MiddleEndian

My LG DualUp monitors (with no internet access) recently triggered some LG Adware Bullshit to install on my Windows laptop. So I'd say stop using LG anything (or Windows anything since they're voluntarily in on the scam too lol). If you want the 2560x2880, maybe buy the knock-off INNOCN vertical monitors.

https://old.reddit.com/r/pcmasterrace/comments/1v1pkbs/lg_sp... ← examples of others who ran into the same shit

Most of the time, I want neither. No I don't want the ticketmaster app (or DICE). I may need to visit a website to buy a ticket, but after that just email me a QR code or something. Even worse, I found myself at Royale in Boston and they wanted me to install yet another app to check my coat. I hid my coat under a chair instead and have not returned to the venue since then.

The example from the article:

This summer, the kids’ performing arts school are singing and dancing in a show at Disneyland. We’re all very excited, but my excitement, at least, was muted a little when I was told to install the “Travelbound” app in order to get access to the itinerary, travel arrangements, and accommodation details.

I don't need an app for this or website for this. Just email me the information and let me put it in my calendar and then leave me alone.

I lack the skills, time, and nerve to try it with my own phone lol (and wouldn't want a keyboard). As much as I miss the Palm Phone, this is an acceptable compromise.

On the topic of the thread, I am left-handed. When I tried to resize the keyboard while it was closed, it constantly glitched out. Could not figure out what was going on until I rotated it 180° and tried it with my right hand. Resizing worked perfectly lol. Something about coordinates I imagine. I hear left-handed phone users used to have their horizontal photos come out upside down until someone figured it out.

On the other hand, I'm also a Dvorak user, and the Dvorak layout in SwiftKey has the delete key on the left, which is super convenient. Shown here: https://www.middleendian.com/phone-with-keyboard.jpg

I agree that phones are too big. I refuse to switch to two-handed phone use. I used the Palm Phone PVG 100 with a 3.3" screen as long as I could, but software got too slow and battery-hungry, and my now-wife was annoyed when my phone would die halfway through our text based conversations lol. Used a chunky 3.5"er (Soyes S10Max) for awhile but it died after a year.

Now I use the Motorola Razr 2025. 90% of the time I just keep it closed. The outer screen is 3.6" and a square, but the screen doesn't extend all the way out if you keep the hinge on the side. It's kinda heavy at 6.6oz (compared to the Palm Phone's 2.2oz), but with a ring, it's super easy to use one-handed. And it has battery life and compute power to handle today's unnecessarily compute-heavy apps. You can also split apps in half when it's open so you can just use them on the bottom half of the phone.

Pictures:

https://www.middleendian.com/phone.jpg

https://www.middleendian.com/phone-with-keyboard.jpg

Main disadvantage is that when it's closed, you only have a "selfie" camera as the back camera is facing you and the front camera is inside. So it's hard to quickly take pictures of things I see outside (usually funny birds). Other annoyance is that if you open the phone, use it, and then close it, the outer keyboard resets to the default keyboard and you need to "change the keyboard layout" to get it to use your preferred keyboard (Microsoft Swiftkey in my case)

As someone who recently switched from Rackspace to Hetzner for my dedicated VPS (albeit before the recent price jump), I am still quite happy with my decision. Apparently they are not raising their prices for existing customers, but even so, their prices are consistent and very clearly laid out, they don't change month-to-month, and their website is incredibly easy to use (both when choosing options, and when doing server management), which is more than I can say for Rackspace lol (or Linode now that they're owned by Akamai)

Sounds like a concern for app devs but something that shouldn't be a concern for users (because they should be able to turn it off)

Yeah the mainstream alternatives to x86 are all super locked down

I use KDE at home after leaving OS X when it became clear Apple became more interested in mobile OSes than desktop OSes, and using various combos of Linux and Windows for a bit. Gotta agree. Powerful, customizatable, and predictable at the same time.

On the flip side, many websites ask if I want to allow notifications

One of the first things I disable on any new Firefox setup. I want zero notifications from websites (or in general, one of the objective improvements of Windows 10 over Windows 7 is that you can just disable notifications entirely, while disabling balloon alerts in Windows 7 was a huge battle that never fully worked)

I use Android. Lyft put marketing notifications in the default notification channel on my device. If the Play Store were useful, they'd have banned Lyft until they fixed it. (haven't gotten one in a bit so maybe they did (or maybe I set something so that the app could only message me while it's active))

Now, I suppose we could argue that Google could be more ham-fisted about forcing apps to use them, but that's murky.

I disagree. What the is the point of forcing everyone to use the Google Play Store (or whatever app store on iOS) if the store doesn't stop spammers?

People complain about Uber, but Lyft does the same shit. I got a promotional notification from Lyft and could not disable it without disabling the main notifications that tell me when drivers were arriving.

If app stores were useful instead of just rent-seeking, they would kick Lyft off until they stopped doing that.

I guess I already know roughly how much space they're taking up since I just check how much space I'm using in my dropbox directory on one of my computers. From my perspective, Dropbox basically has no User Interface, but a fantastic User Experience.

On the other hand, I can't think of a single new feature they've introduced since 2011 that matters.

Honestly that's what I love about it. I work on something on my desktop. Then when I go to my laptop, everything is there too. It's great. When I get another computer I can just enable Dropbox, walk away, and all my projects, notes, pictures, etc. will be there. I pay them some amount of money per month and it just works and I very rarely need to visit the website or even click on the icon in my toolbar.

Sometimes I read notes on my phone and it's kind of annoying that I can't search through text using their app, but I generally consider that to be a problem with Android rather than Dropbox.

There's a setting to fix this. But it's criminal that this is the default

I dunno, what does Jordan's Furniture do about the fact that the recliner I'm sitting on is feature complete and has been since 2005 and seems to be sturdy enough to last me for the next twenty years? Try to sell me something better, try to sell me different things, try to sell things to other people, and succeed or fail at those goals.

I haven't used a Mac in a bit but I remember liking BBEdit back in the 00s, and it still seems to exist without having a subscription model.

Mainstream behavior doesn't necessarily mean what people want. Many try and fail to stop Windows updates, for instance. I would guess that the majority of the users of the TicketMaster app would rather not use it.

I'm with you. I also hate automatic updates. Times when I want my software to behave differently from the day before without me requesting it: Zero.

It puts the incentives on the wrong spot too. They are no longer incentivized to make shit appealing enough to upgrade.

I'm pretty sure 95% of photoshop users only use a feature subset thats also available in GIMP (except for maybe the latest generative infill)

It's been a few years since I tried GIMP but the last time I did, I couldn't rotate text and then edit it without losing my rotations. Rotating text isn't some obscure feature. This wasn't only shockingly behind Photoshop, it was behind Microsoft Word or even Clarisworks. A quick Google search suggests this remained unsolved as recently as 2024: https://old.reddit.com/r/GIMP/comments/19ckuo4/text_layers_a...

This isn't blind hatred of OSS or learning new things. I've gotten annoyed with Photoshop now that they decided to replace their UI with web components, and so far Krita has been quite pleasant to use despite not also being identical to Photoshop.

Mac OS used to have the benefit of a more native application philosophy. So even though the OS got out of your way, all the applications felt unified and consistent with each other.

Close Windows laptop and leave it on desk, open in morning... 50/50 chance:

1. Laptop has most of its battery life still because it slept successfully and predictably

2. Laptop drained battery to 5% and only then slept

Yeah I've found modern KDE's shortcuts are not only similar to the best parts of Windows, but also slightly better (Win arrow keys reposition without doing minimize/maximize, only win pgdn/pgup minimize/maximize) so I can move shit around more fearlessly.

And people should be free to pick and choose whether they want to use sites that do that or not. Whatever hacker news does seems to be fine for me, and I did not need to verify my ID in any way (even though it's very easy to figure out who I am from this profile)

RCS barely works on regular Android.

In the last week or so, multiple people have told me they cannot text me. I found that I was getting a "verification limit exceeded" error (perhaps because of my unusual behavior of usually being at work or at home, both which have known wifi networks, and sending maybe half a dozen texts any day?). I got the error to go away for half a day and they were still unable to message during that time, and now that I have it disabled I still appear as online on RCS (yet still unreachable?) so they still cannot message me lol.

I've been on the other end many times across multiple Android devices across multiple years, being able to send messages to some RCS users, being unable to send messages to other RCS users, not being able to receive messages in group chats entirely comprised of Android users, etc.

SMS/MMS: Handled by carriers, you can send messages to people who are offline and they'll get the messages when they turn their phone back on.

Telegram/FbMessenger/Whatsapp/etc: Handled by individual corporations, you can send messages to people who are offline and they'll get the messages when they turn their their device on.

RCS: Handled by both Google and carriers at the same time for some reason, maybe 80% chance of being able to send a message to somebody who's online, let alone offline.

I'm sure there are multiple reasons it was challenging, but Google and friends have not risen to the occasion at all. Truly a garbage protocol.

Not The Silliest Contrivance to happen to video standards :P

Anecdotally, my (smart but doesn't really care much about computers) fiancee was able to get all dozen of her mods for The Sims working on Bazzite Linux without any help from me besides a chmod +x to one script.

But we don't play any online multiplayer games, so YMMV on that one.

Apps require you to sign in again all the time, and send a verification code to your e-mail to do so. Changing locations is, yes, a reason to require sign in.

What? TicketMaster is the only app I use that does this. Probably because it's too hard for end-users to get rid of it. If some Telegram or some food delivery app or something tried to periodically re-prompt me to log in because I went outside my house or whatever, it would get uninstalled and replaced with something that didn't.

For the up-front convenience you get with phone tickets

Even as a person who does have a smartphone, I feel like phone tickets are anti-convenience because they rely on terrible apps like TicketMaster. It's only a positive trade-off for venues or whoever. If they texted or emailed me a QR code, that would be a positive tradeoff (and a texted QR code would probably work for this guy's flip phone too)

It's already been beaten into acceptance that I have to use the Ticketmaster app (shockingly awful) or Dice app (not quite as bad but still sucks) to get into a lot of music venues in Boston.

But at one club they wanted me to install another app just to check my coat. I elected to hide it under a some furniture instead lol

One of the straight-up benefits of TV gaming that Bazzite (and presumably any KDE environment, but it's been a bit since I used another) has over Windows is that you can label your Bluetooth devices. I have blue controller, pink controller, white controller, damaged white controller. 90% of my gaming is local multiplayer games and I switch between an actual PS5 and PC, so this is super useful.

Can't do it in Windows 11 for some reason. No option to label them in the new settings app and the option to label them in the old control panel does not work. They all got saved as "Dualsense Controller" and you just had to guess which one you were reconnecting.