cross-posted from: https://dubvee.org/post/1764707

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Dooley

It's not often you see WV natives on-screen. Last year I learned that Brad Dourif (Lon Suder from Voyager) is from here, and TIL Paul Dooley (Enabran Tain from DS9) is from not far from where I live.

Just thought that was interesting that Trek has two (so far?).

Basically I'm trying to de-clutter the cables to my charging station, and was hoping to use a 3-way cable for my phone, watch, and headphones.

My main concern is if one device is able to successfully negotiate QuickCharge or PD, would that send 9-20 volts to the other devices?

e.g. if I grabbed the wrong cord and hooked it into my laptop, the laptop requests 20v, would that PD negotiation succeed and also send 20v to my 5v devices on the other two leads?

I've only used these kinds of cables with USB-A and chargers that can only output 5V. Most of my chargers now are QC/PD so I'm curious if I should avoid those or take any particular precautions.

Source

The resemblance is a little uncanny.

Bell Riots kick off in 6 days, and we have a proto Borg queen coming online in 2024 just like that old gypsy woman said. Maybe we do live in the Trek universe.

Follow up to this post: https://dubvee.org/post/1715655

I've completed the first week of my 30 day dumb phone challenge. There were a few hiccups along the way, and I had to break out the old smartphone more often than I'd expected, but overall, it's still been successful beyond my expectations (my expectations were quite low, and I figured I'd have given up already lol).

I probably won't be doing weekly updates, but the first week was pretty much expected to be the most challenging, so I figured a follow-up would be warranted.

TL;DR: So far, so good, and I'm actually enjoying it rather than tolerating it as I initially expected.

Main Challenges

MFA for my work VPN

That was, by far, the most frequent cause of having to break out my smartphone. Despite changing my default MFA method from app notification to code, nine times out of ten, the VPN would still try to send the app push. This is made worse by the really crappy VPN my work offers that will, on a good day, disconnect you at random one or more times per workday (sadly, I have no say in what product we use for that). Needless to say, the old phone remained at arm's length most of the workday (though I was successful in keeping it "out of sight, out of mind")

On day 3, it started to prompt for a TOTP token about half the time (yay, progress), and since day 5, it's asked every time. Why it took 3-5 days for that change to be fully effective is beyond me. Note to self: If I ever do change back to app push, never lose my phone.

Looking up Business Phone Numbers

I was out running errands and needed to call a local business to see if they had a specific thing in stock (the big box store I was near was out). Rather than run back to the parking lot and grab my smartphone from my car, I re-enabled the mobile browser to grab their number from their website. While this went against the spirit of the experiment, my old dumb phone way back when did have a primitive mobile browser which I used similarly, so I'm going to let this slide. I've also left the mobile browser enabled since needing to lookup a business phone number while out and about is not an uncommon situation.

Pokemon Go

Ok, so this is purely an indulgence, but I do have a very long, unbroken streak going on Pokemon Go. I'm not really a die-hard player anymore, but I do refuse to break my streak. So every morning when I let the dogs out, I sit on the patio, drink my coffee, and catch my daily Pokemon as well as play a few of my daily word games. For those purposes, the smartphone is basically a wifi tablet/Game Boy that gets used for about 15 minutes and then put away. I can live with that.

As far as the challenges go, that was pretty much it. Looking at the contemporary slate of feature phones (most of the ones I looked at run KaiOS), a web browser is pretty standard so I didn't really cheat much at all by re-enabling it. As far as "feature completeness" is concerned, re-enabling the web browser seems to cover all my known bases.

General Experience

It's certainly been different. I still have the "itch" to pull out my phone and start scrolling at the first hint of boredom, but having this pseudo dumb phone is kind of like wearing oven mitts to keep you from scratching when you had chickenpox as a child lol. I've found myself taking in my environment more, being more observant of people/things around me, and generally listening to a lot more music when I need a distraction.

Beyond that, it's been great not getting notifications for every little thing, and there's been very little FOMO with not being "always on" in multiple IM apps. People were also quick to start reaching me via SMS instead of IM.

The other thing I'm really enjoying is just using this thing. It just feels so much more comfortable in my hand than any of the cookie-cutter rectangles I've used for the last 16 years. It took a little less than a day to get back into the full swing of tap and T9 typing, but I'm enjoying that, too (or maybe I'm just enjoying physical keys again). I have to make far fewer corrections than with the on-screen keyboards, and going back to fix a mistake is way less frustrating with physical arrow keys than the stupid finger slide smartphones use.

I've also quickly gotten spoiled by not having to suckle at the teat of the nearest USB cable throughout the day. Partly because I'm not scrolling on it all day and partly because there's just less phone the battery has to support, it easily lasts all day with plenty to spare. It'll get unplugged around 6am and only be down to 65% or so by the time I go to bed. I'm used to being well below 65% before lunch lol.

Next Steps

This is only the end of week 1, so I've got 3 more weeks to go before I really feel I'm ready to make a decision. Based on initial experience, I probably could go for a true dumb phone, but the only thorn in my side is my bank app. I really hate to lose that, and it's the only thing I can't do even with a modern "dumb" phone.

Before beginning this experiment proper, I did play around with this as the smartphone it actually is (I disabled a lot of things on it to dumb it down for this challenge). It's certainly a weird form factor to use Android with, but it's got its charms. One thing I noticed was that I could do everything I could do on my main phone. The nice thing, though, was that I just didn't want to. Like, it was just annoying enough with the small screen and tap/T9 text input that I was happy I could do something if I needed to but was too annoyed to make a habit out of it. That said, I very well may un-dumb this when the 30 days are up and keep using it as my daily driver.

1.4.13

Docker Tags

• ghcr.io/asimons04/tesseract:1.4.13
• ghcr.io/asimons04/tesseract:v1.4.13
• ghcr.io/asimons04/tesseract:latest

Bugfixes

• [0ed97991] Don't badge-ify hashtags if the hashtag linkify option is disabled
• [ce5a310a] Make markdown text reactive (and re-run pre-processing step) to changes to the enable/disable hashtag setting.
• [704e2d78] When clicking the user/community links in the modal, close the modal when navigating to the target (previously modal stayed open)

Enhancements

• [3b8ef653] Update banner when viewing a post on a remote instance to use more concise verbiage and add an extra button to link to the post's canonical instance.
• [ec8c4bfe] User and Community links are now a elements rather than button. Allows middle-clicking or right-click-> open in new tab to immediately open the profile/community in a new tab without having to click through the modal. Regular clicks still open the modal.

New Feature: Synthetic View Modes

Under the hood, there are still only two main types of view: Card and Compact

However, Compact view is affected by several options which can be combined to create different view styles.

The "compact/card" switcher button has been replaced with a selector menu to select from one of 6 views:

1. Card: The flagship Tesseract post view. Posts are shown as cards with all the media embed bells and whistles. Post body preview is set to 240 characters.

2. Compact: The classic "compact" view as of 1.4.12. Feed margins are present, post images are thumbnails, the post body preview is 240 characters, and no media is embedded unless the post is expanded into card view.

3. Wide Compact: Same as "compact" but without the feed margins. Posts span the full width of the display. Clicking the thumbnail image or the "expand" button in the post action bar will expand the post into card view.

4. More Compact: Same as "wide compact" except the body preview length is set to zero and can be expanded.

5. Ultra Compact: Same as "wide compact" except the thumbnails and the post body are hidden. Post body cannot be expanded, and you will need to click into the post to see it. Post can be expanded to card view only with the "expand" button in the post action bar. Expanding into card view does not reveal the post body, only the thumbnail image (if present). If the post is a media post, the embed will be available (either in full or click-to-play depending on settings)

6. Reader: Same as "wide compact" except the entire post body is shown (up to 10,000 characters).

More views may be added along the way, but for now, those should cover more use cases without having to manually fiddle with the various options.

I'm really liking the "Reader" mode, myself.

Per Wikipedia, RAS Syndrome is short for Redundant Acronym Syndrome and was coined in 2001 in a light-hearted column in New Scientist.

A person is said to "suffer" from RAS syndrome when they redundantly use one or more of the words that make up an acronym or initialism with the abbreviation itself.

e.g. "I had a hard time entering my PIN number into the ATM machine because its GUI interface was unintuitive"

The sentence still makes sense and, depending on the acronyms used, is more clear. Different industries use the same acronyms for different things. If you're working with people from different industries, sometimes those overlap; having the last word spelled out can help distinguish which is being used.

There are few linguistic hills I'll die on, but this is one of them. This post brought to you by a coworker who didn't like that I said "PIN number".

It really looks like a laptop, but it’s actually a 14″ 1920 x 1280 monitor and USB keyboard in a laptop form factor.

There is also an integrated trackpad, speakers and mic, and a rechargeable battery. That makes it capable of providing its own power, and it can even function as a power bank in a pinch. There’s an HDMI input on one side, and on the other is a full-featured USB-C port that accepts video input via the DisplayPort altmode.

Don't count on the Deep Space Nine star angling for a Star Trek: O'Brien any time soon.

DS9: 1x14: Storyteller

In his defense, it's his one and only half-ass, and it was intentional.

And if you don't get the reference in the title: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FqURRsNLxB4