kirk781

joined 2 years ago
[–] [email protected] 6 points 6 days ago (1 children)

I think the company behind Fairphone makes wireless earbuds as well with replaceable batteries. They are priced in the mid range segment but sadly not available worldwide.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 6 days ago (4 children)

Haven't Spotify mods already been clamped down in one way or the other(in terms of having a trimmed down feature set)? I used to follow Balatan's mod from Mobilism and last I saw, Atleast some stuff was server sided.

Either case, mods can only go so far. I only used Spotify Premium once for a short while before returning back to YT Music and one of the things I liked was third party clients on desktop. ncspot is a terminal based client for Spotify that rakes in one tenth of memory requirements but sadly requires Premium and I don't think there is any way to bypass that as of now. (though of course, most users won't even care about such a niche client)

But if someone is serious about music, then Soulseek is the way to go. It has most genres of music, usually in flac and locally stored music is any day superior to cloud.

 

An old article but still atleast introduced me to one really weird Keyboard layout

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

The most egregious example is the Larsen and Toubro India Head who asked for NINETY HOUR work weeks and said that he felt sad that he couldn't make his workers work that long legally.

Funny thing, not only the company defended him (and his crass remarks associated with it), he also earned, I think, INR 50 Crore whilst a new guy at his company will get ~5 Lakh per annum. Since 100 lakh=1crore (Yes, Indian conversion system are slightly different than million and billions), the CEO nets in 1000x that of its lowest earner. If there ever was a picture of evil, then this person is.

And you can't even point to any specific political party as such since except for Communist Party Of India(Marxist) perhaps, none take this issue seriously. (India has a gamut of parties from regional to national level). Part of the blame does goes to the voter base as well ultimately since the reason this isn't a topic in India's Parliament is because outside of the urban masses (and even then for many it was secondary issue to others), others don't see this as part and parcel of their future.

 

The market is India. 4 out of top 5 phone OEMs are Chinese in origin (last I saw data) with other being Samsung.

Google does not have the same brand value as Apple in India, despite still somehow expecting people to pony up in the same price range. Add to it their custom heating Tensor chips in the past years in a hot climate like India and it doesn't make for a good showcase. Brands like Nothing have made faster inroads in the Indian market both by local production and complete array of their products available from launch time.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago

He was the frontman for Motorhead. Though he started his career in Hawkwind in the 70s, I think.

 

Too bad S25 base model still has only 25W charging support and a relatively short battery capacity of 4000mAh

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Today Weather is decent otherwise, has multiple sources as options and a clean, somewhat customizable UI. It also has a proper Wear OS app with complications support.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago

I honestly don't know what Pocketcasts folks are working on. Their forum has lists of issues where the official Wear OS app lacks so many features, doesn't sync properly and apparently can't run fluidly on my Galaxy Watch 6 even [Like how much memory does it need? Gnome on Linux probably is more resource efficient than their Wear OS app].

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago

I use Obtanium actually since my main mobile browser is Iceraven which isn't on F-Droid by default. [It supports sideloading extensions that official Firefox doesn't].

IIRC, Pano Scrobbler is free but has a premium version as well on Google Play. I scanned through their Github and as of August 2024, the dev was working on implementing payment features without Play integration [like donating to the app and then getting a key for it which will be validated against license servers]. I used to sideload Premium variant of Pano Scrobbler before from Mobilism.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Reminds me somewhat of the Pocketcasts app. It had a one time purchase option once but then switched to a subscription tier instead. Ironically, if Google Podcasts were alive and being developed, then no one would have any need for Pocketcasts since the former had desktop playback and Google would have developed a first party Wear OS app as well(like Pocketcasts).

However, as is evident, Google killed the app and YT Music is not at all built for podcasts. If it categories as a podcast app, then it is the single worst I have seen for podcasts.

 

Even simple apps nowadays have become subscription only. Whilst I used to pirate most stuff in the past, but if the app in question is a small one time purchase, it's not bad considering you don't need to sideload updated apk's from Mobilism each time a new version is released (looks at some great cheap apps like Pano Scrobbler).

However, the trend has shifted towards the other side with everything from video recording apps(AZ Recorder), Weather apps(Today Weather) and Battery monitoring apps(Battery guru) offering subscriptions. Some have a high one time purchase option but some like the latter don't.

Battery Guru is an example of enshittification. If phones still came with removable batteries and companies supported them, then for the price of say, a 4 year subscription to the app, I could have just gotten a new replaceable battery. It's not like the app will magically stop my battery from degrading.

Whilst I have done piracy ( and still pirate stuff like films because no alternative, screw you Netflix), I tried to go the legal route for some apps since then updation and management of them becomes easier. But with the subscription scourge, I doubt devs are going in the right direction.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 month ago (12 children)

Copyright warnings are fairly common in developed nations like much of western Europe and say, US right? Do they result in prosecutions as well( would it be worth it for an ISP to take an individual user to court and spend time and money on it?)

Copyright warnings are almost unknown in my country or much of the underdeveloped / developing world.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago

I am also on Nicotine. I just tried downloading and it is working fine. My port 2234 is closed as per Soulseek official site [though users can download from me, I think].

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 month ago (6 children)

I tried yesterday and it was working. Is it not an issue with the client instead? Try Nicotine instead of the official Souseek client once.

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submitted 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
 

Some companies, most notably Google, have regional specific pricing for their products. So for example, YouTube will be significantly cheaper in India, let's say, than in the US because former's purchasing power is much lower.

However, not all companies do so and that is a prime motivator towards piracy, even for customers who want to go the legal route. There are many examples from niche ones like the streaming app History Hit to mainstream newspapers like New York Times.

I would like to focus on the latter. It's no secret that it's news app in moddable form is easily available though the games section is still off limits, I think. Still, I went to see how much their legit variant cost in my country, India. For first year, it was INR 1000, not bad, considering that rival newspapers in my country have a similar structure. The small thing is that after first year, it will jump eight fold. So, a subscription to a newspaper will cost annually more than any streaming service I can think of(and Atleast streaming services have to offload the Full HD streams from servers, news articles have a much lower bandwidth cost) and almost the price of an entry level smartphone per year.

It's almost as if NYT deserves to be pirated. It is almost as if they don't wish to take users money, even for those willing to pay. For a subscription, that is Twice more than Play Pass, YouTube Premium, Disney combined, it is almost laughable.

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