Admiral Patrick

I’m surprisingly level-headed for being a walking knot of anxiety.

Ask me anything.

Special skills include: Knowing all the “na na na nah nah nah na” parts of the Three’s Company theme.

I also develop Tesseract UI for Lemmy/Sublinks

Avatar by @SatyrSack@feddit.org

  • 23 Posts
  • 400 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 6th, 2023

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  • I’ve had pretty good experience with Nextcloud’s instant upload. The only time I’ve had it shit the bed was ages ago when it would occasionally get stuck on a conflict, but that hasn’t happened in a long time. Pretty much all of my image folders (camera/DCIM, Screenshots, Downloads) get synced. The only annoying thing was when apps would suddenly change where they download to and I’d have to reconfigure yet another sync folder, but I can’t really fault NC for that.

    Mine is set to upload and keep a local copy and only do a one way sync (phone to NC). Not sure if that causes less issues than a 2 way sync or deleting the local copy after upload?


  • I tried a true dumb phone but was breaking out my laptop too much for everyday tasks (dumb phones these days can do hotspot).

    The flip phone I have runs Android 11, so I have the bare minimum necessary chat apps, email, GPS maps, and such. The main draw is that those work well enough, but anything more than that is possible but very frustrating. That’s kind of what the Minimal is about: e.g. yeah, you can watch YouTube videos on it, but you won’t want to.

    Then, when the detox period is up and you’re fully off the addiction, you can get the standard phone back.

    That’s kinda what I did. I used my flip like a true dumb phone for 30 days as a challenge and then un-dumbed it a little bit back to where only my basic needs were met and nothing more. I assumed I’d have rushed back to my old smartphone, but after breaking a bunch of habits, I found I didn’t really want to. Plus, I really missed T9 texting as weird as that sounds lol.


  • Yeah the marketing for it was lost on me. I already digitally detoxed last year when I switched to the flip phone I’m currently using, so I ignored the sales pitch and just looked at it from the cool hardware perspective and mostly reasonable price.

    Credit where it’s due, though: I tried unsuccessfully to just uninstall the time sink apps from my regular smartphone and always ended up just reinstalling them. It took using a device that couldn’t feasibly run those (plus a weaning-off period) for me to fully let go. Seems like that is what the marketing is trying to target.





  • Mostly the e-ink display and the QWERTY keyboard.

    By its nature, it’s not great for doom scrolling, TikTok, or videos (the major time sinks with most phones). Those aren’t my use-cases anyway; I’m more of a reader than a watcher so I figured this would be like a supercharged version of my Kobo (which I love) that has a physical keyboard (which I have missed terribly in smartphones).

    Edit: Plus, its 4:3 e-ink display and keyboard just scream “install Termux on me!” Also planned to use it as a nice portable SSH terminal like I used to have back when smartphones had slide-out keyboards.

    I’m rocking an aging Cat S22 Flip right now and have been trying to figure out what to replace it with. The Minimal Phone seemed like exactly what I wanted. Sad that it arrived DOA and am probably not going to bother replacing it; waiting weeks for something that arrives DOA is a hard thing to recover from.





  • Good. May other retailers and grocery chains follow.

    I hate those things - they treat you like a thief by default. I rarely use them and prefer to wait in line for the 1-2 cashiers, but I did the other day because I only had a few bottles of water to check out, and it was unsurprisingly horrible.

    Scanned and bagged all my stuff. More slowly than I’d have liked, but otherwise uneventfully. I unpocket my wallet to get my shopper’s card and debit card out. “Oh no, you didn’t!” the machine said as it called for backup. Cue waiting 3-4 minutes for the attendant to get to me.

    The machine asked the attendant if I was stealing and showed a replay of what it assumed must be me trying some Ocean’s 11 level of grand larceny. In the video? It was me getting my wallet out to pay.

    Absolutely no time was saved. Nothing was more convenient, and to top it off, I was once again accused of stealing by a bathroom scale with delusions of grandeur.