throwaway74737

Dare to make mistakes in getting good at yourself. People won't care or even remember them.

I have tried them, iPhones are elegant, but I still don't need a golden ball and chain. In most cases, I can use the applications I need on the web, like my bank. I figure out destinations beforehand, writing things down, print directions out, or buy a paper map for a holiday. Lyft has a site called https://ride.lyft.com/ which lets you call a car on a normal browser. Open to using a car service or public transit. I would prefer not to have the burden of carrying a smartphone around with me. Once I took a month-long road trip with a friend. My camera broke, so all I have are journal entries written on hotel notepads. Best time of my life.

Happy to. It requires being willing to change anything in your life to make the whole thing better. That is frightening. A smartphone and social media can end up being a kind of security blanket, it gives you a cheap dopamine hit, so remind yourself that cowboys did without not long ago. Religious Jews still give it up for a day and a night every week, getting together to eat and talk face to face, and maybe play a board game. It means being willing to reorient yourself so that you have a different circle of friends. That does not mean that you are giving up on your current ones! You might try different things and find that you find meaning in boxing, doing something physical in your neighborhood, or making a craft or music. When you set boundaries up front - "hey, I won't be using Insta, but we can still make plans by phone/email, rehearse, play these gigs, and post our recordings to Bandcamp" - you will discover who is good enough to allow into your life, because they respect your time by keeping appointments.

Life is too short to waste distracted by a smartphone. I prefer to use a the large screen and keyboard of a laptop for communication. I am still using a 2G phone with a B&W display for emergencies, for example if I get lost or held up meeting friends. Even then I'll have discussed a contingency with them - the old-fashioned way. I pay next to nothing to keep the account open, and the tap-texting naturally limits my desire to use it for more. Rue the day that GSM is shut down. I also have some text alerts set up from a script running at home to let me know about urgent things.

5G seems to me like planned obsolesence of 4G with only an incremental improvement. 4G was supposed to be "Long-Term Evolution". I had thought that meant forward- and backward-compatibility for decades. Granted, latency is much lower. Did I get taken by marketing?

With 6G deployment already being projected, when I don't even know anybody with a 5G handset, it also seems like a make-work technology.

Deployment of a new wireless technology throughout a national wireless carrier, let alone all carriers in a country the size of the US, or in the world, is such a huge undertaking in terms of environmental resources, that it seems almost irresponsible unless there is a significant improvement.

2G was a quantum leap over 1G analog networks. In 2G networks like GSM, the digital communications stack was so tightly integrated, and as optimized as a 1990s video game, that even everyday layman users knew stories like "I could send an emergency SMS from the middle of nowhere even when there was no signal". It seems like that kind of robustness is missing the more abstract and higher-level these wireless generations go.

I still use GSM daily in the US with a few new and classic phones. The technology is at just the right level with only calls and some texting.

Are there any updates on their GSM network? There are rumors that it will be also sunsetted, but I hope it will stay on. GSM is still useful because of its broad compatibility.

Downvotes are really getting out of hand on this site. It's like a person cannot even express slight negativity. I _want_ to have a completely FOSS audio production stack. I beta-tested Fedora and found a showstopper, which means I need to stick to MacOS for my audio work for the time being. Somebody thinks this means my comment is invalid.

In 34, I've seen a problem with Ardour accessing the JACK API in Pipewire. Apparently one of the API calls is not implemented, which makes Ardour crash from time to time. Sadly, this means I am not comfortable using a completely free/open-source audio production platform yet.

Smartphones come with many physical sensors. Laptops are bigger and have more power, so they should have just as many.

- Very good quality cameras front and back, including IR, dot projector and flash

- Analog audio I/O

- GPS receiver

- 3D accelerometer and gyroscope

- Magnetometer

- Ambient light level and color temperature

- Ambient temperature, air pressure, hygrometer

- Radiation detector

- Wasn't there some research into a user-facing radar that could detect gestures?

- GPIO and SDR