Good lord. I hate how much of myself I saw in that video 😀

We got a cold snap the last two weeks of October and I typically refuse to turn the furnace on until at least November (except once in early October to give it a health check for the season). After a summer of the thermostat at 79 degrees, it was a bit jarring to adapt to a 60 degree setting when it started getting cold.

I’m cold blooded (or whatever means I’m always cold) but I don’t go to all the crazy degrees this guy does. I basically live in my robe, wool socks, toboggan, and finger-less gloves. I work from home these days and have never looked more homeless.

Bought some USB rechargeable hand warmers last year, and those things are great. I’ll often have a hoodie on under my robe and will throw those in the hoodie pockets to keep my core nice and warm. On the lowest setting, they’ll last all day. They also charge nicely from the solar panels (or from the power banks that have charged from the solar panels).

I hate excessive bedding and have a hard time falling asleep under that many layers, so I use an electric mattress pad which is fantastic.

It’s strange how we’ve moved from mall shopping to online shopping to now AI shopping for us

Well, “we” only did the first move because it was more convenient. The latter is being forced on us.

I generally dislike editorialized headlines (when used as post titles) but this is the exception. Nicely played.

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. 😡

Hard to say. I’m not sure of the delivery radius that’s allowed here and whether rural food deserts would even be eligible or not. I was just mentioning that ordering (non-perishable) groceries online and having them shipped does have a legit and unfortunate use case.

Back when I lived 45 miles minutes from the closest grocery store, I’d order my non-perishables online and they’d usually come via UPS or FedEx.

This isn’t really the demographic they’re catering to but Food Deserts are a sad reality for many in the US. Being able to order staple food and have them delivered (even if it’s not same day) is often less painful than driving 30-50 miles to the closest grocery store.

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.

I honestly don’t think they’d tell me, but I’d also be interested to know. Fingers crossed they have some stock on hand for the occasional replacement.

It does have a physical keyboard, too. Sadly can’t give it much of a review given the circumstances, but it does have a good feel and seems like it would be pleasant to type on.

Yeah, I have a ticket in with support but haven’t heard back yet. I did ask specifically about the turnaround time for a replacement. Hopefully that’s a reasonable amount of time. I definitely don’t want $400+ tied up until the next batch ships in September.

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.

Well, I don’t even know what to say to that. Except that in Puerto Rico, a McFlurry it’s called a Señor Flurry.

https://lemmy.ca/post/46655208

Just defederated from usagi [dot] reisen just in case federation starts working on that end.

Sadly, that’s an eBay photo I searched for the comment. I had that exact setup, but it got sold at a yard sale over 2 decades ago :(

Probably different batches. Recall info said it was due to an issue with a single supplier. Not even all of the listed models are affected, just certain serial numbers for each model.

I mean…I tend to take potential lithium fires seriously, especially when they’re in my everyday carry. Companies don’t issue recalls and mass-replace units on a whim.