Stardew Valley has plenty of silly and funny moments to begin with. But the last patch added a “green rain” event, and during the first occurrence, all villagers are hiding inside, except Demetrius. This guy is just walking around in a full hazmat suit, collecting samples and babbling about mushrooms.

Chrome sharing the same login as the Android device is not only bad for privacy and usability, but is a complete pain in the ass to explain to non-tech-savvy people.

Got PineTime pre-tariffs (even though it took a while to ship to US)

Pretty neat piece of hardware, has everything that I want (notifications, time, weather, timer), InfiniTime OS is open source and was easy to read, build and flash (had to do so to add missing Cyrillic letters and a shortcut)

As long as your expectations are that of a microcontroller-powered device and not a supercomputer-on-your-wrist, it’s fantastic.

Looks interesting, but curious how it bypasses reddit’s requirements. AFAIK there are teddit and redlib proxies, but also few apps like RedReader still work.

Yeah, after seeing plenty of “quirky”/“edgy”/“ironic” culture in 2010s, and given the absurdity of current world and tech leaders, I cannot tell if something like this is genuinely delusional or just satire.

And its neighbor, WSTB 88.9 The Alternation, with local bands, indie/emo/pop-punk, sometimes clueless DJs, regular news and weather.

IMO it had all the content and users some time ago. I follow mostly specific interest/hobby subreddits, but lately even they have devolved into illiterates asking the same exact questions repeatedly; some strange attention-seeking posts such as pictures captioned “getting started”/“this just arrived" or “what should I do with this thing that I got?”; and really dumb stuff such as “I inhaled solder fumes, will I get lead poisoning?” (These are at least entertaining in a way)

IMO Snikket (XMPP) is the easiest all-in-one solution with audio/video chat at the moment. Pretty good on resources too.

I currently host a Matrix Synapse server, but:

• Matrix seems to be expanding in the corporate / institutional direction, more services are expected for regular functionality
• Element X (upcoming client) breaks calls compatibility with old Element, now requiring Element Call. It’s kind of a mess, I presume this is to support group calls, but makes it a PITA to use currently.
• Even with small number of users, Synapse DB grows in size due to state_groups_state table, non-deletable users, and copying ALL data from other servers’ rooms (this one is by design but still…)

AI is a tech debt generator.

Any programmer who worked with legacy code knows a situation where something was written by a former employee or a contractor without much comments or documentation, making it difficult to modify (because of complexity or readability) or replace (because of non-existing business documentation and/or peculiar bugs and features)

AI accelerates these situations, but the person does not even exist. Which, IMO is the main thing that needs to be called out.

I ran prosody server and used Siskin IM as a client, it worked pretty well. But as others mentioned, since this is Apple, the client developer has to run a push server, no background processes and long-polling allowed. Some other XMPP clients (Secret Messenger I think) did not have that set up and do not have notifications.

Profanity for XMPP and gomuks for Matrix are both neat ncurses clients that work pretty well.

Looks like BM818 in Librem5 supports VoLTE, but might have issues with some networks.

PinePhone’s (and one of Mudita’s phone’s) EG25 modem technically supports VoLTE, but was very flaky for me (in a mid-low signal area)

FuriLabs (FLX1) seems to have VoLTE working.

Ubuntu Touch explicitly states that it does not support VoLTE.

IIRC this was partially elaborated on in Matrix 4, where

It’s the Misery Nexus we were warned about.

Nice! Writing a similar converter was my first step when I set up my parallel site-capsule.

Love gemtext, it’s so simple yet pragmatic. (And there is just one version of it, unlike Markdown)

How did you do it? I tried convincing several people to use Matrix or Signal, and I get “who am I gonna talk to on there?” and “WhatsApp works fine”.

When I last used Dino (a few years back, on a PinePhone), I had to build it with notification sounds flag. Not sure if this is still the case, or if that is the same for calls.

./configure --enable-plugin=notification-sound

While looking for above, also found a GitHub issue with your problem

WDYM soft-bricked?

Here’s what I did: I had a OnePlus (before there was a Lineage image for it), rooted it, disabled Google Play, which made all apps scream at me repeatedly (although still worked), then installed MicroG, which made the screaming stop, and most apps continued to work fine (except a specific one that used Google Maps API on a page - MicroG was not enough for some reason)

I am not sure what you mean. Is there a different way to connect a USB-C hub to a smartphone other than the only USB-C port?

I know you are being sarcastic, but that is pretty much how many people buy phones and cars. It’s a gas guzzler with barely 20MPG, requires premium gasoline, is unreliable and can only be serviced at specific dealerships for a top dollar? But it has a premium feel

The entire luxury market would not exist otherwise.

Hardware is nice and all, but how is the software? The 2020 Nord 10 I had was way too eager to kill any background processes, and had a very bad bug consuming all storage space.

I assume the bootloader will be unlockable, being a OnePlus?