🥸 well you see, you own a digital license to watch the movie so long as we have it available, have you read our terms of agreement–

Agreed that this is scummy marketing, though. The only real way to own media (legally) anymore is through physical copies, and even then maybe there’s some provision that makes a DVD illegal due to license shenanigans… but no cop’s gonna bust down your door for owning an illegal DVD of Aquaman.

I think this is mostly what you want, but as far as I can find online (and I’ll test it again later today) it no longer shows traffic warnings and your current speed like the destination maps does. I think it used to, though, which is what’s annoying about this whole situation.

I actually lost this feature for a while - it used to be under the hamburger ≡ menu as “Just Drive” and then the hamburger menu disappeared, and I’ve just recently found it again as a widget.

So, yeah, Google kills all good things and I’m sure it won’t last for much longer, but it’s nice in the meantime.

OK so I’ve read this whole thing and I’m still a bit confused, so help me please: this refers to the “Driving Mode” which hides all my apps and gives some weird simplified interface, right?

Because there’s also a “Driving” mode which is only accessible via a widget (why, Google) which gives you a map while driving without having to specifically enter a destination. That one’s staying, presumably?

This happened to me. I got a very angry call from someone asking why I was spamming them and had to explain that someone was spoofing my phone number to call similar phone numbers, and that it could be happening to his number or anyone else’s as well. I look forward to being globally blocked. :(

As we’ve been tracking, Google is now beginning to roll out “Profile discovery” in Messages for Android to establish your name and photo across the RCS app and others.

This is part of “Profile discovery,” which appears in Messages Settings > Advanced once rolled out to your phone. It is a Google Account-level setting that you can turn on/off. Google notes what phone number is associated with your name and profile image, with the ability to change things.

Ok, so good things:

• I’m glad it’s not auto-pulling from your Google profile, because you may not want that data actually visible to everyone who has your phone number.
• I guess it makes it more like iMessage which is cool (?)

Thoughts:

• So our text messages (which, I know RCS technically isn’t but for all intents and purposes it is a replacement and serves the same purpose) are becoming more chat-like.
• At the same time, Google has made Google Chat more like Messages, visually.
• If the intent is to eventually combine the two, the advantage is that Google has a stronger and more unified messaging platform, but the downside is Google’s RCS implementation is even more customized to the point it’s harder for others to hop on.
• If the intent is not to combine the two, I don’t see why making them look almost identical and yet having two separate apps is at all a good thing for Google. Their user base remains fragmented.

Hopefully this is some secret ongoing messaging solution cleanup plan by Google. I won’t hold my breath, but a small part of me still longs for the return of a Hangouts-esque combined system.

Looks like I’ll be part of the family soon! The Vivosmart does look like what I’m after - small activity tracker for small wrist that provides me all my bodily metrics for my weird metrics-loving self so I can cross reference it with MyFitnessPal (calories and macros) and Daylio (mood).

So… let me get this straight. Google sucks and Pixels are only sold in some countries, so their solution is to reduce Fitbit devices to those same countries?

This is foreboding. Could this be the start of either a rebrand of Fitbit or, worse, a culling of the line in favor of Pixel smartwatches?

Google, I swear if you fuck with my Fitbit I’m adding it to The List (right under Play Music and Inbox). I don’t want a smartwatch, I never wanted a smartwatch. I want my compact little step tracker that gives me a ton of metrics data.

You bring up a good point. It feels like Romulans have also learned to control their violent emotions, but rather than suppress them entirely that energy is just focused all into tactics and smarter ways to be ruthless.

Star Trek: Bridge Crew, great game which was sadly abandoned and left to rot, started you out with the Kobayashi Maru. My friends and I got in there, beamed out as many folks as we could without firing a shot on the Klingons, and then got the hell outta the neutral zone as soon as the Kobayashi Maru was destroyed.

Is that considered a loss? I’d say we saved a bunch of people and hopefully avoided a war. Best we could do given the circumstances. And that’s how we manage life sometimes, as well. You can’t win, but you manage as best you can given the circumstances and take the small victories wherever you find them.

In the same way Galaxy Quest counts as a Star Trek, so too should The Orville. It’s all about the vibes, man.

I haven’t used a Samsung and I know the settings options are different, but on Android it’s Settings > Battery and then you can check which apps are draining the most battery. You can check for anything you don’t have open that might be draining in the background.

If the phone is draining that battery only in use though, it might just be the screen. What if you reduced screen brightness?

The transporter is just a people replicator. Same technology. Why reinvent the wheel?

bendy phone: goofy as hell, but I imagine the tech would eventually be used in smartwatches and such. Imagine a smartwatch where a larger portion of the band is the display and it can be wrapped around both big and tiny wrists. Kind of a neat idea.

moto AI: oh boy, another copilot. I hope one of these ends up being the phone assistant I was promised last decade. Is it so much to ask to have what is essentially a phone secretary that will tell me if I have conflicts when trying to schedule a meeting, or remind me that I told someone I would follow up with them via text, or suggest to me at bedtime that I need to set my alarm earlier because I have a morning meeting I haven’t accounted for and I usually set my alarms one hour before the first meeting of the day? Just. All the data is there. Please, big tech, you can read all my data anyway, just make something useful out of it. I will buy whatever stupid phone with a stupid custom OS that has an actual semblance of proper assistance.

“transforming crinkled receipts into pristine documents” yeah that’s neat, I don’t really scan and keep paper documents but I can imagine it will be very useful to a certain market.

Frankly, I like the idea of connecting this stuff up, even the silly ones like refrigerators and washing machines, for two reasons:

1. monitoring - if my fridge is having temperature issues, I would like a warning
2. notifications - my ADHD brain tends to forget to empty the dishwasher or laundry dryer and having a notification on my phone would help me remember.

Of course, my appliances are not smart enough to actually connect in the first place, and it’s not worth buying new ones simply for this functionality, but if it’s there then I can see some of the appeal. :)

Yeah, I don’t know how I feel about the new app. The old one was basically the same but still somehow a little interesting. I don’t know if it’s the new font, or the sickly grey-green they decided to use, but the redesign just looks kind of anemic and sad.

And yeah, the whitespace sucks, everything is so spaced out and you have to scroll. I always thought good web design (and now app design) was ensuring all the important stuff was visible before having to scroll. Google has apparently gone to a rival school where the tenet is “always be scrolling”.

While I agree in theory, it’s hard practically to give the ability to make private wording and typo edits without giving the ability to make more insidious changes - like pushing a certain narrative and then quietly changing words here and there to erase evidence of that after most people have read it, etc.

If news websites kept their own visible audit trail, much like Wikipedia, I could see the argument that Internet Archive doesn’t need to capture these articles immediately, maybe it should be time bound to a year after publication or somesuch, and therefore recent news could retain its paywall by the NYT without being sidestepped by Internet Archive. (While it’s annoying that articles are paywalled, news sites do need to make money and pay for actual news reporters.)

Trust me, I still haven’t gotten over the untimely deaths of Inbox or Play Music, and my comment history will show me raging about Google’s inability to have a coherent messaging strategy. (By the way, you forgot the original Google Chat which was killed off before Hangouts!)

It’s the same story every time. An app/service with excellent potential, left to stagnate for years, retired. It’s at the point I don’t bother trying anything new Google puts out because I can’t trust that I won’t be rugpulled again.

Edit: my mistake, it was called Google Talk, which was renamed to Gmail Chat, which was killed off in favor of Hangouts.

I just tried the photo sphere mode again for old times’ sake. It sure hasn’t gotten any better. Maybe they’re removing it so they can make and release a better version, but I won’t hold my breath.

I will be forever mad about Voyager. Everything was set up to succeed: crew conflict! Unknown location! Some good actors! Voyager was a nice looking ship!

And then, famously, the actors playing humans were told to be blah and less dynamic to let the alien characters stand out more, and the series had to follow a more stagnant TNG style (they tried to serialize certain plot threads which I appreciate but were confined to episodes of the week a lot of the time).

Like, I can just imagine a mirror universe where the entirety of season 1 was the Starfleet and Maquis crews learning to work together, and conflict and drama as they’re brought together by even more hostile external forces, and also the actors were allowed to actually act and stuff.

I love my Charge 5. I’m glad Google is keeping the series going. Whenever they inevitably sunset the tiny Charge watches and start pushing the big ol’ smart watches that don’t work for my tiny wrists and have a bunch of features I don’t care about, that’s when I’m bowing out.