Amazon is killing one of its best resources, 25 year old DPReview. Read their own announcement, and some of other tech sites and its peers.
That’s a loss for everyone interested in camera gear and how to use it. A sad day.
A brief stint into Mint
After reading so often about Linux Mint lately – see for instance my post from yesterday about Liam from The Register – I decided to try and have a look at it, which I haven’t done in quite a while. Not that I’d need something else than Debian, but I always recommended Ubuntu for beginners or for people switching from other operating systems, and maybe by now there are indeed better choices?
Well, I had a short look only, but I must say that indeed, Mint looks like a thing of beauty:
I gave the virtual machine only 2 cores, and 4 GB of RAM plus 16GB on the SSD, but it ran everything I tried beautifully:
Mint is still based upon Ubuntu, at least this version is/was (I think I’ve read of an alternative one which is based upon Debian, but wanted to try the default one) – so it’s hard to say after only a short time which is better. But everything looked very well laid out, there’s even a firewall which you can switch on with a simple mouse click, and I think that new Linux users would have no problems getting around this; the Cinnamon desktop looks much more like Windows than for instance Gnome does. Plus it didn’t take too many resources, that virtual machine used only some 800MB of the 4GB of RAM I’d given it.
So, in case you’re interested in trying a Linux distribution and don’t know which one, I’d still say try Ubuntu because of the huge user base, but Linux Mint is probably even easier, so take that into your consideration as well – especially now that Ubuntu seems to split to a paid support model for companies, Mint looks more like the end-user friendly variant to me.
Like always, thanks for reading. And now, back to my Debian:
Some IT news for today (March 17th, 2023)
First, a test of a notebook which runs Linux pretty well. It’s the modern version of one that a former colleague of mine had, the Lenovo X1 Carbon, here in its 10th Generation. Liam Proven checked it on The Register’s site, here:
https://www.theregister.com/2023/03/10/thinkpad_x1c_g10_linux/
I had a much bigger and heavier Lenovo P50 “workstation” type which also ran Linux just fine, just like my wife’s L380 Yoga 2-in-1, as you now would call them if you can rotate the display 180 degrees and use it with the in-built pencil.
Seems that for Liam, Linux Mint in its latest version has been a good choice. But others will follow…
Next: Debian’s upcoming version “Bookworm” (or Debian Linux 12) is now in hard freeze, which means that bug fixing will be going on full steam by now, and after a short “full freeze” period we’ll get that next version. Announcement is here:
https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2023/03/msg00004.html
Which I’ve found via the Debian micronews (thanks Laura!).
One last one for today, which this time is about a vulnerability on a Samsung chip. Google’s Project Zero warns about an issue with Exynos Modems, read here:
https://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com/2023/03/multiple-internet-to-baseband-remote-rce.html
Its Pixel 7 devices should be safe already, but in case you have some sort of Pixel 6 or a Samsung Galaxy S22 or others, read AndroidAuthority or other sites about it as well. And turn off VoLTE and WiFi calling until there’s a fix for this.
Ok folks, that’s it for now – and like always, thanks for reading.
Well – the percentage is right…
… but KDE Connect and GSConnect differ with my phone’s opinion about the remaining battery time – see here:
For me at least, “48:29” – what is that – hours and minutes? Or minutes and seconds? – sounds a bit different from the phone’s display of “1 day, 5 hrs”
Have to check where to send a bug report about that…
Anyhow, like always, thanks for reading.
Recommended reading for today (March 16th, 2023)
I’ve found some interesting and thought-provoking articles, which is usually the case if you read interesting media and follow some of the links. Here’s the first one:
The Future Smartphone: More Folds, Less Phone, a Whole Lot of AI, in Wired
What I found particularly interesting in that one was the insight of the last questioned person, Kyle Wiens, co-founder and CEO of iFixit, who in turn brought me to Google’s (and Motorola’s) Project Ara:
This comes from a saved copy of Google’s ad of 2016, short before they buried the project – which would have been the phone-sized equivalent of the modularity of a PC, the best idea for smartphones until now in my humble opinion. Except of course, that it would have been the end of smartphone sales, except for parts… anyhow, shouldn’t we all get this instead of an upcoming Pixel 8 (or 9, 10, …)?
Next topic.
Whenever I hear the news, and listen to all the excitement about “artificial” “intelligence”, I am shaking my head. Now James Bridle has written a truly great article about it, called:
The stupidity of AI, in The Guardian
That’s a must read in my opinion, to set some perspectives right – and to learn that “It’s hard to think of anything more utterly stupid than artificial intelligence, as it is practised in the current era” (citation from the above article).
We’re just discussing these topics in Wikiloops for instance, as first members already came up with computer-generated lyrics. And even the basic questions about copyright issues aren’t that easy to understand, as I’d found in an article in Forbes a few days ago. But James’ article in The Guardian goes way deeper as you will find when reading it.
As I mentioned in this post’s headline, I consider these recommended reading. Thanks for your interest.
Easily repairable, but…
I’ve read the very positive reviews in The Guardian and also in Trusted Reviews about the new Nokia G22 mobile phone. This new device does indeed stand out of the crowd because like a Fairphone 4 you can pretty easily repair it yourself – changing its battery for instance would take mere minutes, and would require almost no special tools. I’ve looked it up, and it starts at around 180€ in the price comparison engines – far cheaper than the Fairphone.
That alone and in itself is applaudable indeed, and we all should give HMD/Nokia credits for it.
But…
Last weekend, we walked through a big chain electronics store, and when coming past the mobile phone section we saw quite a number of people standing around the Xiaomi/Redmi exhibited parts. I’ve had a short glance, and wow, these had really gorgeous displays, must have been OLED, although I didn’t really look them up until now. And they, too, were about 180€ – no wonder that people flocked around them like flies around honey.
And that is probably the Achilles heel of the new Nokia G22 – which comes with a rather huge 6,52″ IPS display with a mere 720×1200 pixels – not even Full HD! They even got it wrong on their own website, because an aspect ratio of 20:9 means that it has in fact 720×1600 pixels – but HD+ also means that for normal video content, 720×1200 is about right (should read 720×1280 for that)… come on, Nokia/HMD, even the Google Nexus 5 from 2013 did far better than that – it had an IPS display as well (OLED wasn’t really a thing in 2013 yet), but at a much cuter 4.95″ size it had Full HD, which easily beat even Apple’s SE line until today.
That Nokia G22 does everything else quite right, and it even comes with a headphone jack. It would be perfect if it wouldn’t be a) that big, and b) come with that lame excuse of a screen. It almost hurts to see a good idea ruined through corporate greed like that!
HMD Global has their phones made by Taiwanese maker Foxconn who have facilities in Vietnam and who also make Google’s and even Apple’s phones. But would customers respect that, or rather take a similarly cheap Chinese brand like the -mi ones I saw on display? That large crowd of people around their display stand wouldn’t probably have a second look onto the Nokia G22 in direct comparison, which is sad.
So my advice to HMD would be: great start, people – now make it 20$/€ (10%) more expensive, and give us a nice OLED display with at least FullHD. Oh, and making it a bit smaller, like 6″ or so, would also be nice. Thanks for your consideration.
Oh, and to the reviewers of other sites:
It also helps not only to look at the makers’ support cycles (like in this case, three years), but also to help/hints about the possibility to unlock the devices’ bootloaders, so that after the end of these support cycles, we can easily unlock the devices, and put something with longer support onto them. I’d love to read any news about that, and if the makers don’t claim anything, ask them – you’re journalists, aren’t you? And as jourmalists you should ask questions, not only repeat the maker’s ads. Thanks a lot.
No “AI” needed…
This:
… is the same as my blog header photo, but heavily blurred with The Gimp‘s “Lens Blur”, using a radius of 200.
I took inspiration from the wonderful wallpapers (especially the “Sage” one) of the Google Pixel 6a mobile phone, which let you really concentrate on your foreground instead of the underlying background. See here as an example:
See how much the browser window and also the Conky system monitor stand out if the background just isn’t that sharp and detailed? What a simple but effective idea from Google’s artist crew; bravi! See 9to5google, and especially this image which would also be big enough to cover my desktop…
Like always, thanks for reading.
GR5 is indeed quite excellent television
Have to agree with deboraey’s review of the Belgian series GR5 (here also titled “Missing Lisa”) – the characters are really nice and believable, the photography is just stunning at times, and the thought of walking 2000+ kilometres is wonderful… 9/10 from me as well.
Currently available in ZDF and/or in MediathekViewWeb (and for Android phones, in the Zapp App), German trailer is here if you can receive that (I think ZDF heavily geoblocks, so apologies if this is empty or not working for you):
In my opinion, well worth watching… enjoy.
Here’s a fun music video…
Just found that in MAR10: Koji Kondo, Nintendo Mario Bros composer, talks music – enjoy…
Better than official numbers…
C. Scott Brown reports about the Fairphone 2 phone on AndroidAuthority, telling us that it has been supported for 7 years until now, and that this is better than even Samsung’s update policy.
And right he is of course, but forgetting that a) some iPhones were supported equally long, and that b) there are third party offerings like for instance LineageOS (just to name the most well-known one) who easily top that – for the mentioned Fairphone 2 for instance, there’s Android 11 in form of LineageOS 18.1 available.
And that’s far from the end of it – on my Google Nexus 5 I had an (unofficial but still great) version of LineageOS 20 which equals Android 13 – and that was a device which was even 2 years older than the Fairphone 2, and which LineageOS officially supported until 14.1 (Android 7).
So the real question before buying any new phone should be: is it supported by LineageOS and other 3rd party offerings? Do the makers at least give you the option to unlock the devices’ bootloaders so that you *can* install something different than the makers’ version of Android? For Apple’s iPhones and the iOS, the answer is generally “no”, so despite their long support through the maker they still lose against “open” Android phones like all devices from Google themselves for instance. See the devices listing on LineageOS, and if your phone is as old as a Nexus 5, don’t forget to mark the “discontinued devices” checkbox – if you find yours there, then there’s a great chance to also find some newer ROMs on the site of the XDA Developers.
The jury is still out, but at least with Android 13 on my late brother’s Pixel 3a I can even use my banking app, haven’t found many bugs even in that unofficial ROM yet.
So would I like to have a newer phone than that? Definitely yes. Do I really need one? Not so sure yet, although having Google’s quarterly “feature drops” is of course something really nice.
So if you’re reading articles about the longevity and the support cycles from manufacturers, don’t forget the third party aspect, it’s an important one in my opinion.
As always, thanks for reading.