jmcphers

Is this still true? I am a Flickr Pro user and the few times I've let my subscription lapse, I recall that I could only see my most recent 200 uploaded photos until I paid up again. They didn't delete them, for sure! But they were inaccessible.

I have used this for almost 10 years now. It's pretty barebones but it seems like the usable lifetime of commercial password managers is 4-5 years before they get enshittified, bought, discontinued, price-jacked, or otherwise made unsuitable for use. "pass" just keeps working.

Google is no better. My family mostly uses iPhones, and on a big extended family vacation, I suggested we use Google Photos to create a shared album to document the trip. Everyone installed the Google Photos app on their iPhone so they could contribute... which resulted in all of them having their email accounts disabled.

What happened? Google Photos on the iPhone backs up all your photos by default, and, like Microsoft, Google "shares storage" between email and photos. The minute Google Photos was installed, it started backing up photos until the paltry free tier was reached, at which point it disabled the associated gmail account since it was "out of storage".

Talk about an anti-pattern; I spent a good chunk of time on that trip helping people get their storage back so they could send email again.

I'll never recommend Google Photos to anyone ever again.

I own the Pebble 2 Duo and the answer is "almost none". It basically just tells you how long you were still/not moving much in the evening, as you'd expect. It's a pretty good proxy for what time you went to bed and got up, and that's about it. It can't actually tell if you're asleep.

There are also (currently) no sleep metrics on app itself; you can only see them on the watch, which doesn't show much besides the sleep duration and an abstract representation showing where you might have woken up in the night.

It really is, I wish there were a version of the Time 2 that had a BW screen. I did manage to snag one of the Pebble 2 Duos before they sold out and I love it. The contrast and reflectivity is unbeatable.

I was bummed to see recently that Amazfit has stopped making watches with reflective displays! They're all OLED now just like everyone else's.

I used a super-cheap Chinese smartwatch (Amazfit Bip S) for years and recently switched to the Pebble. The Bip's battery lasted forever and it did check a lot of feature boxes, but overall it was clunky to use and not in any way hackable.

I switched to a Pebble 2 Duo recently and while the features are comparable on paper (multi-week battery life, reflective display, basic health tracking, etc.), everything is just nicer on the Pebble. The software is thoughtful and fun and there are tons of third-party apps, so it can do all kinds of things the Bip could never do.

There really isn't a huge market for this kind of thing; most people, including nerds, want a watch with a brightly colored screen and tons of health metrics and service integrations. I imagine Pebble will stay a boutique brand this time around.

A simple test for aphantasia that I gave my kids when they asked about it is to picture an apple with three blue dots on it. Once you have it, describe where the dots are on the apple.

Without aphantasia, it should be easy to "see" where the dots are since your mind has placed them on the apple somewhere already. Maybe they're in a line, or arranged in a triangle, across the middle or at the top.

I also have a Playdate! I think it's a Sharp MIP rather than TN LCD. MIP is actually pretty popular in some places -- particularly smartwatches where battery life matters more than bright colors; Garmin, Coros, Pebble etc. all use MIP displays for the lower end models.

The thing about MIP is that the viewing angles are just not that amazing. I have had a Kindle and a Kobo, and they look like paper no matter how I hold them. My Playdate however needs to be positioned at a pretty specific angle with respec to the light to get the best contrast.

I don't have a source for this, but I believe the term Microserfs was not minted by Coupland and predates his work.

(I worked at Microsoft from 2004 - 2013)

I had to use public chargers for a while when my house was being worked on and it was pretty miserable. They were frequently broken, and lines were common.

The real problem with public charger lines is that there is no social protocol for them yet. At a gas station, it is fine to pull up behind a car currently fueling to indicate that you would like to fuel at the pump next. Charging stations, however, are not built with pull-through spots. There's no place to form a queue at all, so people park nearby, circle, and sometimes snipe a spot when it isn't their turn (because who can tell whose turn it is?).