That is on the main branch. Behind the scenes [1] they're working a a huge rewrite to use the Bevy engine. A big effort that seems to be moving at a quite constant pace. It seems they're doing it quite rigourously: I've seen some issues in the bevy tracker where they check what is specific to their project, or where bevy can use some work.
As Fairphone owner I have become somewhat sceptical of their repairability claim.
Mine fell on its side on some pebble stones. The power-button, unprotected by the case, got scratched. The button doubles as a fingerprint reader, which ceased working due to the scratch. At first, I thought "no worries, this phone is friendly to those who want to repair it."
It turns out, this part is not available for replacement. I think this is an oversight; just like the screen, it is an outward facing part, hence, bound to be damaged for some.
Then, I brought it to my local repair shop. The owner had to tell me that they cannot repair Fairphone's, and that, for him, it is one of the worst companies to deal with. They try to centralise all repairs in their own repair center. Which means sending the phone -- which I need -- away for 2 weeks; paying a fee for diagnosis, an unknown cost for repair, and the hassle of a flashed phone. I already know what's broken, I just want the part.
I feel this is a real shame, as I am fully supportive of the stated aims of the company, and I want the product to be good.
[Aside: suggestions on how to deal with a scratched fingerprint reader are most welcome. E.g. can the scatch be re-painted? The phone thinks the reader is there, but it doesn't register any touch. ]
> Then, I brought it to my local repair shop. The owner had to tell me that they cannot repair Fairphone's
I brought mine to my local repair shop as well and they were completely unwilling to even try to repair it. Then I went home and tried myself and managed by just bending back some pins. The display cable had gotten loose. Have worked fine since then.
But is that because the phone is difficult to repair or because repair shop personnel has clear instructions to not try anything on devices they haven't been trained on? Likely "trained" as in their parts supplier does not have a QR code to the YouTube instruction in the ring binder.
Chances are they refused because it's not only a niche phone but a niche phone that's particularly repairable without shop logistics.
Yeah, I tinker with hardware embarrassingly seldom and my impression was that it was very easy to work with. The screen, which was the issue, is designed to be replaced and I realized it was fixable when I was trying to figure out if I could replace it.
My impression was that they had never seen the model before and for some reason they weren't interested in trying. I think I talked to the shop owner and it wasn't at a chain store.
The actual screen had dislodged from its detachable frame so I glued it back to that. And the screen connector pins were a bit bent so I bent them back. Then it worked. Figuring out how the broken parts were supposed to fit together were a little bit finicky I suppose. If I hadn't launched it into a concrete wall it would've been easier to figure out.
Honestly, with a phone as easy to repair as Fairphone I don't really care that repair shops won't repair them. All I need to to be able to order a part.
Not certain which type of sensor it uses, but in any case painting it wouldn't fix it. The problem with a scratch is now it will register that as a fingerprint ridge, but it is in a fixed location, so theoretically if you re-register your finger on the scanner and always position your finger in *exactly* the same space it would still work, but as soon as your finger moves slightly, the scratches position relative to your fingerprint changes, thus changing the fingerprint that is read. You would have to fill the scratch with the same material that it is coated with, provided the scratch is just in the coating, and it isn't say a capacitive type which you've scratched part of that capacitive coating. Thus for a home-repair likely out of luck I'd think.
I could be wrong, any hardware guys please feel free to chime in over me.
Note: slightly simplified explanation but mostly holds for the three common types of sensors.
You could make an attempts using a scratch remover, which are available for scratched screens. There is some chance that it gets you there, though it depends on too many unknown variables to know for sure.
This. If it has the same index of refraction as the screen, it may fill in the damage and make it invisible. It might help to know if the screen is acrylic or glass to choose the right one. The poster has nothing to lose, sounds like.
> I brought it to my local repair shop. The owner had to tell me that they cannot repair Fairphone's, and that, for him, it is one of the worst companies to deal with.
This sounds like an odd & inconsistent story (from the repair shop guy - I'm not doubting your side of this, only his). Why would he need to be dealing directly with the company for any reason other than to purchase replaceable modules which are consumer-available & what would they be giving him trouble with specifically? Unless he's sending all his phones for repair back to the OEMs, but I'm sure that's not the case.
I wouldn't be surprised if some repair shops simply have a "mainstream brands only" blanket policy & don't consider other brands worth the time it takes to read about.
Otherwise you're right that the fingerprint module is specifically a bit of an achilles heel in their repairability. Even leaving aside the fingerprint reader isn't a separate component, it's also unclear to my why they made the decision not to sell the core module for standalone replacement (even if it ended up being quite expensive).
Sadly had a very similar experience about the screen of my FP4, which seems to have a serial fault of producing random inputs whenever it so pleases [1]. Knowing I had bought a phone with great self-service claims, I was confident they could just send me a replacement screen and I could swap it myself. But no, they insisted that I had to send it in, claiming that this would be better for the environment.
I do want to support Fairphone's mission and wish I could whole-heartedly recommend it to friends and family. But this experience and the many software issues have led me to recommend other options instead.
You can definitely buy the replacement screen for the FP4 as it's on their online shop. If you were going for repair under warranty it does seem odd not to just send you the part if you're happy installing it.
This is the problem with all of those „gadget but repairable” companies. It sounds great on paper, but the low adoption rate means that parts are hard to come by, the products get discontinued all the time, and your local electronics repair guy has never seen one of those before.
I also had an issue with the power button on my FP4, sadly it became stuck _on_ so the phone just bootlooped and was immediately unusable.
I ended up posting it for repair, over Christmas, which did take about 2 weeks but it was fully covered by the warranty.
I've successfully replaced the USB port after accidentally filling it with sand once, and that was trivial apart from UPS losing the package the first time. I really do appreciate the repairability, even if it could be better.
You're right that I maybe phrased it too harsh, the repairability _is_ a great feature. And of course, they do more by checking supply chains for some of the parts. The thing is, if your part is not available, you're stuck with their repair service. It surprises me they don't offer all parts.
Great though, that they resolved yours within the scheduled time!
At least it was the finger print scanner and not your finger that needs replacing. Biometrics as an EXTRA layer of security, on SHARED devices, makes sense. As a convenient replacement for passwords, on a personal device, net negative.
This is completely out of touch with the reality of the average user. The main causes of account theft continue to be phishing and data breaches which are easily exploited because most people reuse their passwords and will never stop doing so to use a password manager. Biometric passkeys are probably the only viable way to improve the situation.
Really? What about phone theft? If someone sticks you up and knows all it takes is your finger to unlock the phone, I would think they would be more tempted to do so, as it takes more or less the same level of coercion as taking the phone. And it's easier than fumbling around with a password... therein is the double edged sword...
Demanding a password introduces more error and more room for evasion than a finger, which as I said is about the same as getting the phone in the first place. You are right that in some, maybe even most cases, it may not make a difference. But when time is of the essence, additional obstacles are often simply avoided.
You also might ask who is sticking you up. For example, I believe there is fourth amendment literature re government officials that have gotten away with using an arrested persons biometrics to unlock a phone, in a manner in which compelling the release of a password would be illegal. Put another way, I can simply grab your finger or put your phone in front of your face, whereas beating you until you surrender your password is a lot harder to accomplish without creating additional consequences.
Still depends on your threat model. Not everyone lives in a place where stick-ups and random arrests are so common place that you want to inconvenience yourself 99.999% of the happy flow.
Indeed, good point. Proper threat modeling is everything.
This also explains my original reply to the ancestor comment. As I see it, most people's personal threat model essentially already accounts for data breaches to the point that they are almost irrelevant. We hear about them all the time. More and more people are learning about credit freezes or 2fa or just getting these services baked into things they already use (more banks offer free credit monitoring, 2fa is increasingly a standard). It seems like we are in a place where data breaches just become essentially background noise to the average user.
In my view then, I would personally factor in physical theft as a higher threat than "phishing and data breaches". Even if low probability to begin with.
There is also the objective question of which occurs more or incurs more damages to individuals, the answer to which I do not know. I know companies often spend a lot of money to fix problems or deal with lawsuits, but individuals don't really get compensated by that the way they would if someone who ripped your phone away from you was tackled to the ground and your property got returned. For example.
As you say though, the threat model is everything.
You've been trained to think it's a viable alternative to passwords. It's seems you even think it's "better". Little children can figure out how to bypass it on their own, and they don't even need to be especially clever. Hopefully you never have to learn first-hand the other ways it can make an already bad situation even worse.
This is a great project: the code is super neat and the write-up very clear. I like the sousveillance aspect of it!
For a project I needed a low-latency RTSP stream as well. When reading a video stream with OpenCV, the default video buffer is quite big, which, when filling up, makes the video lag behind a second or two. It then becomes impossible to perform any interaction on it.
I wasn't familiar with the setting you use to overcome this: setting cv2.CAP_PROP_BUFFERSIZE to 1 on the VideoCapture.
I am not sure, but you might get even lower latency by turning to OpenCV's GStreamer support. For me the trick was:
When testing, I also found out that the codec and image settings of the camera matter. With a h264 stream, the images came in batches of a number of frames, whereas MJPEG provided a more constant image stream with lower latency. Lastly, disabling 3D noise reduction also removed some delay.
I really like Zed, and I want to use it but I keep going back to VSCode when I need to be productive on my code instead of messing with my editor. I use both at the same time because Zed feels so much nicer, but so far, VSCode's features are quite a bit head.
I've been doing this for some time now and it indeed makes editing text in vim easy. Just `dd` and `p`. And as the article mentions, diffing is much cleaner.
There's a caveat however, if you comment a line (to keep the thought, but see how it would work without) some Markdown parsers will interpret it as an empty line, and thus create a new paragraph. It then becomes necessary to remove one of the semantic newlines, which looks rather messy.
As a Colemak (DH) user for ~5 years, I share these experiences.
I did a monkeytype benchmark before switching, and I still barely hit the same numbers, so it's certainly not a magic fix for more typing speed. What is left then is the argument concerning ergonomics: which I am not sure is worth the trade-offs.
Every time I now sit at another's computer I am unable to type without glancing at the keyboard. Moreover, I am trying to switch to (n)vim, and am completely at a loss navigating, as the hjkl keys are now scattered across the keyboard -- beating their purpose.
While being an avid Debian user on both server and desktop, I had never heard of the Extrepo[0] package mentioned in the article. It would be great if the repositories included in there would suggest this way of adding their repo. While it cannot guarantee the safety of added packages, it at least add an extra layer of checks.
Another useful thing from the article for me was `apt modernize-sources` to update the existing sources.list to the new structure. Now I need to check if scripts like this run automatically on my auto-updating desktop from my parents.
What I lack with the "modern" `sources.list.d/` file schema is a command to perform common types of edits. Something like `extrepo` but generic and with knowledge of Debian repos/dists. It's a small thing but I want to be able to type commands like
apt-sources available # prints known dists, marked by their support status
apt-sources list # prints all active dists
apt-sources add trixie # or "testing", "unstable", "sid"
apt-sources remove bookworm
apt-sources dist-upgrade # combo of the previous two
Perhaps `extrepo` would be extended to include Debian-proper or this hypothetical `apt-sources` would be kept Debian-repo-only or perhaps it would cover extrepo's scope.
Adding to the list of 'this is what I am using', I have switched both terminal and code editor to Maple Mono[1]. Which, looking at TFA, seems to be somewhat similar in spirit as Atkinson Hyperlegible, although I haven't used that.
Maple has many ligatures, I personally like the hypervisible [TODO]. Overall I find it very legible, even on small sizes, and pleasing also for writing e.g. in Markdown.
What is particularly striking about the scandal is the impact of the mini-series. From what I understand (as a foreigner to the UK) is that it was the mini-series that sparked national interest in the case. Without it, those involved would still be in a bureaucratic and legal nightmare, in which all institutions rejected their innocence claims, and hardly anyone would have been held accountable. See also the "Impact" section on the linked wiki page.
It leaves me wondering how the situation would have been if it would have been a (dramaturgically) 'bad' series. It might have left those involved even worse of.
It's worth pointing out that Mr Bates vs The Post Office screened in early 2024. The Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry was set up in 2020/2021 and the public hearings started in 2023.
So it may have looked like "it was TV what done it" but the wheels of justice were turning long before the show came out.
We were in the middle of an election cycle. If you were paying attention you were aware of the scandal slowly grinding its way through legal slop, but most people probably weren't that clued in (as per normal).
But that mini-series threw it into the current public consciousness, and so suddenly it wasn't just the judicial system working through it but the Tories now gave a shit (briefly), because they thought showing that they care might save them (it didn't).
> It leaves me wondering how the situation would have been if it would have been a (dramaturgically) 'bad' series. It might have left those involved even worse of.
Holy shit. You might see big corps like the post office fund big dramas as a way to sway public opinion. A tool in the pr playbook.
It didn't work because it was a terrible movie and blatant propaganda, but I could see someone doing this successfully if they were more subtle about it.
I suspect it’s a deliberate strategy in other venues. I see a lot of comments on HN that seem like they’re rage/troll/flame bait to cause a line of inquiry they are advancing to be flagged/downvoted, but if done as intended, their reply will be divisive enough that the troll trigger man isn’t identified as a troll, but they induce trolling in others.
Anyone Can Become a Troll: Causes of Trolling Behavior in Online Discussions
Justin Cheng, Michael Bernstein, Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil, Jure Leskovec
> In online communities, antisocial behavior such as trolling disrupts constructive discussion. While prior work suggests that trolling behavior is confined to a vocal and antisocial minority, we demonstrate that ordinary people can engage in such behavior as well. We propose two primary trigger mechanisms: the individual’s mood, and the surrounding context of a discussion (e.g., exposure to prior trolling behavior). Through an experiment simulating an online discussion, we find that both negative mood and seeing troll posts by others significantly increases the probability of a user trolling, and together double this probability. To support and extend these results, we study how these same mechanisms play out in the wild via a data-driven, longitudinal analysis of a large online news discussion community. This analysis reveals temporal mood effects, and explores long range patterns of repeated exposure to trolling. A predictive model of trolling behavior shows that mood and discussion context together can explain trolling behavior better than an individual’s history of trolling. These results combine to suggest that ordinary people can, under the right circumstances, behave like trolls.
There are other scandals in the UK, like IR35 that basically prevents worker owned businesses from making profit, then resulting cottage industry of parasitic "umbrella companies" and tumbling economy. But directly affected people are easily generalised as those with broader shoulders so the public couldn't care less if they cannot run their little businesses. Meanwhile big consultancies that lobbied for it are getting minted on public sector contracts, they have very much a monopoly now. Things are more expensive and shittier. Oh and then Boriswave - as if captive services market wasn't enough for big corporations - they also got to import the cheapest available workers instead of hiring locals.
The propaganda that was manufactured by the government around this was particularly clever. Most people believe the captive labour market that has been created was for the benefit of the tax payer - see the downvotes and no comments - and reject the idea that it is actually the opposite and only benefactors are big corporations. The idea that subsequent governments could be so corrupt, doesn't compute.
Wow, that book sounds like a mix of Johan Harstad's footnote riddled Forsaken/The Red Handler (and who's Max, Mischa & Tetoffensiven even is about 'idling') and George Perec's An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris[1]. As you say, the almost childlike fascination with the mundane is really valuable, it helps to guide my own eyes when wandering the city.
[1]: https://github.com/nannou-org/nannou/tree/bevy-refactor