If you ever catch me smiling at my phone, it’s probably because I started laughing randomly and it’s weird so I am staring at a blank screen which is something you don’t know but the whole thing suddenly looks normal.

Previously solved by facemasks.
I didn’t even have to interact with people much.
I want another pandemic. I mean, in a good way or something…

Developing? Is it?

Your title is missing s in news.

tailed buttplugs

The whole comment aside, just for those unaware, if you see someone with a tail in public, or just anywhere outside of sex-centered environment, it’s almost surely a belt.

And finally “We are reaching out to let you know Alexa key phrase based activation will no longer be supported. For better personalization, Alexa will always process audio in background. Don’t worry, your audio is safe with us, we highly care about your privacy.”

My every usage of assistant boiled down to just “What’s this song?”, so I just replaced it with Shazam.

Gemini… having tried it, you will surely get an answer, perhaps based on random magic.

I’d extend that to around 25 - 30 for such bigger things since around that is when brain generally finishes developing…

Matters when they met.

I left Reddit after API protests, but that’s not where I found it. I was just lurking around elsewhere. Then at one point on Twitter, SDF posted about running a Lemmy instance, so I tried joining it.

Hence the username, I thought this was an SDF’s thing so I used my SDF UNIX username, user224, instead of my regular lukmly013.

user224 was also unintentional, since I intended to use lukmly013, but someone, a user name xiled, has verified my account for free giving me more access. And thus I had to keep the username, originally meant just for testing purposes.
It would otherwise be just $1, but via PayPal which I am unable to use. I even got shadow-banned for cases when guest payments are allowed in my country. And I am not going to make an account for a barely functional service (PayPal).

Let’s drink swill milk [Wikipedia] to that.

The swill milk scandal was a major adulterated food scandal in the state of New York in the 1850s. The New York Times reported an estimate that in one year, 8,000 infants died from swill milk.

Swill milk referred to milk from cows fed swill which was residual mash from nearby distilleries. The milk was whitened with plaster of Paris, thickened with starch and eggs, and hued with molasses.

Swill milk dairies were noted for their filthy conditions and overpowering stench both caused by the close confinement of hundreds (sometimes thousands) of cows in narrow stalls where, once farmers tied them, they would stay for the rest of their lives, often standing in their own manure, covered with flies and sores, and suffering from a range of virulent diseases. These cows were fed boiling distillery waste, often leaving the cows with rotting teeth and other maladies. The milk drawn from the cows was routinely adulterated with water, rotten eggs, flour, burnt sugar, and other adulterants with the finished product then marketed falsely as “pure country milk” or “Orange County Milk”.

Around 2020 I think. But it’s HP.

I’d date it around ~2008

Eh, my laptop’s webcam looks worse than this.

Unfortunately, especially with lower budget, that often ends up being choice between hardware and software.

I didn’t want to run custom ROM on the X3 Pro due to warranty. I had the motherboard replaced thrice, on average surviving for 9 months each… But there were theoretically options.

Armor 24 doesn’t seem to have any custom ROMs available, as seems to be usual with MTK devices, but the hardware is quite unique. I already had numerous strangers ask me what that phone is, how often it needs to be charged, or “what can that thing do” and “I am not surprised it has such strong light anymore” (it’s a massive 85.14Wh brick).
To be honest I like how it feels in hand compared to a fragile thin slab.

But the only ones making crazy devices like this seem to be brands like Ulefone, Oukitel and Unihertz (they even have a projector phone like Samsung did, but modern) which most likely won’t see custom ROMs, and I am too dumb to try building and maintaining something myself. I don’t even know how it works with device-specific drivers.

I did, as I said, by returning the phone xD

I think I also (unsuccessfully) tried ADB.

Not a carrier phone. I don’t know what specifically it is, Google Play… something. I disabled automatic updates in Play store, so probably something else. I usually just quickly pull down notification shade and click “Cancel”.

Even disabling all available restriction settings often doesn’t quite work. For clock app I set it to unrestricted and disabled optimization in DuraSpeed, still, it’s a dice roll. The chances are lower when charging. (Ulefone Armor 24)
On previous phone Unrestricted setting and locking in recent apps also didn’t quite work, but that phone had more issues. I’d often find that everything just randomly crashed overnight. (Poco X3 Pro)

But it also seems per-app. From experience, the most kill-resistant app is Termux (terminal emulator), but only if you disable child process restriction in developer settings. LibreTorrent also survives well, making the 2 only reliable large background download methods LibreTorrent and wget in Termux.

But anyway, my Alcatel 1066G dumb phone was just 10 bucks. A more reliable solution (and it supports animated GIF wallpapers 🙂).

It often feels like I am just a user of someone else’s device.

Even from the stuff that is shown like “Your device has new features” and “Settings changed by carrier”. And how Motorola tried forcing updates by using non-dismisable (they would re-appear immediately) full-screen notifications, and trying to disable the app led me to “Blocked by your IT admin” (I returned that phone).
Also when I connect any modern phone to Wi-Fi not manually set as metered it starts downloading a bunch of random shit automatically.
It keeps killing apps I want running (I had to use a cheap dumb phone as alarm clock with the past 2 smartphones), but keeps all Google services conveniently spending data and battery.

I just got an old HP inkjet that doesn’t care about reported ink levels and cheap ink bottles from AliExpress.

I print white on black because I have so much damn ink and nobody expects dark mode documents. Kinda funny when I take out a sheet of paper and have to dry it out. 120g/m² is absolutely the minimum when doing such crap though. Regular 80g/m² just wrinkles up and leaks through, although that’s also a property of dye ink vs pigment ink.

But I also lucked out on sales combined with coupons

Currently it’s €18.50, though for 0.5L (~1 pint) that’s still cheap. Honestly I am surprised I actually received that.

deleted by creator

10 years later
Printers now include embedded cellular modems as backup for OTA firmware updates, ink subscriptions and telemetry.