lichtmetzger
@lichtmetzger@discuss.tchncs.de
- Comment on QWERTY Phones Are Really Trying to Make a Comeback This Year 4 days ago:
It’s pretty heavy which was weird for the first few days, but I got used to it. At first, it was a bit hard to hold that heavy brick in my hands and reach the keyboard on the bottom without losing my balance, but now I don’t have a problem with it anymore. And I notice now that I can start typing blindly more and more, which is super cool.
The OLED screen on the back is a gimmick I rarely use. But I really like that the device sits flat on a surface if you put it into the official case. There’s no camera bump tilting it at an angle, like so many modern smartphones do.
Be aware that they use old BlackBerry screens, which have been sitting in a warehouse for years. They have great resolution, but some of them started to delaminate at the edges and that looks like stains on your screen. I got lucky and my screen is pretty good, but other people got really messed up screens. Unihertz is not handling those issues well, it seems, only offering a free case or very low discounts.
- Comment on QWERTY Phones Are Really Trying to Make a Comeback This Year 5 days ago:
I don’t think it’ll be shit, but they don’t talk about RAM at all while revealing all other specs. Given current RAM pricing it seems like they’re still trying to make a good deal on that, which will ultimately decide how much RAM customers get. It probably won’t be a lot.
Unihertz put in 12GB into the Titan 2, good luck trying to match that now.
- Comment on QWERTY Phones Are Really Trying to Make a Comeback This Year 5 days ago:
I got the Unihertz Titan 2 in December and I absolutely love it. 12GB of RAM are amazing. The camera isn’t good, I hope they’ll improve that with the next model.
Clicks is very quiet about the amount of RAM in their device, it seems like they haven,t finalized that yet. Given current RAM pricing, I fear a 6GB model coming… :(
- Comment on What are your technology mispredictions? 1 week ago:
At least we still have very powerful netbooks. GPD makes some.
- Comment on What are your technology mispredictions? 1 week ago:
I am really grateful that Microsoft removed Windows Mixed Reality from Windows 11 and turned a lot of good headsets into trash for a while. Got an HP Reverb G2 for 120 bucks and now that works better than ever thanks to the Oasis driver that came out a few months ago.
It’s 2160p per eye and I played Half-Life: Alyx on it, which is an absolute masterpiece. And I got Virtual Home Theater and watched all of the Guardians of the Galaxy movies in full 3D SBS. Better quality than my local cinema.
The Steam frame is supposed to have the same resolution and might be 600+. I’m not paying that much for VR.
- Comment on What are your technology mispredictions? 1 week ago:
And the Sidewinder Force Feedback Pro joystick. Came out in 1998 and people still build USB adapters today to make it work in modern racing games and flight simulators.
Using light sensors was wild back then, the successor didn’t use them anymore because they cheaped out.
- Comment on What are your technology mispredictions? 1 week ago:
I wish we’d still use them. Typing this on a Unihertz Titan 2.
- Comment on Windows 11’s 2025 problems are getting impossible to ignore 2 weeks ago:
I do admit that I run Win10 IOT in VirtualBox for a few small programs that won’t run under Wine.
I work in an ad agency and I have to use it, too, sometimes. Mainly for Adobe XD and Illustrator. I export their shitty proprietary formats to PDF and SVG, shut down the VM and continue working with native Linux tools.
- Comment on Windows 11’s 2025 problems are getting impossible to ignore 2 weeks ago:
This guy assassinates.
- Comment on Windows 11’s 2025 problems are getting impossible to ignore 2 weeks ago:
I like having to put “site:reddit.com” at the end of my search query before I can even begin to scratch the surface of the issue.
kagi.com solved this problem for me.
- Comment on Windows 11’s 2025 problems are getting impossible to ignore 2 weeks ago:
Ungrouped buttons with titles is very efficient for me, too. I grew up with Windows 95 and my brain can handle this really well. I despise grouped buttons I have to hover over to see the actual windows and the icons only mode makes the clickable area too small and annoying to navigate to.
- Comment on Maybe the RAM shortage will make software less bloated? 3 weeks ago:
I’m currently running Fedora Linux with Firefox and YouTube opened up. The whole system uses ~4GB of memory. That’s totally fine and I couldn’t care less about what Microsoft is doing with their OS.
With that said, I don’t think we’ll see a lot of optimizations in commercial software. Maybe a few here and there, but a lot of developers nowadays don’t even know how to optimize their code. Especially people working in web development. Let’s just throw hundreds of npm packages into one project and bundle them up with webpack, here’s your 12MB JavaScript - take it or leave it.
- Comment on ‘Baldur’s Gate 3’ Maker Promises ‘Divinity’ Will Be ‘Next Level’ 4 weeks ago:
The story was excellent, the combat was a slog. Still finished it and ultimately enjoyed it, but it felt like they were being limited by the DnD system a lot, ultimately worsening the experience.
- Comment on ‘Baldur’s Gate 3’ Maker Promises ‘Divinity’ Will Be ‘Next Level’ 4 weeks ago:
Act 3 launched half baked and half broken
It still has bugs to this day. I played through the whole game two months ago. The printing press mission was extremely broken. It’s a mission where you are supposed to swap out the headline in a printing press so a magazine doesn’t shit-talk your party. The mission progressed as intended, the press even praised me for swapping the article out and on the next day I still got shit-talked.
I had to do the whole mission again and talk to the printing press twice (for no reason) to fix it. Yenna in my camp also never cooked for me.
Larian announcing their next game to be even bigger than before makes me a bit cautious. I hope they don’t bite off more than they can chew.
- Comment on ‘Baldur’s Gate 3’ Maker Promises ‘Divinity’ Will Be ‘Next Level’ 4 weeks ago:
Cyberpunk’s launch issues were largely stability/performance related
I played the first release when it came out. There were a LOT of mission-breaking bugs, missing content, much less customization options, entirely missing features, a really messy perk system etc. It feels like a very different game now, since they patched in more content that was initially missing.
Someone did a writeup of all the patches here.
They should’ve pushed back the game at least for another year. 1.05 mostly focused on the cutscenes and Jonny Silverhand/Keanu Reeves since that’s what sold the game initially and left a lot to be desired in other areas.
- Comment on Google's latest reason to give them $14/month: "Watch in faster playback speeds with Premium" 5 weeks ago:
Sometimes they even show an “Experiencing interruptions?” popup just to be extra dickheads. I am patient, I can wait.
- Comment on Introducing SlopStop: Community-driven AI slop detection in Kagi Search 2 months ago:
Absolutely. I’ve been using it for a month and it feels like Google, but before they enshittified. DDG was my previous goto search engine, but it’s gotten really bad as well. Especially the aggressive keyword replacements drove me almost insane.
- Comment on Germany seeks deal with the Taliban to expedite expulsion of Afghan migrants 2 months ago:
Thank god the rise of fascism is limited to specific areas of the world and not a general problem of our planet’s societies. /s
- Comment on Over the past ~20 years, Google became the de facto entry point for learning new skills and information. Google also sucks now. This is a really big problem. 2 months ago:
Thank you, that’s really insightful. Especially this:
As it turns out, Kagi was founded originally as an AI company, who later pivoted to search. And going by their comments in their Discord, AI tools seem to be what they spend most of their time on these days.
I’ll enjoy it as long as it lasts. Which probably won’t be very long, but we’ll see. :D
- Comment on Over the past ~20 years, Google became the de facto entry point for learning new skills and information. Google also sucks now. This is a really big problem. 2 months ago:
What’s questionable about Kagi? I switched to it last month and the search results are amazing, it works just like Google worked before the enshittification. Which makes sense, since they actually pay Google for access to their API.
I used DDG for a while, but they get increasingly bad. They started to aggressively replace keywords with similar sounding keywords, which really messes up the results. Absolutely unuseable garbage.
- Comment on If AI was all it was cracked up to be, it wouldn't be shoved in your face 24/7 2 months ago:
Username does not check out.
- Comment on just one more bro 3 months ago:
This reminds me of the sketch from Chris & Jack, where one person tries to outsmart a genie and almost succeeds, but still fails.
- Comment on The demise of Flash didn't bring any big HTML5/JS equivalent for watching animations; fast internet and better video compression made those types of animations become raster videos as well 3 months ago:
That’s true, but there is a project called “ruffle” now, which is written in Rust and can play .swf files. So if you really want, you can still build Flash animations and share them online.
Ruffle also runs in browsers, thanks to wasm.
- Comment on I'm tired of teen superheroes 3 months ago:
Oh yes, I miss mature characters in modern animes. I’m so tired of stupid Lolis 😭
80’s anime had believable characters that didn’t all look like they were 10-12 years old. Cyber City Oedo, Robot Carnival, Patlabor…great stuff.
- Comment on It would have been really funny if a video game ejected the disk if you lost too many times 3 months ago:
The Guardians of the Galaxy game did that, at least a little bit. The game seemingly ends, credits are rolling and then they slowly start to glitch out and some of the names are replaced with the name of the antagonist.
Then the credits crash out and a second bossfight starts. You can kinda see it coming, but it was still pretty cool for them to do that.
- Comment on The time and expense of commuting is theft, if that job can be done from home. 4 months ago:
Absolutely. I’ve been working from home for ~3 years and I’ll never go back. I have so much more time for myself (and also, no one is annoying me with smalltalk or stupid questions).
- Comment on Spotifies come and Spotifies go, but that folder of badly-sorted MP3s will still be there in the 2050s. 4 months ago:
I find music on YouTube and autoconvert it to MP3 with yt-dlp and ffmpeg. It embeds the metadata, cover art and tries to parse the artist and title as best as possible.
yt-dlp -x -f bestaudio --audio-quality 0 --audio-format mp3 --embed-thumbnail --add-metadata --metadata-from-title “%(artist)s - %(title)s” --playlist-start 1 --playlist-end 999 https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=123abc -o “./files/%(artist)s - %(title)s.%(ext)s” --cookies-from-browserNeeds minimal adjustment sometimes if the title format is weird, but works 95% automatic. What I like most about this is the fact that music vanishes all the time from YouTube. No one deletes the files from my harddrive but me.
- Comment on 4 months ago:
I imagine you must be quite skilled to be able to manage your whole-ass company (and run their systems into the ground). So it shouldn’t be a problem to get another job after being fired.
Why fuck with your own life, just because of your own ego and a drive for revenge? That guy must’ve watched too many animes.
- Comment on Sony is raising all PS5 console prices in the US by $50, starting tomorrow 4 months ago:
There isn’t a CFW for PS4. But what we have is GoldHEN (which enables us to run decrypted games, also called fPKG’s) and various methods to run GoldHEN.
Up to firmware 9.00 (I believe) there is a browser exploit to run it, up to 11.00 you can also hack the console via PPP (pppwn) and up to 12.02 GoldHEN can be loaded with a BluRay you have burned before.
So you basically start the system and put it in a state where it accepts unsigned code. It’s very similar to PS3HEN. There’s also a method of hacking the console with some obscure Japanese games and one with a PS2 game.
The channel MODDED WARFARE always reports on those methods and makes tutorials, highly recommended.
- Comment on 7 years later, Valve's Proton has been an incredible game-changer for Linux 4 months ago:
Well…looks like my employer will have to buy me a Macbook soon.