There are significant features being added too. Like satellite messaging in areas with no cell coverage can be pretty worthwhile. You’re right though, most other stuff is meh. I’d like wireless charging for my current phone but can do without it. I have a $250 phone from 2023 and don’t understand why anyone buys a flagship.

New PC hardware is mostly compatible with the old stuff or at least somewhat standardized except at the lowest end. Phone stuff is much worse about that. Idk what a Linux phone would mean anyway.

Yes the HW isn’t comparable to a modern phone though.

It’s worse. Linux desktop is only possible because of the relative consistency and openness of x86 PC hardware. Phones are nothing like that. At best we will have retro Linux handhelds with phone functionality.

Good luck, phone hardware changes very fast though.

https://feddit.org/post/9959466/5697405

[why blocked?] "a contributor made a push from a sanctioned region is what i saw. not even a main dev, and they didn’t receive any warning is my understanding. i might be way off, i’m not a final source:

With very large SSD systems, these high throughputs mostly come from parallel chip accesses and transfers. Very low latency is more interesting. I’d like to see the numbers at queue depth 1 instead of 512.

Nice I guess, it adds 4g to the older T-deck. I guess with a SIP client app you could use it as a voice phone. The processor is an ESP32-S3 which has wifi and BLE though the Lilygo article doesn’t mention either of those. I almost bought a used T-deck last year but figured it was another thing I didn’t have a real use for.

I’d like to see a receive-only POCSAG pager built into a thing like this. I don’t know to what extent 1-way pager services still exist in the US, but the idea is that it’s a system that sends text messages in the SCA subcarrier of FM broadcast radio stations or sometimes other classes of transmitter. It has mostly been displaced now by cellular phones, but some people like doctors on call still use it, as it is supposed to be more reliable, plus the FM signal penetrates buildings better than cell signals do.

For me though, the main idea is privacy. It is receive-only, so there is no always-on connection sending your location anywhere. People can send you a text and if you’re in the coverage area of the FM station, you receive it and can call the person back (in the old days, by finding a landline phone) or whatever. Some of the more expensive plans had regional or nationwide coverage, by broadcasting the message on a whole network of FM stations.

POCSAG itself is a digital protocol for which many software implementations exist, and it doesn’t look too hard to write one. So the main challenge is having an RF receiver in the T-deck that gets a frequency where there is a pager service operating in your area.

I don’t understand the attraction of small slow epaper displays. I’m fine with regular displays in a thing this size. I’d like to have a 13+ inch epaper tablet but no FOSS ones exist right now afaik.

Yes they have different stuff now, but same idea.

Government secure phones are special hardware made by the NSA. They are nothing like civilian phones. Obama got the NSA to lock down his Blackberry but I doubt that is doable with today’s mainstream smartphones.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/STU-III

Military gear generally has tons of anti-moron safeguards. Unfortunately, Signal is for civilians.

Multifunction copier printer scanners are usually consumer crap. The good stuff is generally single function. Monochrome is more of a solved problem than color, I think.

Avoids the need for a network connection or server, though I guess you could run it on a local socket. The UI might be preferable too.

I’m surprised they aren’t making the same demands of the relevant TLDs. Or are they trying that and failing? If yes, why would they have better chances with Google?

If the kobo hardware device can read drm’d epubs, it is “using drm” to do so. I’m asking if Calibre can read those same drm epubs. Do you know if it can, maybe by adding a plugin? I know there was something like that for Kindle files. Thanks.

Thanks yeah I don’t have a kobo reader so was asking if there was a way to read paid-for kobo downloaded books that have drm, similar to how decss lets you watch DVDs that you bought. I don’t mind paying for books but don’t want a locked down reading device with it’s own crappy software and possible invasive phoning home.

Yes I’ve been using the calibre client app under Debian MATE and it’s decent. I’m a Luddite though, so sometimes I convert epubs to plain text with pandoc and read them in emacs or a terminal.

I didn’t downvote anything fwiw.

Thanks. What I meant is, if I buy a kobo book off bn.com, can I read it with calibre? Those books usually have drm but maybe calibre can bypass it.

Thanks, I didn’t know about that. I might try it.