4 mm wider than the 10V. :(

This model series used to be the only decent option for a narrow mid-range phone. Not much separates it from the competition aside from the 3.5mm jack, now. What a shame.

I see FFT, I upvote. I love that game so much. I should play it again… It would be perfect for the Deck, too.

Please follow the instance rules if you’re posting here. Reported for breaking the only rule: Bee Kind.

Another consideration is whether you’re a “patient gamer”. If you want to play the latest and greatest, then I have no idea. But, if you’re like me, then there are literally thousands of slightly older games you’d be happy to play.

If that’s you, then you can’t beat the Steam Deck for value. With game bundles, I often get 8 games for $10 or less. Even if I only play one, that’s incredible value compared with $80 new titles.

With a tiny bit of work, you can get Epic and GOG working on the Deck, too. If you’re a Prime subscriber, you’ll get 1-4 GOG/Epic games/week for free in addition to Epic’s weekly giveaways and GOG’s occasional giveaways. Some of those are AA/AAA games from a few years ago, too.

If you’re tired of AAA games entirely (like me), then the Deck is also likely the best since there are so many incredible indie games. I’d much rather play 20 unique 1-10 hour games than a single 100-hour AAA repetitive slog. And most can be had for $10 or less if you wait for a sale or bundle.

It’s also a great emulation machine for everything Nintendo that came before the Switch and everything else up to the PS2 generation, I guess? (Switch emulation is a bit of a pain to get working well, and for anything 360/PS3 or newer, they mostly have PC versions anyway, I think? I’ve never had a reason to emulate any of 'em so idk.)

The OLED has a great screen and great battery life, so I have barely touched my smaller emulation devices since getting it. Why use a tiny device with cramped, limited controls when I can play on a great screen with Steam Input (so I can easily write my own game macros, or use the back buttons on twin stick games instead of the face buttons so I never need to take my thumbs off the joysticks, etc.)

I guess if you actually want a device on the go, then something smaller might be better, but for longer trips the Deck works great in my laptop bag, and for short, mobile gaming breaks, I’ll just play Minion Masters or Space Cadet Pinball on my phone.

Yeah; that’s not much time, and I’m not a lawyer, but this seems a complicated legal question. I just assumed any tool that circumvents any sort of digital lock would be hosting in countries that DGAF about US laws. Even better if they have a .onion address to avoid any network blocking attempts, like z-library.

Film 1 is the crew desperately trying to make it home in the prologue and dying, then the alien mind control worms slowly take over a NASA research facility until it’s finally eradicated in the closing scene, with Sigourney Weaver the lone human survivor. But if you wait until after the credits, you get a 5-second teaser of a single worm wriggling out through a crack in the side of the facility.

One of my bigger concerns from all this is that reduced access to users to install apps might have chilling effects on app development. It’s great being able to get apps from Itch.io, GitHub, and FDroid, but will developers continue releasing there if the user base dries up? I guess apk-mirror will likely still continue, since they’re ripping from the Play store anyway.

Realistically, everyone should probably be updating their BIOS when building a new computer. Often, early updates have the biggest fixes, right?

We all should probably be updating our mobo BIOS periodically, at least for the first years or two when there are still significant potential updates/fixes, but I don’t blame anyone who doesn’t; it’s not as straightforward as Windows Update doing everything for people.

My (major Canadian) Bank app (TD) has always just worked, no matter the state of my bootloader or root, and I’ve never bothered with Magisk Hide or anything like that to try to dodge root checks.

Eh, for most things, sure. I’m right with you for most media, but there’s a lot to be said for confining content when it’s part of the cultural zeitgeist. Ain’t nobody talking about Game of Thrones now, and it’s only 6 years old, not even a decade.

With any sort of piracy setup, almost all mainstream media is incredibly easy to get within a few hours of release, and most “Long Tail” content can be found pretty easily, too. If it’s so obscure that you still can’t find it, then that’s likely a good indication that you’re solidly pushing into indie content that hardly earns any income, so they could really benefit from us paying for their content.

We do try to make sure indie content creators get paid, though. For example, Kindle Unlimited is pretty amazing for us. My wife and I share an account, and we read so voraciously that authors get paid out about 10× what we pay for the service. Maths out roughly like this: ~30 books/month, on average, at ~1¢/page (actual pages, not Kindle standardized e-reader pages, which are only half a page), at ~250-300 pages/book is $75-90/mo, and we pay for 2 years in advance at I think $7ish/mo.

But I’m totally with you on games. I spend lots on videogames, but almost entirely for indie game bundles at $1-2/game, typically. I have literally thousands of games I’d love to play going back decades, so I don’t need the latest releases unless it’s a game I’m super excited for.

Which ones? It’s pretty easy to pass Strong Integrity.

With a web browser and user agent spoofing, that’s basically how it works. I don’t want any Facebook/Meta apps on my phone, so I use a desktop Google Chrome rule for all Meta URLs in my browser and user the web versions. Mobile is slowly taking over, but most things have a web version.

Unfortunately, that doesn’t work for everything. The Quest 3 requires an Android or iOS device to set up. At least an old cell phone on a throwaway Google account works for most of these, since they don’t need to be used often.

Epic winning this case might just open that for them.

On the other hand, do they want to enter the mobile market? They’re a privately owned company, so they don’t have the same shirt sighted pressures to chase exponential growth endlessly, like cancer. They are already making money hand over fist.

Bluetooth headphones do this, too. It’s infuriating. Let me turn off battery saver mode, god damn it! (I assume this is on the headphones, not on Android, though?)

For some reason, TalkBack triggers this, too, so most Bluetooth headphones are useless for that purpose. Something in a recent update broke TalkBack in the Kindle app so it won’t read continuously the “old way” (that worked) and instead uses “continuous reading mode” that pauses just long enough to put Bluetooth headphones to sleep every sentence. And I don’t think Google cares because Amazon has implemented their own TTS system in the Kindle app that’s slow as fuck for anyone used to speed reading with TTS, but it’s the way everyone is recommending now for Kindle. I’ve switched to pirating books so I can read them in Moon+ Reader instead, since it works.

Completely agreed. Nothing was added by this blog post, for anyone who wasn’t following it, but it was a decent enough summary. Then that last paragraph comes out of left field.

Ross has championed this for all our benefit, at great personal cost.

This is made up, right?

Oh, that’s good to know. I read that Switch 2 games are just cryptographically unique keys to allow download and play of the games.

And good point about the installer vs. just having the game files in a folder. Yeah, it’s not like GOG where you can download an offline installer file.

I’m typically the one to remind people you don’t own your Steam games, either. Would certainly like a fix for that, too.

Eh… You don’t “own” them in that the First Sale Doctrine doesn’t apply, sure, but plenty of Steam games are DRM free, so you can store your own backups, if you want to. That counts, in my books.

Like, how much more do you need? ETA: That’s more than you get with Switch 2 “physical games”, isn’t it?

I was debating doing something like this; install my build in the crawlspace below my desk. It’s just an exterior wall, so running a big enough channel through the wall would mess up the insulation. :(

That’s a sweet setup.

Hit the nail on the head.

Millions and millions of print books are destroyed all the time, and very rarely is anything of value lost. Libraries, thrift stores, and used book stores get inundated thousands of books donated to them, most of which nobody wants. Unless you, personally, are going to take on sorting, transporting, and storing dozens of duplicate copies of books in poor condition, and have some purpose for them (presumably?), then get off your high horse about the destruction of bulk-purchased used books.

Individual copies of mass-published books are not precious. Only rare books are important for preservation. And, even then, digital copies are much more practical for long-term storage than physical books. Anna’s Archive’s preservation project as a shadow library is only possible because data storage is very cheap, infinitely replicable, and practically free to transport.