I’ve seen some of the photos of people driving American-sized pickup trucks around Europe and I hope they get outlawed. Unfortunately, Europe and Asia do have so many more options - sometimes even by American companies much to my annoyance.

I occasionally look into getting a Kei car of some sort. Though it’s not really practical for me. Maybe one day, by the time a sub five inch flagship phone is developed perhaps.

Small vehicle sales represent less than a fifth of the market. Major manufacturers have ceased production of sedans and hatchbacks in favour of larger platform SUVs and pickup trucks.

I realise that vehicles aren’t really the focus here, but the smartphone market isn’t too dissimilar in certain ways. The major manufacturers have discontinued their smaller for factor devices citing ‘sales’, but those devices cost nearly what a larger one did so it’s reasonable that consumers would opt for the bigger screen, especially when it’s typically coupled with a larger battery and superior camera.

Also similar between these two markets, if you look overseas, or at older used models, or make any of a variety of compromises, you can find something if you’re determined. Or you don’t find something and just deal with the giant phone that sticks half out your pocket and you can’t sit down without removing it.

Personally, I’m enjoying watching the advances in folding phones. They are approaching Westworld standards pretty quick. Trouble of course will be when they get there, it’ll cost the same as a car and at that point it better unfold some wheels too.

Similar to vehicles, smaller phones probably would sell just fine.

The issue would be that not many people would buy a phone 2/3 the size unless it was also 2/3 the price. Even if the manufacturing of such a device was 2/3 the cost (it wouldn’t be), the bottom line for the manufacturer would be same number of devices sold, but 1/3 less money.

Companies don’t do less money.

Yes I suppose, just like anything, a nuance here would be whether or not we expect a person of such political authority to be able to have weekends at all.

On one hand, they’re still a person working a job and no one should be working 365 days a year On the other, the societal cost, in terms of income tax covering travel and security costs, of having a President that travels every weekend is a bit much.

If the President was only golfing on the weekends, and wasn’t charging the government to golf at his own clubs, then this whole thing of him taking leisure every weekend would be a harder thing to argue against without getting into that whole administration work life balance discussion.

Not for nothing, but the headline of the article is talking about time spent golfing, and so is neon_nova’s comment.

The thing the President did isn’t the problem, or really even the frequency. The problem is the cost to the taxpayer.

‘20,000 American’s pay for President’s golf habit’ would be a better title.

Eight days so far during ‘work week’ time. If he was going on his own dime, this wouldn’t be worth talking about.

It just makes a better talking point to say ‘he’s golfed 37 days out of 152’ despite it not being about how he’s using his weekends (assuming we hold government to the same 5 on 2 off standard as most of us have) when it’s really about how much it’s costing.

A better headline would be ‘President spends income tax of 20,000 Americans on personal entertainment’.

Inglorious Basterds, 2009.

A bacon egg vehicle?

That comment is a bad take to be sure, but it isn’t really about eliminating every vehicle in existence. We’d still need individual vehicles to serve for delivery and emergency services, as well as a bunch of other stuff.

The main thought is just that it’s a bit silly to have half the population driving a two tonne vehicle to the grocery store. There’s already communities where golf carts are used instead of cars.

The whole concept of ripping out every road and installing solar tramways is just as much a nonsensical extreme not worth taking seriously as ‘what do I do if I order a computer and I work from home’. I get your use of the example though, it is the equivalent counterpoint.

I still have installed a dozen or so clients, so I opened Voyager to remind myself what it is in comparison to Jerboa, which is also my preferred client.

Suddenly my android device has an iOS user interface. To me, this is lazy development. I’m sure it’s fine for someone accustomed to it, but even having a static header and footer seem out of date.

I’ll stick with Jerboa for the time being.

Right - I wouldn’t benefit from such a thing either. The market exists in China probably due to the density of people living in apartment buildings without access to home based charging.

Battery swapping is common practice in China. Far as I know, these swaps aren’t for huge capacity batteries, and moreso designed for smaller ones. Takes about as long as filling a sedan tank with fuel. We could have this technology, but there’s not really a push for it.

I’m all aboard Spotify alternatives, but this post is an echo chamber of people that are far more likely to know “the difference”. We aren’t representative of Spotify’s customer base.

Most people listening to music probably wouldn’t be able tell the difference from cutting the quality down by double digit percentages. This is exemplified by the number of people using wireless headphones.

Spotify certainly could offer service on par with Tidal and similar, but being beholden to shareholders that only look at the bottom line and never the quality of the service, that executive might not be right, but they’re not exactly wrong.

I see your point, but I also saw Juiced Bikes go out of business last month after 15 years in the industry.

We’ve got about 2.5 gigabit up and down in my neighbourhood so we’ll be good in that department. I’m going to see if any of my group are interested. I suppose the limit here will then be how many streams my machine can handle at one time. Guess I’ll find out. I appreciate your insight.

Cheers.

Ah I completely forgot streaming away from home. My travels tend to have limited internet access, and so my practice is to download things we might watch through Findroid.

Given your friends have access to your library, what do you think would be required (ideally) for streaming to work without transcoding? As simple as a beefy internet connection, a 4k screen and them having a Shield or equivalent?

I only ask because I know a number of my circle use Shields already and I think the ones in my neighbourhood are all on gigabit connections. Might be worth looking into so long as I’m not in for upgrading the machine. I’m more of a set and forget person myself.

Stepping aside from this particular thread for a moment. Could you share why you need hardware transcoding?

Admittedly, I don’t quite understand what components would build a better machine as far as a media server goes, but I turned off hardware transcoding when I first set Jellyfin up on a NUC. The only issues I have are the startup speed of the app, and every now and then it crashes when loading the library and I just relaunch it and it’s fine.

I’ve assumed it’s the Nvidia Shield doing the heavy lifting as far as playback goes, because I’ve never had a recurring problem with playing any particular file. I’m starting to think I don’t really appreciate the benefits of hardware transcoding.

Echoing @[email protected], I downloaded the first party app right from the Play Store on my Samsung. Though I prefer the third party, Findroid, the first party app is good for the dashboard management.

When we launch Jellyfin, we are shown icons for what user, we select the user, and it opens the associated library. Similar to Netflix.

I started using Jellyfin about two years ago now, and have only encountered a codec issue here and there, but I’ve found it can be worked around by setting playback to another player, like VLC.

Might just be me, but I don’t like double tap to skip. Findroid has another scrubbing method I’ve not seen anywhere else but I wish it were the standard.

When you drag your finger to the right, it says how far you’re about to skip ahead. The longer your swipe, the further you go. When you release, it scrubs to that timestamp. Same with going backwards.

I find it faster, more accurate, and more versatile. The only thing I don’t like about the Findroid player is the UI timeout is twice as long as I need it to be.

“Ireland does not give preferential tax treatment to any companies or taxpayers,” stated a spokesperson from the Irish Ministry of Finances.

I wish the media would eviscerate these people like they used to.