That’s a nice find. Odt, ods, and odp, seems to work fine both on phone and tablet.

True. On the software side, SyncToy seems to have been abandoned in 2021. Sounds like a reasonable candidate to get picked up by PowerToys, but who knows.

What would be the current equivalent, FreeFileSync?

I’ve had plenty of Mini-USB failures, all of them in the socket. There’s a reason why when Micro-USB was designed, they bumped the required mating cycle rating to twice that of Mini-USB.

The biggest problem with Micro-USB, is that it got adopted as the standard charging port for smartphones, which proved even the doubled mating cycle rating way insufficient.

For reference:

• USB-A, USB-B: 1500 cycles (but they tend to stay put)
• Mini-USB: 5000 cycles (good for sporadic data transfers, and once or twice a day charging)
• Micro-USB, USB-C: 10000 cycles (better for daily charging, not so much for many times a day)
• Magnetic adapter, Wireless: until it burns out, but not so standard.

If you had problems with Micro-USB, expect about the same to happen with USB-C. Plugging it once a day to charge, should last 30 years; plugging it 10 times a day to “top it up”, will break it after 3 years on average.

Personally, I’ve put some magnetic adapters in all Micro-USB stuff like 5-6 years ago, and so far only one of the adapters has broken, all sockets are like new.

Install a Windows backup software… targeting a Linux machine? Either that, or external HDDs.

I wouldn’t trust SD cards with being backups. Data retention on Flash is a finicky issue, and SD cards are the worst of them all. Even SSDs have been known to suddenly lose their data when not powered on for some time. HDDs and DVD-Rs still have the best retention rates… but still don’t forget to follow 3-2-1.

So like mini-USB?

Still, is it the plug, or the socket that breaks? I’ve been holding for a long time that using sockets with tiny plastic tongues to hold the conductors, is a bat shit crazy move in consumer electronics, where a cable is prone to getting a lateral tug that rips the whole thing apart.

This includes some old Samsung connectors, all of modern Nokias, mini-USB, micro-USB, and even USB-C.

Old Nokias and Ericssons had the right idea: pogo/flex pins on the connector, and just a bunch of plates on the socket, so the cable would break but the socket was rock solid.

It shows some big blank spaces from time to time… I’ve assumed it’s a bug related to the pi-hole 👀

There are fake phones, even fake computers, for little kids to “play being adult”.

For somewhat older kids that can already hold a tablet without dropping it, a cheap Android tablet with only WiFi, can be stripped down of all the crapware and preloaded with some games, educational stuff, and some media for offline use.

Maybe. And yet, this also didn’t sound particularly nice.

Assuming good faith, I don’t see the argumentative part.

From my superficial glance at the exploit, it abuses Google’s mechanism to keep you logged in on every device you were before a password reset, so “I think” it doesn’t matter how many times you change it. I haven’t dived deeeper or checked what would be a real countermeasure other than logging out everywhere.

I’ve also marked it to check out how it might interact with passkeys and password-less logins; at first sight, it could be really bad.

A ban on furry porn would make me uninstall.

I barely ever posted anything, or engaged in any conversations. Since the “pay to troll” changes, the only reason I still check it from time to time, is because some artists are spread over different platforms, and some people spend time reposting links on 𝕏. The name, 𝕏, is also a good fit for that use, so why not.

I care. 𝕏 is also a great source of furry porn. 🤷

Will this be real, or another one of these?

https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2023-china-ev-graveyards/

https://indianexpress.com/article/trending/trending-globally/chinas-insane-graveyard-resting-place-discarded-bikes-9037753/

They kept provisional filings on hold for over 15 years, released their own product without filing for the actual patent, and only did so after a competitor announced their own product.

If you don’t want to call it “trolling”, what do you call “abusing the patent process to keep competitors unaware of pending patents that can be used against them retroactively”? What would be a shorter word for that?

This is not a vote, these are facts you can check yourself:

• Between 2006 and 2022: Massimo kept building a portfolio of “provisional filings”, without filing a final version that would get published
• 2022: Massimo launches its own watch, still without having filed for final patents
• later in 2022: Apple announces a watch with similar functionality
• shortly after Apple’s announcement: suddenly Massimo decides to file final versions of a slew of patents it had kept in the “provisional” stage for 15+ years

There is no counter-argument.

our backlog to even first look at an application was 18months. I was working on applications that had been ongoing for 5+ years after first being picked up

That’s insane 😲

I mean, it’s already iffy to assume than “only one person can come up with a given idea at a time”, it gets worse when “whichever gets to patent first is the only possible inventor”, but waiting 5 or 15 years after the fact just to be granted a monopoly on the invention… is insane.

It’s not important when the application became a patent, it’s important when it was filed and what it contained

Maybe I’m missing something, but how can anyone be accused of copying a patented work, if they announce or release their product before a patent gets published?

Sure, they probably should have filed an application themselves, but if the backlog to even look at an application is 18 months, then what happens of person A files an application, then 12 months later person B files a similar application, and they just sit there? Should person B wait until their application gets processed (positively or negatively), before announcing or releasing anything? What about products released with a “Patent pending” notice, are they just a gamble?

What I seem to understand for this case, is that Masimo has been filing multiple provisionals for different patents over 15 years, they may have approached Apple to license some of them, then when Apple announced their own product, Masimo hurried up to fix the wording on a bunch of the provisionals to match Apple’s product, and filed them as finals.

From an external point of view, what I see is the publication of a product using non-patented technology that should be considered prior art and render all those patents invalid.

Apple fanboys gonna fanboy.

I will kindly ask you to retract that insult. I have never owned, paid for, rented, or otherwise let any Apple products into my life, don’t own any AAPL, and definitely are not a fan of Apple’s shenanigans.

these 10 years of court cases

What are you talking about?

I could understand filling a provisional patent and then only pulling the trigger on the whole shebang when you actually have to protect it.

That is trolling.

Patents are intended as a social contract:

• An inventor: gets a limited time monopoly to sell their invention
• Everyone else: gets to see how they did it, then get to do it for free once the monopoly time expires

Filing claims and keeping them hidden, then rewording them for publication when “you actually have to protect it”, is trolling.

They registered it over 10 years ago. […] or did they see and copy it?

You can see patents once they get published, not when the provisional claim gets filed… so no, Apple could not see and copy it.

Apple just magically come up with the same idea

According to Masimo, Apple lured some engineers from Masimo to develop a solution… that happened to be similar enough that Masimo could file, and this time publish a patent after the fact that made Apple infringe it.

a lot of people ready to defend the big multi-billion dollar corp.

Even more people look at the finger and miss the Moon of a broken patent aystem.