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

  • 77 Posts
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Joined 2 年前
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Cake day: 2023年6月6日

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  • Not sure about Android, but on iOS, when one scans a QR code it shows the web address on the screen that the user then taps on. For the average user, I doubt that they are going to question what the URL is before following through to the website.

    Android does the same. The problem is most of those QR codes are encoded short links which tells you nothing about where they’re taking you.

    https://short.link/au1034gha could take you to a PDF on the restaurant’s Wordpress site or it could take you to malware or somewhere else you really don’t want to go.

    In that case, I blame the people generating the codes for using URL shorteners. My org uses them in flyers for the public, and I always have to chastise them and re-create the QR codes because they run the URL to our website through bit [dot] ly. 😡




  • 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.