Skull giver

Someone needs to curate and maintain the blocklist. Paying for software once is a surefire way to have it stop blocking anything a few years down the line because the company stopped updating their lists when the sales ran out.

If you pay a set fee for something that requires continuous maintainance you’re either overpaying enough to compensate for cash flow interruptions or you’re at risk of the software being discontinued. The latter is especially true if you’re getting stuff for free, but in that case you’re also not entitled to any service.

As for “why not block teamviewer at the router”: because then anydesk will still work. And if you block anydesk, Microsoft Remote Support will work. And if you block Microsoft Remote Support, RustDesk will work. And if you try to block every single RustDesk server, grandpa’s internet probably no longer works anymore, because you’ve just blocked off every data center in the world.

Impacted devices can perform a factory reset to recover functionality

So it’s not bricking them, then? Stupid that they didn’t catch this in testing but the phone still works fine. These gross exaggerations are exactly why people aren’t paying for news anymore. I swear to god we’re five years away from people saying a single app crashing is bricking their phones.

It sucks for those affected, but I’m amazed at how many people will lose decades of their lives and access to critical services like banks because their phone stops working. This time it was an update, next time it’s a gust of wind blowing your phone out of your hand. Recovering from a factory reset is a pain but if it costs more than an evening, you’re setting yourself up for a failure in the very near future…

Side note, when have you last checked if you still have the 2FA recovery codes from your most important accounts? Maybe spend half an hour this weekend to make sure you can still access your bank accounts and email when your house burns down with your phone inside of it!

You’re not doing AJAX without Javascript, and that’s what the Google search site is optimised for. Plus, there’s no way to deal with the mandatory cookie consent popup without additional page loads either.

You can do most of Google with CSS but you can’t do it easily without sacrificing functionality and Google doesn’t care about the people without Javascript anyway. Why invest time and effort into making this stuff work for customers that don’t earn you anything? It’s not an open source nonprofit that cares about its users, we’re talking about Google.

They need Javascript to serve users an experience that doesn’t look like it’s from the 90s. “You don’t need Javascript” is technically correct in the same way you don’t need Google because you can go look through an encyclopedia in the library.

The kinds of people that disable Javascript probably don’t use Google anyway, and if they do, they’ll have their browsers so full of tracking protection that serving them costs more money than it earns.

I’m just kind of surprised Google still worked without JS up until now. The people who don’t have Javascript enabled are such a tiny sliver of market share that Google may as well serve them a broken web page.

I think Duckduckgo still supports searching without Javascript, though you may need to wait for a meta refresh when you use the standard search engine integration, so make sure you use the right URL in your search engine settings.

While that works pretty well, I find it strange how little people use the ability to tap an NFC tag to instantly connect. Getting the camera pointed at a code only takes a second but tapping a sticker is even quicker.

I guess most people don’t know about that feature.

Can we have a setting to show phone calls as more than a weird notification? I’ve missed calls because my phone was on silent and I thought I was just getting a message.

This looks pretty good! Hope someone hacks support for the KDE Connect protocols into this because I don’t really feel like installing yet another app that runs in the background permanently.

The UI looks very slick compared to what KDE Connect has to offer on Windows and I don’t think screen casting is even an option there, so both apps could do with borrowing some code from each other.

I don’t think VR headsets put the battery in front of your eyes, the weight would make them uncomfortable. They’re probably somewhere on the side of the device, or in Apple’s case, around your waist.

Bad chargers, clearly damaged devices that are still used, you name it. Several exploding iPhone stories turned out to be the result of cheap, shitty chargers. Anything with a lithium battery can light on fire or even explode if you handle it wrong.

There’s a good chance that Samsung should still be made to pay up for the damages and compensation, but I’ve seen people do very stupid things to portable electronics containing batteries.

Based on the pictures, the earphone looks like it was on fire on both sides. That’s not a literal explosion at least (there’d be more than just hearing damage if it were). My guess is the lithium battery got damaged somehow and the escaping hydrogen gas caught fire One reason not to use earphones that have batteries inside your ear; had the batteries been hanging from the bottom like those Apple ones, the hearing damage probably wouldn’t have been as bad.

They know you blocked it. They could just hide the element. The feed may be sent to your device, but there’s no reason to show blocked content like this.

Unfortunate. The Samsung store is probably the biggest non-Chinese competitor to Google Play, and now it’s picking up Google’s annoying practices.

I know people like to be dismissive about every app they don’t personally use, but the Samsung Store really isn’t all that bad. A whole bunch of paid apps can be bought there for cheap or even gotten for free sometimes. I wish more people used it so Google would actually feel pressure to make the Play Store better.

Respecting GPC is pretty cool, never seen real a website do that.

To be fair, DOCSIS 4 uses tk be called something stupid like “DOCSIS 3.1 full duplex” so a lot of areas reporting 3.1 may actually be running 4.

I personally would get a modem with DOCSIS 4 if I had to buy a new one. Replacing WiFi is quite cheap and if access points get flaky there’s always ethernet, but I would get the most up to date stuff on the upstream side just in case the ISP decides to upgrade their network.

I agree that YouTube is pretty much dead as a audio medium (Google Play Music was so much better!) but things like podcasts don’t need Spotify; they work over RSS so any app is supposed to be able to play them (though I guess most people probably don’t know what podcasts are supposed to be these days). I’ve loaded my Patreon podcasts into Podcini, for instance, proving that subscription models aren’t a problem for podcasts either.

The hosting cost difference between videos and music is staggering, though. I’m still surprised YouTube can afford to exist on ads alone, even if they play three ads for every video. It’s unreasonable to expect YouTube to be the same price as Spotify if you watch any video content.

I don’t get the comparison between YouTube Premium and Spotify Premium. YouTube does much more than Spotify so of course it’ll be more expensive.

Those are steep price jumps, though. Google must have pretty high confidence in their adblock blocking tech.

DOCSIS 3.0 is a 2006 spec that provides less than a tenth of the bandwidth of DOCSIS 4.0. With the way channels are redistributed, you may not even get more than 100mbps/10mbps if you plug in your DOCSIS 3.0 modem, no matter what your subscription may be, depending on how your ISP deals with old hardware.

The cable frequency spectrum is shared with everyone else, and your ISP isn’t slowing everyone down to make your hardware work, so you’re pushed into thin channels with limited bandwidth that others can use to pull 10gbps down and 6gbps up while your modem will struggle to get any decent speeds.

In theory your ISP could be tolerant to old modems and redistribute their channels such that you’re getting the full speed, but that does mean your entire area gets a lower combined total network speed when people do buy newer hardware. Older modems waste network bandwidth so in congested areas the other side may allocate fewer channels to them.

The latency did improve significantly between 3.0 and 4.0 (ten years of development will do that) but it probably won’t be your biggest problem.

As for the WiFi, I’m still on 802.11ac and I don’t really care that it can only do 520mbps down on my devices. There are some latency advantages to newer WiFi as well but they’re pretty inconsequential if you don’t replace your old modem.

As with so many things, you can give it a go and see if it works. If your performance is not sufficient (or your ISP doesn’t even let your modem connect) you may need to invest in a newer modem.

Newer DOCSIS standards allow for using more frequencies for both upload and download as well as newer techniques. If some frequencies on a network are reserved for 3.1, the frequency space for 3.0 will go down and so will your performance. The frequency space that used to provide 125mbps can now provide someone else with several hundreds of megabits, so you get kicked down to 75mbps for everyone else’s benefit.

DOCSIS 3.0 came out in 2006 and 3.1 in 2013, and 3.1 has already been succeeded by 4.0 in 2017.

I think I’ve used MMS maybe once or twice, but didn’t messengers use the subject header of the MMS messaging for group names? Seems like a waste if they didn’t.

If OEM unlock isn’t in the settings, look online, there’s probably a program you need to run or a button combination to press.

As for installing the ROM, you will most likely need to flash a custom recovery partition (TWRP is a very common one). This is usually done through fastboot mode, by holding down a button combination (volume up plus power usually but it’s different for each model) and running fastboot flash recovery your-recovery-image.img on a computer with the phone hooked up.

After that, reboot into recovery mode (power + volume down but again this is different for each phone), wipe the system partition and the cache, and probably the data too. Then install the ROM files and, if applicable, the Google app package of your choice. I don’t think Google Play works on anything older than Android 7 these days but I haven’t looked into it much. Better look into microG otherwise to get modern apps running on that ROM.

Be warned that some devices can end up wiping an important system partition containing your IMEI and DRM keys. You can’t get those back if you mess them up, leaving you with a phone that can’t call.

Assuming my quick Google brought me to the right page, this guide may be if use: https://wiki.lineageos.org/devices/victara/install/