A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.
Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts:
If you made it this far, showerthoughts is accepting new mods. This community is generally tame so its not a lot of work, but having a few more mods would help reports get addressed a little sooner.
Whats it like to be a mod? Reports just show up as messages in your Lemmy inbox, and if a different mod has already addressed the report, the message goes away and you never worry about it.
I want my jailbroken iPhone 6 back.
That thing was sick. Simpler, yet more customizable than iOS currently is.
And I realize everyone probably has a “things were better back then, shakes fist” opinion, but I have reason to believe my exact setup would blow kids’ minds, transported forward in time.
…Other than the camera. For sure. I’d give kids a mirrorless camera to go with it, and it’d still be cheaper than a modern top end iPhone.
And I realize everyone probably has a “things were better back then, shakes fist” opinion
At some point, we have to start admitting that things were just better before. A lot of technology/software peaked ~15 years ago. Before it started sliding into the fucking mess we have these days.
Some yes, many no.
Linux drivers? Nowadays you can plug almost anything in and it just works. 15 years ago it may have not been possible to make it work.
The amount of self-hostable open-source software now beats everything from 15 years ago.
Yeah, the self-hosted and FOSS side of things will forever be improving, but corporate shit just gets worse in terms of UX. I mean even FOSS projects have awful UX sometimes as they try copying corpos and their web apps.
I just got a huge nostalgia blast of the days running Cydia on my iPod Touch 3rd gen. I'd customize Winterboard, install emulators, pirate games. The little, touchscreen computer in my pocket truly felt like it was mine! Then I got a Nexus tablet, hopped on early Android, and felt even more free to use my device how I wanted. Fast forward to today and I feel like some sort of criminal running Graphene and just hoping F-Droid repos exist after Google locks down Android. Tech is way less DIY and hella dystopian, as we move into a full surveillance state and compulsive identity verification. But I digress. Now I'm just rambling and depressed about the future of tech. Thanks OP. 🥲
It's weird to think of Android 4 as "early Android". For me that was the peak.
I remember when it was socially unacceptable to be glued to your iPhone when you go out with people.
I remember when I had to leave my GameBoy in the car…
I remember when no kind of mobile computing was available to anyone other than corporate execs.
It still is, people are just offending at a high rate.
Hopefully, I will someday be able to buy a Linux smartphone that is truly controlled by me.
I don’t think that’s the right criteria here. Librem 5 already exists, but that alone doesn’t make it a viable daily driver.
You would need to be able to do nearly everything through the browser without installing any Android or iOS apps. About 15-20 years ago, you could live like that, but can you do that today? I would argue that you can’t, because the world has moved on. Of course, you could always sever your ties with the rest of the world and demand everything to work through a browser because you can’t install the apps everyone else depends on.
GrapheneOS with no Google play services/sim is the best experience currently available
The year of the linux phone.
I wish it could actually happen. But corporate has learned a lot from the 90s and early 00s. They are lock in experts that won't let that happen easily.
The number of places that expect you to download their app to do business with them, or sign up with them, is beyond disturbing.
I now actively try to make their life difficult. I'll ring up,.or try to order at the counter. I had a table at one place, and rang up and ordered pick up. Better service than I was getting lol
And then I pull out my wallet and try to pay with cash and all hell breaks loose 🤣
I spent 30 minutes looking for an item at Microcenter.
I got someone to help look. no good, can't tell you where it could possibly be.
called up and ordered it for pickup, came back 30 minutes later, there it was at the pickup desk.
My experience getting help is complete opposite. I love microcenter. Lucky to have 3 of them within 45 min of me.
Yep went down hill after the BlackBerry Storm
Oh man, full keyboards... A dream
That company just rolled out the physical keyboard add on. I’m very lazy, but if pressed I will dig up a link
I've been looking into a new phone, and I'm seriously considering one of those "Unihertz Titan" ones with the physical keyboard.
We can boycot banks that mandate android/ ios apps, we can put phones in faraday cages, we can form new cell operator companies, we can form unions and increase their political power and whilst the republican seats of power atrophy we can guide them by active participation into compassionate forms so they dont become a source of backlash. We can support companies like pinephone and librem for small handhelds if we want, we cant support risc-v, we can use gnu guix and bolster its usability to verify the validity of the software stack.
Say it again for the people in the back.
You can't exist without a smart phone now. I went to a baseball game and refused to install their app for the ticket (which couldn't be purchased with cash). They said they can text a link to a QR code. Printing it wasn't an option.
I should have asked what I could do if I didn't have a phone but I suspect their head would explode.
At Costco, you can't get in line at the optical center. unless you use a phone camera to shoot the QR camera. I hate that: for most of my life, I was phoneless, and now I am obligated to pay for a service and device that I don't care for.
It really cracked me up 15-20 years ago when there was a fair amount of panic about the government / world order microchiping people at more or less the same time that everyone was starting to pay to carry around GPS devices that listen to you.
50 years ago, everyone was afraid to be spied on by the soviets or the US, now its "Hey Wiretap, find me a recipie for pancakes".
When the subject comes up I have often said that cell phones are what we avoided in the PC space when the IBM BIOS was reverse engineered.
It has been a disappointment to me that so many smart otherwise tech literate people have seemed to not be able to see the tech industry, and others, putting the digital noose around out necks with smart phones.
We are not too far away from entire brick and mortar businesses being off limits to someone whose only smart phone is not an iPhone and does not pass Googles Play Services Safetynet checks for an app and the only method to pay they have being cash or a physical credit card. That is wild, and something that should worry nearly everyone that has a vested interest in being able to live their lives without being under the thumbs of private corporate interests if they so choose.
And that is before even getting into the even more concerning parts of modern phones which take all of the above and make it scary by replacing private corporate interests with governments.
Nothing good ever comes from getting in a position where you have to interact with, or obey, another party and they get to set all of the terms.
Yes! I remember being obsessed with Samsung Note phones because they were for power users and had so many cool features. The Note 9 was the last smart phone I actually was excited about and I kept that thing for 5 years. I got the S22 Ultra and it was cool but by that point Samsung had removed all the cool hardware features from their phones (thermometer, barometer, iris scanner, finger proximity sensor [could do really cool mouse like actions by hovering your finger above the screen], and a bunch of other cool features).
Now I have the Pixel 8 pro and slapped GrapheneOS on it. The OS is really cool and so technically amazing but I could care so little about the actual device it's loaded on.
This is exactly what Orwell feared TVs would become when he envisioned telescreens. Took a little longer for it to come to fruition. What's fascinating about the novel that people over look is that the older generation in 1984 tend not to own them because they're resistant to new technology just like today. So they aren't really mandatory. Like smartphones.
I missed using the Playstation Portable in college. It was a fun handheld device where we can play fighting games such as Tekken and Guilty Gear and action adventure games God of war, Medal of Honor and Dissidia: Final Fantasy
I think about the fact that the Nintendo DS let you animate, draw, message friends, work as a step counter and all kinds of stuff. The PSP had a Sim slot and could be used as a GPS. I used mine for media, music and comic reading on it was awesome.
Like the things you could do was important and not just the data that could be scraped from you. Like they made it a competition to make them something you would want to use instead if all reduced to the black brick you have to have.
Duuuuude.
I absolutely adored hatena flipnote. There were so many crazy good animations, especially stickman fights. Now the servers are down, and only a couple were mirrored somewhere :/
I was watching a show the other day where the wealthy protagonist got his phone thrown to the grown and smashed by someone and he freaked out because it was a $200 phone. I think the episode is like 10 years old or so. Phones used to be cheap to own as well as cool.
I would be happy with a Nokia 3310 with Signal and Matrix support.
Idk about that specific one but people have turned other Nokia models into cyberdecks. Might be worth checking out.
And shit form factor, huge and bulky but very flat only. Because all customers demand it.
I have my blue and grey Nokia still.
When I was on my way home from work on the subway, I just tried to fill the screen with a snake the whole time.
I still hope for a cool game to be included when I buy a new phone. Spoiler: there is no cool game included
That's how they get you every time, now, it seems! First release....
Them: hey look at this cool *cheap new thing that's so amazing *soon you won't be able to live without it!
Us: wow, shiny.
Little time later after you're hooked... $$$$$$$