $500, but it seems like a sealed actual new copy will be harder to find for that price.

So like $150-250 saved by choosing Samsung, and probably getting a superior package in most ways. Google has reduced the warranty period in the US of the newest waves of Pixels by 1 year, so really they aren't offering a ton of value for that high price.

That stuff must be really super cheap, as the price difference between it and the alternatives is insane.

edit: internet searching about on this apparently shows that the price difference should not be that much??? Two different dentists want me to pay about $250+ more per tooth for non-amalgam fillings. Madness!

In my experience the mercury amalgam fillings tend to crumble and plop out in pieces after a few years. Maybe not the entire filling, but enough to where they'll have to declare a do-over, drill and augment/replace with more mercury amalgam.

I'm not sure if this is a puff piece or an ad disguised as an article, but it is quite fluffy.

A more apt title would have been 'Chuchu TV is pretty great, but could it be greater?'

The Sun Magazine is still an ad-free pleasure.

https://www.thesunmagazine.org/

Are there many low-end Xiaomi phones that support AT&T?

https://www.frequencycheck.com/carrier-compatibility/p5vW4/a...

I thought they were mostly not useful for US carriers?

The display on that model is remarkable for a low-end device.

A solid alternative would be a Moto E5 Plus. A more stock/typical Android experience, with a huge battery. It has another gigabyte of RAM, which should be a tangible upgrade.

You could get an LG Stylo 4 for a little more, but it has lesser build quality and the display is so-so.

I don't think either will get many updates though. The LG will probably receive a few security updates, the Moto might die without ever receiving another update.

There's the Samsung J7, which will receive 5x the updates as the LG and Moto combined, and even might get major version updates, which neither of the aforementioned will receive -- definitely no major version updates for the Moto, but is not totally unheard of for LG's low-end, just unlikely.

I've not used the J7 though. Probably similar performance, just the dunno about the display. Samsung definitely has a far better track record for security updates that either LG or Moto.

The chances of foreign entities using that information for profit or for ill are probably much higher than if it were US govt. spying. US govt. spying would be more concerned about security and criminal issues, if they were indeed inside your computer; Chinese entities could consider the more broad use of that information, maybe even for individual financial enrichment or identity theft.

US citizens at least have some laws in place to protect them, while if China steals your stuff you are just wholesale boned.

I don't think it's that, really, that streaming users don't really enjoy music, it's just that streaming services simplify things, removing the need to handle physical media. Never underestimate the warm, convenient glow of laziness that streaming services enable.

I do think that there can be something lost when listening to an assortment of single tracks as opposed to cohesive albums. Getting a new album and letting it play all the way through definitely feels like a different experience to me than putting on a playlist of assorted tracks.

With the prevalence of streaming music I wonder if more and more artists are abandoning the creation of cohesive albums?

There's also the issue that, I think, that compressed audio files are particularly susceptible to bit-rot (perhaps compressed files of all kinds?). If you don't have a physical copy to re-rip from then you could well be boned.

It seems the bigger problem is not specifically what they are trafficking, but their ability to get it north of the border. Much more stringent border controls are definitely a good idea. That would diminish the seemingly unlimited supply of cheap Mexican labor though. Tough call.

> If heroin and morphine were legalized

Addiction and abuse rates would skyrocket, though. With an availability similar to alcohol, that would begin a plague that would envelop the country with astonishing speed. The problem with those drugs now is already a big problem, but if you put them within reach of every single adult you could bring a country to its knees.

Yes, legalizing them would be a boon for commercial interests, but that is practically the only people who would benefit from this. Oh, and drug treatment industries! They'd become as ubiquitous as mental health businesses. Big Constipation would replace Big Tobacco.

> prevent deaths from adulterated drugs.

The influx of death and destruction introduced by that legalization would make adulterated drug deaths look quaint.

Whatever the solution to this problem is, it won't be full-scale legalization. These drugs that are almost impossible to use responsibly, and are guaranteed to be highly addictive.

Back in 1995 warez demos were one of the things that most drove my interest in programming.

Tangent: 'BBS: The Documentary'. Great film, I only wish it were about 4 hours longer -- it seems much too brief.

I do know that is the default for many popular Wordpress themes. The hamburger break-point is usually too generous. It looks like its just a poor use of spacing that leads to premature hamburgerization:

https://i.imgur.com/kTid0y3.png

"I'm tired of walking a parent through uninstalling Google Chrome"

Unchecky works well to prevent that crapware from ever getting installed. It unticks those default 'install my paid crap' offers.

https://unchecky.com/

I recently switched from a Lumia 950 to a Sony XZ1 Compact because I wanted something that would be more pocket-friendly.

Good:

- Speed-wise it is a huge upgrade. Everything is instant. The memory management is superb. I can open an app one day then come back to it a week later and have it sitting right where I left it.

- Build quality is great. Plastic back, so no case required -- that was one thing I also loved about my Lumia 950.

- Battery life is easily 2-3x that of my 950. On top of that it also charges faster.

- It has a great display, significantly brighter than the Lumia 950 display.

- The display does not scratch easily, unlike my Lumia 950, which required a screen protector or else it accumulates numerous fine scratches rapidly. This phone lives in my pockets without protection for 2 months and has acquired zero scratches.

- Developer-friendly, with monthly updates. They even have complete AOSP device trees on Github, with detailed instructions on their developer's website to go with. Other than Google, who else even does that? I was impressed.

Bad:

- The 720p display is noticeably pixely. Also not as easy on the eyes as an OLED display.

- There is no chance you'll find a good glass screen protector for this, thanks to how the display curves just a little bit into the sides.

- It has hard metal corners. This is not a phone that curls up comfy in your hand.

- The speakers are crap. Stereo front-facing speakers, yay! No, hush that, the speakers are crap. Even at their loudest I miss notifications. That was not something that happened with my 950, which was crazy loud.

- The camera is inferior to the Lumia 950's camera in almost every situation other than handheld in low light. I was comparing the 950's camera to a Pixel 2 before I bought this XZ1 Compact, and it held its own against that as well, with its greater resolution offering a big advantage -- except handheld in low light. The camera on the 950 is something special. Also: no RAW on the XZ1 Compact. No RAW on any Sony phone, pretty sure. The XZ1 Compact's camera isn't bad, its pretty good, actually, it's just not superb like the 950 or Pixel 2. The noise reduction applied to its JPEGs is too harsh, that's its biggest problem. Not a camera you'll want to make prints from.

For a small Android, I don't think there's really any other choice than Sony compacts. The nearest competitor [in the US] would be a Pixel 2, which is much larger.

All-in-all, the only major things I miss about the 950 is its camera and its super loud and clear speaker.

Somehow the scrolling is also broken on their mobile site, and that can't be by accident. Is it some sort of javascript middle finger to urge users to move to their app? I've never experienced scrolling issues like that on any other site, ever.

That they make their mobile site intentionally unfriendly and frustrating is infuriating.

Reddit has just gotten too big. So much of the bigger subs are fluffed with surreptitious sponsored content, reputation management, etc. I would have thought that that was where Reddit made the real money, by providing a back-end to make ads look like organic content, by helping moneyed backers influence discussion toward their monetised and brand-building ends.

If Reddit isn't charging and managing those using their platform for that purpose -- not an insignificant number, surely -- they are fools.

The entirety of 20th century music on a single 3.5" floppy disk. It doesn't get any better than that.

I have an archive of about 3600 MIDI files I collected from 1997-2004. I don't know if it's of any use, but here we go:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1mqI7d6kd3zOIZ2VjbKaeu3f6u3a...

Most of the file names are wonky, but I think the artist and title information should be inside many of the files.

There should be some files in there that are long gone from the web, some I know are from amateur or unknown musicians. But as I said, the filenames are a mess, so yeah.

The Pixels don't have removable batteries, and certainly are repair-unfriendly.

Too bad LG quit doing removable batteries, their phones with that design were relatively repair-friendly.

I wonder if it would be possible to implement that feature on an Android device that allowed you to flash your own custom appsboot/lk? I've only spent a little bit of time in LK stuff, but it seemed to me that that was where that functionality lives.

From leaked LG LK code it shows that's definitely where their bootloader unlock keys lived [at one point a couple of years ago].

Since the Librem device is a different beast, though, I wonder what their bootstack looks like? Super curious now!

Really excellent work on the graphics. Adorable!

Why?

Wasn't Doom already popular on consoles by then/before then?

I think FPS domination was inevitable on all platforms, no single title could have stopped it.

> for many who didn't have a powerful PC at the time,

In the late '90s I think most people did not have a PC at all. They were only just becoming affordable as the millennium hit. Surely console systems were more prevalent.

BTW: The article linked is a composite of articles copy-and-pasted from these two sources:

Mainly:

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/world-history/this-...

Additionally:

https://mashable.com/2014/11/05/first-photograph-of-a-human/...

It's those 2000 year old photos that I hanker for. :) 200 years ago is magical, 2000 years ago would be incredible. Oh, to peruse the stinky streets of Herculaneum!

Gosh, I hope humanity can keep it up for another 2000 years, keeping out heritage and history well-recorded.

I hadn't thought of that, that indeed sounds torturous!

Given that her only choices were to live horrifically disfigured or to undergo experimental treatment that involves living highly medicalized for the rest of her life, I think assisted suicide should absolutely have been an option.

Actually, I think assisted suicide should be a right for all people 25+ years old, in particular, at the very least, should be optional for those presented with harsh physical issues like those presented in the OP.