If you still think the hardware is pretty good, you haven’t been using their newer hardware.

I think I wrote a comment about this recently, but their newest mouse with a layout I like (G604) was made with terrible soft rubber that is practically designed to disintegrate with use. All their mouse switches are also short life crappy switches that stop working relatively quickly.

Soldering new switches into the G604 is an absolute PITA because it was designed by people who didn’t care for repair. Still doable, just annoying. I just wish the rubber was replaced with the grippy hard textured plastic they used a few years earlier.

At least you only need to use the software at first when you’re setting things up.

I only ever participated in the original Place years and years ago, putting down maybe two or three pixels.

Maybe where you’re from it’s easy to separate your government flag as its own symbol that doesn’t represent real people but when you’ve got like 20x30 pixels it’s hard to represent a local community online with something better than a flag. I think we ended up with less than ten pixels inside of a heart iirc.

At least for me, in my own country, I associate flags with popular protests and other symbols make me think of the government. Law enforcement uniforms and mismatched old automatic rifles from fifty years ago. Crippling bureaucracy that operates four hours a week that stretches five hours of paperwork errands into a six month chapter of your life (not a symbol but when you say government that’s what I think of).

Point being I don’t find it weird at all that people wanting to represent themselves will default to a national flag. My understanding is that in like Germany there’s a line where nobody wants to seem too proud of the flag, and in the US people are so desensitized to seeing every McDonald’s have 4000 flags on display, in England the red and white flag has different connotations if it’s in a football context or not, etc etc etc

A lot of flagpoles here are faded and tattered and often with one of the stripes almost separating off the flag. Might be doomerism but I think it looks cool, I think it very much is an appropriate representation.

I’m from Lebanon, this flag is for me, and when the government uses it, it’s using it deceptively to pretend it has any interest in our lives and our problems

Shame it’s not on iOS. I’ve corrected a few things on local maps directly on Google’s platform (hilariously, it keeps rejecting some of them which are clearly visible from the satellite image), but I’ve always wanted to fix up the local OSM map. It’s just really intimidating as someone with only a very surface level understanding of how GIS works.

It’s kind of nice how everyone is in on the joke now? Like I think if you told the average person 15 years ago that a lot of history “documentaries” are racially motivated drivel you’d get a funny reaction.

I think I could show this to my (quite conservative) parents and get a good chuckle out of them now.

Granted I’m from the Middle East and the racist theories we have here have some of the roles swapped around. We don’t have 24 hour electricity but the average person genuinely believes we are the god-chosen enlightened people who are only held back by some combination of hubris, western empire, and “western empire” (this one should have a bunch of parentheses around it, several sets, I don’t want to get caught in some spam filter).

I remember seeing people mod the iPhone 4 to replace the glass back with a nice wood back.

Metal and wood can’t be a worse idea than glass. Grippy too. Although without the right treatment it can get gross I guess.

This has been happening on and off for months in Lebanon, the pilots have all been landing without GPS lately in case it cuts out again while they’re mid-landing. Utter chaos when it first happened, delivery drivers especially were very lost, and people in general had a tough time dealing with the loss of GPS. We don’t have a rigorous address system so sending locations to each other’s phones is really important here.

I think “sounds more like” is a weird thing to say though for this kind of thing