Liam Proven

@Newhere Right now my little daughter is sitting next to me playing Toca Boca World on a phone running a modified Graphite OS. I am familiar with it. Honestly, it’s a bit of a pain, and I’m normally happy enough with my ultra-budget ChiPhones. Which cost 1/4 as much and frankly do more.

Personally I’m with Scott McNeally:

https://www.wired.com/1999/01/sun-on-privacy-get-over-it/

“You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it.”

@filister @Newhere

Wow. You spend more on 2nd hand phones than I like to spend on brand new ones!

@yxc999 @zdhzm2pgp

> even this one is way overkill for what I want in a phone. Why can’t there just be a low-spec one instead

Exactly this.

My solution is: dirt-cheap bargain-basement Chinese phones.

They do the job and you can get a lot for under £150.

My best buy was an Umidigi F2. Stunning device for £125. I have bought dinners that cost more than that.

*But* you’ll never get an OS upgrade, they’re unsupported by all the alternative OSes, and there is the everpresent risk of spyware.

For me, that’s worth it, but I get that it’s not for everyone and so I do not unequivocally recommend them.

@jumping_redditor @kibiz0r

You really need to read this series:

https://marcin.juszkiewicz.com.pl/2025/07/07/arm-desktop-2025-attempt-part-one/

@dessalines

Link unreadable for me in Firefox.

Target:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia/_Signpost/2026-08-02/News/_and/_notes

@Mihies I honestly don’t see why, no, not at all. If you want to keep the data then you plug the drive into anything else with a USB interface. If you don’t want to keep the data, what’s the problem? Just format it and donate it, whole.

@Mihies @douglasg14b

Stick the drive in a USB caddy and keep it?

If it’s an array, buy a big one and then repeat from step 1…

@datendefekt @drawerair

Yeah, no, that’s utter nonsense.

During the COVID lockdown I was doing a lot of walking around the local woods with my infant daughter in a pushchair. I listened to music on my phone. I was using free conf-swag head phones.

So I bought myself new ones. Absolute top-of-the-line super-fancy Sony in-ear things with bass boost and all the trimmings.

They were about CzK 600, which equates to about £25.

I still use them. 6Y later they still sound amazing. By any objective measure they are better than any in-ear things: excellent isolation, superb sound (in as well through the integrated mic), complete cross-platform compatibility, *infinite* battery life – no batteries! No pairing, no synching, no updates ever. Come with build-in anti-theft anti-loss device: a cable.

£25. What that is in dollarbucks I don’t know as I avoid visiting fascist states that might imprison me. $35?

@chobeat

Good?

@Ferk Ah, I see.

I suppose so.

As a one-time committee member on Skeptics in the Pub, there are a lot of things in life that *demonstrably* Do Not Work, never did work, and can be proved not to ever be possible, which all the same, billions of people are very impressed by.

Homeopathy is my go-to example – see:

https://www.howdoeshomeopathywork.com/

This is true of all Supplementary, Complementary and Alternative Medicine. It’s all a S.C.A.M. ;-)

But it goes much further. Gods, for example. All 100% made up.

And yet…

@Ferk @meejle

> … people are not unimpressed by AI

I disagree strongly. Smart people who understand how it works, and the cost, are DEEPLY and profoundly unimpressed by it.

I want to see it banned.

@meejle @onlooker

> The current state of AI is impressive to me

Really? Seriously? It’s just a fake, every bit as much as ELIZA was – just with a vastly bigger set of responses it generates on the fly from a vast database of stolen material.

@PanArab @yogthos 20M units in China is too small to count as a rounding error.

When one Chinese phone company hired an American CEO he talked in interviews about how experimentally selling 50M units of a test prototype suggested it might have potential.

@Sxan Immaculate reasoning. Can’t fault it. Well done. 😁

@GregorGizeh @Sxan Old English (and current Icelandic) letters. English had these until we bought printing presses from the Germans, who lack these sounds.

þ represents unvoiced th, ð voiced ð.

So, more logical spellings than the bodge of “th” for both.

So why not?

@UltraGiGaGigantic @geneva_convenience France did have a commercial scale fast breeder reactor, Superphénix.

@jeena @freeguru He really is. He was once a vaguely sane FOSS industry commentator. Then he lost/left his job, and had to monetise his blog & channel. Result: 90% of it is frothing hatred and insanity.

@kristoff Not really… On ChromeOS, there are no apps.

@kristoff @purplemonkeymad All of these are in-place same-disk snapshots. The ChomeOS system is simpler and so can be automated but you only get 1 level of undo.

I don’t know any mainstream OS that does dual-failover. Deepin Linux has 2 root partitions but I don’t know how it uses them.

I think Valve SteamOS does something like this. It’s not just for games: it has KDE built in. There are guides to getting it running on your own hardware. You will want AMD graphics, though.

@kristoff @purplemonkeymad But watch out: you will need a *huge* root partition, because it’s very easy to fill it with snapshots and if it reaches 100% it *will* corrupt.

Btrfs is tricksy: it won’t give a straight answer to df -h and there is no working equivalent of fsck.