The problem isn't this developer being lazy or 15 years late, it's that this hardware wasn't built for Linux and only blessed groups (with a lot of money) get access to binary blobs. The FSF has a project to reverse engineer these blobs but it takes time. Same problem Linux used to have with laptops.
If you're looking for a daily driver the most reliable I've seen is the furi phone. Those guys are passionate and have put in a pathological amount of time to getting calls working world wide. They can only pull it off by supporting one phone that they sell.
> If you're looking for a daily driver the most reliable I've seen is the furi phone.
The Jolla C2 (SailfishOS) and Volla Phone Quintus (Ubuntu Touch) are also pretty good daily drivers, only issue is they they're only available in the EU.
Also worth keeping an eye out for the upcoming Comodore Callback (SailfishOS), which is being shipped worldwide.
Android 1.0 was able to ship to the public with binary blobs. This problem of shipping a device and getting and using binary blobs has long been solved.
I have a HAM level understanding of wireless communication and want to expand it. This book and the ones you listed seem like they'll go over my head. Any recommendations on an "101" style text book?
The other recommendations you're getting are college-level texts. If McDermott's book suits your initial needs, Rick Lyons' and/or Steven W. Smith's DSP books would be a good next step.
If you're familiar with HAM, perhaps Software Defined Radio (SDR) approach is better for you.
There's another relatively unknown wireless communication book by Qasim Chaudhari namely
Wireless Communications From the Ground Up: An SDR Perspective, also in the 2nd edition.
There are even GNU Radio experiments course available that you can try alongside the book.
According to the author, the course also covers the fundamental concepts of DSP and SDR without using any mathematics.
[1] Wireless Communications From the Ground Up: An SDR Perspective:
Turning my Unihertz Jelly Star into an Xperia Play like device. Basically I want to add a slide up controller to this tiny phone. I was reminded of my Gameboy Micro while watching a review of Mina the Hollower on it and now I'm determined to play that game on this tiny thing. No idea if it will actually run.
Learning FreeCAD to create a sliding insert between the body of the phone and the screen. If I can pull that off the rest should be easy.
Unfortunately the controller board will have to connect to the phone over BT although it will use the phone's battery. I wanted to connect it over USB internally but there's no bus on this phone and trying to hijack the lines running to the USB C port would be feature creep that would stop the project. Another idea was to take over an I2C line going to some peripheral I don't care about but I think that would require a custom android kernel so BT it is.
By the way this phone is awesome. Highly recommend for anyone who wishes they didn't need to carry a smart phone.
Parents will get their kids phones worrying that they're missing out. The more parents do that the more the kids without phones are actually being left out. If the government puts restriction on these things than parents are much less likely to worry.
I've heard of parents of children for a certain grade getting together and all signing a pact that the kids won't have phones until a certain point, say 16. It only goes into effect if something like 75% of the parents for that grade sign on. I like that idea.
Imagine there's a lake with 100 fish farms. Each farm operator can pay $50000 to install a pollution scrubber that benefits every farm operator by $1000. Obviously, none of them do it, since it'd cost them $49000.
Coordination problems are why we have a government. It mandates the pollution scrubber, each of them moans a lot, 3 of them cheat, but everyone is $47000 richer in the end (except the cheaters who are $97000 richer until they get caught).
I agree with you. I plan to not be pressured by what other parents are doing. But that pressure is real and many parents end up thinking it's what's best. It's better that they have friends and a phone than neither of the two.
I contemplating writing a reply suggesting maybe a text or email instead, but I don't know enough about OP's situation so I don't think it's appropriate to give any advice that they didn't ask for.
Maybe there is a time for difficult outreach, but recommending someone to celebrate a person (and one of the most significant people in their life) whose primary emotion is disgust in response to unchosen personal attributes is remarkably insensitive. No need to salt those wounds.
Let's hope things get better for anyone in this circumstance, but IMO it is the parent's job to make an attempt.
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Nobody wants to or tries to be this kind of person, so here is my shout out today to the moms who DID find a way to work through the challenge of accepting a child whose sexuality, spirituality, politics, etc. are different than they hoped for.
I don't mean to be a douche, but that's an exceedingly ignorant and short-sighted statement. A child doesn't owe their parents anything. If your parent is upset about something about you that you cannot change, then that parent can rightfully go fuck themselves.
Each person has their own situation so it isn't my place to give specific advice, but each and everyone should pause for a moment on this day, be thankful that they are alive, and consider to do the right thing that they wouldn't regret if they don't do it. Even if you wouldn't call your parents.
I think owing something should be contractual - they consent to owe something in a fair exchange.
A person does not consent to being born.
If someone treats you properly (raises you at least somewhat decently), you don't owe them anything, but you should feel an obligation to thank that person whether it's by saying thank you, or helping them later in their life when they need help.
I think my parents were good parents. I like them. They were good parents who really wanted to take care of kids, and were active in mine and my sisters' lives.
My wife's dad ran away when she was fifteen (and with two considerably younger siblings), without any attempt to contact them or pay child support. He's a douche, and I do not blame my wife at all for having no desire to take care of him when he's old.
Her mom is very cool, and took care of four kids on a low income while still being active in all their lives. My wife will probably take care of her if she's unable to take care of herself.
People like to act that if you share DNA with people you have to grovel to them. I think that's dumb.
I disagree a bit somehow with the statement as it's a bit too generic, in my perspective, I do owe my parents care when they get older (I don't care about laws, talking about morality), I wouldn't send them in a home waiting for them to die, they'll live with me and my wife until they die, I understand that many might disagree with this, and it's fair if you had shit parents, but if you had parents that genuinely cared and done everything for you, I believe you want to also be fair for the sacrifice they've done and take care of them when they are too old to take care of themselves (or if 1 of them die, luckily I have both of my parents still!).
Can you really consider yourself a good kid if you just let them die in a center? In my eyes, no.
You might feel an obligation, but you don't "owe" them anything.
It's pedantic but there's a subtle difference. Doing something for someone because you're grateful for them is fine. I like my parents, I might take care of them when they get older, but I'm doing that because I like them.
> Can you really consider yourself a good kid if you just let them die in a center? In my eyes, no.
Ironically, I think this is too generic. What if your parents were physically or sexually abusive? This isn't hypothetical, there are millions of children that live that reality. Are they "bad kids" because they don't want to help them when they're older?
Yeah I've put a specific "clause" for shitty parents, shitty parents deserve no support in the end (imo).
My main argument is really that in the West, we are going too far away from the grateful mentality and it's scary and even absurd to see the number of parents that die alone (I'm talking about good parents), I find it sad and immoral in many scenarios.
I use the word owe because it's a moral code thing, the same way as I owe my wife & children lifetime promises and support (but not obligated right?), it's not something really negotiable in my head and I don't really intend to change it.
I vow the same thing for my own children and I hope I'll do genuinely a good job, enough for them to feel that they owe me the support when I'm old. Think about the gift you do to a loving mother to let her die surrounded with her own kids, nothing is more important in life than this in the end, as you get older, no career or money matters, probably only family does (again, talking only about good parents, shitty ones aren't included in this kind of discussion)
I think it's certainly fine to be grateful for your parents if you like them. I had pretty ok parents so if they need help as they get older I'll probably help where I can.
I guess I just get a little annoyed that people act like you are supposed to. I didn't choose to be born, and as far as I am aware neither did the other eight billion on this planet. The parents were the ones who brought the kids into the world. The kids are their responsibility, not the other way around.
Can anyone tell me exactly what these laws do? Is it just going to ask for a birthday when I run `adduser`?
What's the point? Is it meant for one admin account to restrict other user accounts?
What I got out of it was that an os has to provide an interface to applications so that if they make an age request(note that the law says nothing about when or what applications will make a age request) the os can provide something. and it has to provide an interface for the user to enter the information.
So when we map this requirement onto the mechanism of how the os provides information to applications. and how users set up the system. I have come to the conclusion that compliance on a unix-like platforms is as simple as
echo ${AGE_CATEGORY} > ~/.config/ca_ab_1043
Then the program can get the age category anytime it wants to. the user is able to put this information in at account setup just like the law asks using an accessible interface, the same interface everything else on a unix-like platform uses, the shell.
You’d need some script that updates the age category based on the user’s provided birthday (which is not shared with the applications) but otherwise yeah
The brackets are a few years wide, so it could take a bit of waiting. But yeah I’d consider setting a slightly different day/month for a child if I was paranoid.
I guess you could also make the bracket selectable instead of requiring the age
I believe the California law (which has passed) requires operating systems to collect the DoB or Age of the user when setting up a user account, and then expose an API that shares the users age range (not their actual age or birthdate) when requested by an application.
It does not require the OS to actually verify the age, collect government IDs, or any other data.
The intention, I think, is to put the responsibility for communicating the users age on the OS, instead of having each application or service do their own age verification (by scanning IDs, requesting user data, etc). Since it’s set on the machine, a parent can set it once for their kid when setting up the device.
Or I guess the kid can set it if they're smart enough to reinstall the OS or spawn a VM. I'm sure there will be online resources to help them that kids know how to share
Yeah if you have admin access to your device and know what you’re doing it’s basically a non-issue. I’m guessing a savvy high schooler can change their age bracket easily.
If you want to give a young child a laptop or computer though, it maybe helps keep them away from objectionable content.
The California law says nothing about verification or immutability, what if someone made a mistake when putting in their age? Why do we need to hide it? Better to just let the user change this at will.
Yeah the most likely thing (for the California law, at least) is that compliant OS's expose a form at account creation where you input a birthdate or age, and have either a CLI/file/setting where you can change the birthdate or age with admin permissions. No verification is needed
The short answer is that a lot of states now require KYC by service providers under the guise of adult content prohibition, "protecting the children", or mass surveillance. So the service providers like Facebook are trying to foist off the responsibility to the operating system. The pesky details of storing and managing PII becomes Somebody Else's Problem, and if the operating system implements an easily bypassed KYC e.g. a simple check box and then the kid get radicalized or get exposed to problematic content, the service provider can just shrug and point the finger at the OS. In other words it shifts the responsibility to the lowest level instead of the platform companies.
You can frame it nefariously, but honestly, it just makes way more sense to me. I want as little of my personal info as possible in the hands of random services, and that includes the stuff needed for KYC checks.
In the original article there are some blue underlined words. “California” is one of them. If you click it, you will get a nifty video answer to your question.
Depends on the law. Some of them say that the age range must be provided to all applications through an API, and all apps and “app stores” must filter content based on this value. Others say that this isn’t enough and you actually have to verify the age based on some commercial scheme like CC or ID verification. Some say you have to send the age to websites. Many of these laws seem to be in direct conflict about what is allowed and not allowed.
In all cases, at least in the US, these laws violate the first amendment (as code is a form of speech), and freedom respecting users and devs need to resist them until they can be defeated in court.
Honestly the laws don’t consider open source operating systems at all. They’re meant for the overwhelming majority who are using commercial operating systems. They imagine something like android or iOS or windows where yeah they ask the question during user creation and then handle the age gating in their app stores, anything outside that model isn’t something they’re going to spend any time thinking about, because why would they?
If you're looking for a daily driver the most reliable I've seen is the furi phone. Those guys are passionate and have put in a pathological amount of time to getting calls working world wide. They can only pull it off by supporting one phone that they sell.