> being able to join many communities from a single login.
That's one of the features I hate most about Discord, the difficulty of having separate identities in separate places! You can set a "display name" for convenience, but everyone can see your root identity.
....it's available in the Western hemisphere now?! The page mentions Mexico!
I've been wanting to play with Toosheh for YEARS since I first heard about it, but I understood that it was only carried on a bird in the mideast! When did that change?
And simultaneously gimped the theft-alert use case. I embedded one into my labelmaker, which is a notoriously high-theft item on jobsites. I can still track it in case I leave it behind, which is great.
But if someone steals it, they get an alert that there's an airtag traveling with them, and they can go through their loot to figure out which item it is, and ditch it, or destroy it. In the first case I get my labelmaker back, but I never bust the thief.
Right? Nokias had the equivalent of today's "case" built right into the design of the unit, plenty of durable plastic around the vulnerable parts -- the phone would've been considered unfit for sale if it couldn't survive a drop in out-of-the-box condition.
By the time you stripped a dumbphone down to be as vulnerable as one of today's is, it'd be a bare PCB. Nah, probably even in that state, I bet it could handle a drop better than a new iPhone straight out of the box.
What you buy today isn't a complete phone, it's just the guts. One tumble to pavement and you're out a grand. Heaven help you if you fumble it while trying to install the case that should've been part of it from the beginning.
And yet, we still buy them, because the alternatives are from shady manufacturers who never provide updates, and there is no third-party hardware that can run up-to-date iOS. If there was, I'd buy an iNokia in a heartbeat.
I'm carrying my 13 Pro without a case, to see it's Alpine Green glory and feel the matte finish on the back. It's been perfectly fine for the last almost 4 years, some minor scratches on the steel edges I fixed with a sandpaper, there is one recent scratch on the screen and that's all. Otherwise it looks good, just a bit used. Has fallen multiple times from pocket when sitting, and a dozen times from tables, few times onto pavement (that's what needed sanding).
Almost every single one "case" for iPhone is a waste. Waste of material, waste of space, waste of your money, waste of user experience. You've already paid for a perfectly good phone, and then slapped some $[1]0.99 case on it to gain nothing but pain and vanity.
I only had one case on a phone, that made it better - original wooden case for 1+3T. Been looking for same experience on iPhone, but it's not possible due to shape -- they are all bulky. The closest thing is carbon-fiber cases, and I had one, which saved this iPhone when I dropped it onto slanted pavement, where it slid for a few meters screen down, ruining the case, but saving the screen.
Would I drop it if I wasn't using a case, that has parts sticking out, making the phone more cumbersome to use and carry? Unlikely, because it happened in the first year owning it, and I've been going caseless since then and nothing similar happened.
I dropped my flagship Samsung S24U one time. I was running and it slipped out of my back pocket.
That 1 meter fall resulted in calls unable to be placed, USB charging and ABD does not work, and the microphone for the voice recorder does not work. All that indicates that the daughterboard cable was displaced. But the unworking rear camera indicates that there is a second fault in there as well.
Not to mention the alarmingly large dent in the corner, that shattered the screen protector and likely would have resulted in the screen itself having shattered if no protector were on it.
New phones are designed to break. Contrast with my Note 3 that I carried for 8 years without so much as cracking the screen once.
There is no such thing. A connection to the internet should be equal to any other connection to the internet, modulo BGP peering. Noone has a right to dictate what services I run or don't run, what protocols I speak or don't speak, what traffic I accept or deny, but *me*. That's the whole point of being on the internet rather than Prodigy or Compuserve or something.
The physical location of that connection is irrelevant. Maybe I feel my servers are safer in a datacenter. Maybe I feel they're safer in my basement. In my case, it is very much the latter, and again, you don't get to make that call. I do.
> A connection to the internet should be equal to any other connection to the internet
It's not your connection. It's your ISPs. They are also their IPs.
> Noone has a right to dictate what services I run or don't run, what protocols I speak or don't speak, what traffic I accept or deny, but me. That's the whole point of being on the internet rather than Prodigy or Compuserve or something.
Then become your own ISP. Get an ASN (easy), acquire your own IPv4 and IPv6 space (also easy, but v4 is expensive), get a commercial connection that'll allow for BGP, and go ahead, do whatever you want with your IP addresses.
> The physical location of that connection is irrelevant.
It's not about the physical location, it's about who's IP addresses are you using. If they are not yours, the service provider has every right to restrict what you do with them.
This is one of the things that E-Delivery (something which Europe is now implementing[1,2,3]) is going to fix.
It's sort of like email, but based on the XML stack (SOAP / WSDL / XML Crypto / XML Sig), with proper citizen authentication and cryptographically-signed proof of sending and delivery.
We are repeating obvious things here aren't we? I moved to Germany from a very pro IT country Finland. I've been here now for 15 years, and while I still disagree with their idea of dismissing email, I kind of got used to it. A couple more decades and it'll happen...
The main issue is that who is supposed to implement it? The gov has 2 possibilities: hire a contractor, or do it themself. DIY has the issue that nobody wants to work for the gov because as any IT specialist you'd earn 1/3 or 1/4 of what you would earn in a private company. Stateworkers here cannot be fired. So you trade money for extreme "stability" (read: laziness). Hiring a contractor requires money they also don't see the necessity to spend. And that's how you end up in this situation. There are also other issues like no national wide implementation plan. Every state, every commune has to figure out and build stuff themself.
If this resonates with you, I highly recommend picking up a copy of Tracy Kidder's 1981 novel The Soul of a New Machine. You'll be hooked by the end of the introduction.
And if you like that, the good news is you will probably like most every Kidder book. Or at least House. His works tend to be inquiries into how systems work, just at different scales.
Pray for clear skies and go out and watch the beautiful aurora, silly!
Depending on the kids' ages, you can teach them quite a lot about the Earth's magnetic field and why the aurora concentrates at the poles, how the high-energy particles light up the sky (it's a lot like a neon light), and how the atmosphere shields us from any danger despite the spectacular show.
That's one of the features I hate most about Discord, the difficulty of having separate identities in separate places! You can set a "display name" for convenience, but everyone can see your root identity.
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