I use Session Messenger, on the Oxen network. Love it on principle even tho the implementation is a bit lacking in places.

And there’s Tor… Which is what it is.

It doesn’t if the screen is connected directly to the frame buffer which can refresh independently. Whether that’s actually implemented this way in hardware, well who knows, but I suspect it is as that’s useful to display any static image. Then just power up the display driver for a microsecond to refresh the image if needed.

You can have an IR blaster as an accessory for the headphone jack.

Make it open source on F-Droid, compatible with the Fediverse, and maybe you’ll even get 500 installs.

I like both the piped bot and the tldr bot for the same reason: I don’t need to visit a horribly bloated, ads and scripts ridden web site, which most news sites are. So I take the bot as a really good service. Also consider that without it I’d say most will just read the title and may make conclusions based on that. I’d say that’s a bigger advantage than the downsides you mention.

(Yes I use adblocks and stuff. Most news sites are still a drag to visit and difficult to read.)

I think the bot is fine in principle. The YouTube web site is fucking terrible and it’s nice to introduce people who don’t use automatic redirects or 3rd party clients to an alternative.

My problem is that it would offer only piped.video links. We don’t know how long the piped.video instance will work, but well that’s the case for any instance. Ideally a bot would provide at least two links - piped and invidious, and maybe cycle or randomly choose instances. Perhaps under a spoiler tag.

Of course it’s up to community mods to choose, but I think bots like this or the tldr bot provide value even if they can cause that “Reddit moment”.

There are a lot of phones that have some of the features - Sony has punchless displays, some cheap phones have headphone jacks, all the Motorolas have two SIMs, some phones have SD cards in shared slots, Pixels and some others have unlockable bootloaders, it’s just basically impossible to get one with all of this…

My bad here, I didn’t mean AAC, but ALAC (lossless) and other Apple’s own mp4 variants. Indeed not sure how’s the support in core Android, although I’d guess ALAC should be since it’s part of mp4 specification.

I haven’t goofed around with it in a while, but some ~10 years ago when I was doing tech reviews I was looking into ALAC quite a bit and was surprised how nice it is, and apparently easy enough to implement that even lots of hardware devices supported it without even advertising it. Also 3rd party audiobook players can often deal with Apple’s audiobook DRM.

Basically, Apple did surprisingly well with audio formats while also supporting some open formats (at least in hardware), so maybe that’s also a reason why I’m not so adamant about formats being 100% free from the start, as long as they get the codec ball rolling.

But again it’s been 10 years since I was looking into this closely so I’m very fuzzy on the details.

Screen with no holes, physical dual SIM cards and mSD card, headphone jack, somewhat trustworthy manufacturer with no ads and bloat, easily unlockable bootloader. There should still be one German-made phone that still has all that and some more, if it still exists, although if I ever get to getting a new phone we’ll probably all be using brain implants so it may all be moot by that point. Don’t worry about it, I’m not looking for recommendations or anything, I know everyone thinks my demands are crazy.

Well this was a 150 € phone when new so that’s a pretty different category than what you’re looking at. I wouldn’t be surprised if 32b was still a thing in the cheap Chinese phones.

If I ever get a chance to replace it, it will be extremely tough because it has a bunch of things which are indispensable for me that newer models simply don’t have.

Not for a while, I have an oldish Motorola with Android 9, probably one of the last phones with 32b OS

(Don’t anyone dare tell me to “upgrade”)

Okay

I only use Bromite at this point for some streaming stuff which don’t work so well on FF based browsers, and Mulch always pauses playback when minimised… Bloody annoying. I didn’t want to use Brave, but I guess I might have to try it.

Can’t use it as I have a 32bit phone and the dev refuses to provide a 32bit binary (and won’t explain why, referring to some nonexistent past discussion)

Guess it’s time to finally retire Bromite

Aye so bottom line, we’re stuck with what exists until new formats are forced upon everybody… ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Ed:

was under the impression raw was universally supported

Raw isn’t a format, it’s supposed to just be unaltered stream from the imager, so every camera model is unique in that regard. But DNG is a way to describe that data so it’s more readable to programs unfamiliar with the specific model. And well, some makers prefer to use their own proprietary models.

Although it’s gotten better now that nobody buys standalone cameras so the makers can save money by not developing their own software.

Ed2:

none of apple’s formats are supported outside of apple devices (and i guess itunes for windows)

Actually AAC is mostly Apple’s format and support for it is pretty great. I’m not super familiar with the details but it sounds like a similar situation as with webp.

*customers

Haha they definitely can’t claim there was no space for a headphone jack indeed.

But I mean, electronics is tiny, it can go with the same motherboard as a phone. The only thing it needs to be larger is a battery, and that’s a capacity/weight balance.

Speakers maybe, but that’s also a function of thinness so I don’t know how much of a difference size makes. Thin laptops sound just as crappy as anything else thin unless the vendor shells out for some expensive units.

It’s gonna be funny if i15 becomes the bestselling iPhone due to USB-C. And shareholders will be like dude, these open standards actually sell, just go with them next time instead of all the proprietary shit

if i make an image then upload it to the internet - the only software that’s involved is on my side (gimp, ps, whatever[^1]) and the browser of the person viewing it.

It’s not. The web site you’re uploading to has to support it to allow you the upload in the first place, and to process it to make previews or lower-res versions for the web pages or apps.

Well unless you’re uploading directly through ftp and share only the link, but again that’s not how people use pictures.

Then if the person on the other side wants to download the picture, set it as wallpaper, send it through messenger, then those programs need to support it too.

Heck now that I think about it, browser support isn’t even that critical because web sites can make media available in whatever format the browser supports. The important part is the backend, and local apps.

meh, i haven’t seen any in the past ~5 years apart from ones specifically chosen for that 256 colour æsthetic; but i will believe you

Do believe me, recently I’ve started converting those I want to keep to mp4 and I’m saving gigabytes.

Recently I’ve had some debates here with people looking for better support for gifs, or how to encode them better or whatever, and I nudge them towards webp at least. Because simply, if the web site supports only jpg, png, gif and webp uploads, then I definitely prefer webp.

it did get places. it has got places. again, it’s very new and is already well supported

It’s not all that well supported in lots of those cases I mention. And where it did get, it only got because Apple has actually billions of devices out there and has the power to make the format default among them with one worldwide update. Yet it still has to convert to jpg when sharing elsewhere by default. That’s how huge the resistance is.

It’s not all that new either, heif was introduced in 2017, webp even earlier and people still bitch that they can’t use it because their oddball app doesn’t support it.

Meanwhile x265 has been a common thing for years, and every few years before there’s been a new generation of video codec, and nobody ever bats an eye when there’s a new update.

jpeg2k failed because of licencing and royalty issues. heif hasn’t spread because of licencing and royalty issues

I’m not advocating for these formats specifically (definitely not jpeg2000 haha), but I’m saying licences and royalties aren’t that super important when it comes to how supported something becomes.

Hell look at Apple… Everything is proprietary.

Or when it comes to formats, mp3 is still the most widely supported audio format (non-free), and DivX has been the most widely supported video format for much longer than anything else… Also non-free.

jpe group have a considerable amount of sway so i’m sure they could persuade most camera manufacturers to support it

Haha hardware camera makers are the slowest dinosaurs when it comes to technology. Took them fucking ages for some to support DNG raw format, and before h264 was already getting grey, most would record videos only in mjpeg.

But it’s more about phone cameras anyway. And well with those we’ll only have webp and heif at most, so I guess we have to deal with that anyway.

Maybe if Mozilla had not abandoned their FF OS, maybe that would’ve been a camera supporting jpegxl now.