The Indiana exception isn't about DST but that some parts are on Central rather than Eastern time. As somebody who lives about 15 minutes from that border, it's pretty aggravating and causes way too many problems for us but we still forget and assume everyone is the same time we are.
The combination of removable battery and card reader was unique to LG over the past two model years of smartphones. They even based their marketing around providing both. It's a sad day for anyone who feels that both are essential to decent phone experience.
The G3, G4 and G5 are also supremely easy to repair. It's not just the loss of the removable battery, although that's also a huge issue. The G-series was a huge favorite for me because I could fix one in just seconds with nothing more than a precision Philips head screwdriver.
But yeah, since I don't want a phone any larger than a G4 or G5 and I can't get both removable battery and SD reader, I guess I'm done upgrading my personal phone.
We're talking about disabling application packages. Not even rooting or unlocking it. There's literally no danger. Worst case, you might have to plug it back in and re-enable something or download an alternative equivalent.
Never actually tried it myself, but it makes a nice GUI with boxes you can un-check.
Is it really too much to ask to dig up the Android SDK and the relevant drivers for USB connection in your OS of choice? Do we complain about needing to get Python or.NET runtimes if we're using platforms that occasionally need those as well? Is a USB cable that much of an ask?
Hours? I'm talking about minutes here. Not even very many of them. The practice *I* want to continue is the ability to purchase phones that have removable batteries and card readers that I can repair with no tools other than a screwdriver. The only contemporary phones that still have those features are made by LG. I'm willing to accept five minutes of inconvenience in plugging in my phone and typing a few commands to kill a few apps I object to so that I can continue to get proper hardware, rather than accept a lame device with hardware that I'll NEVER be able to modify.
If you know how to use adb, you can disable all the stuff you want on your Android device. Literally everything is modular, so if you like the dialer on your Asus phone better than the one Samsung gave you, go ahead and switch. There's no reason to do anything but buy the right fit of hardware. Everything about the software load is adjustable even if you don't feel like dealing with root access.
Even the Pixel has what I'd call annoying bloat, but since it only takes about five minutes to clean all of it up on a device I'll probably use for a few years, this isn't much of an inconvenience.
Among US Cell carriers, Sprint and some of its associated MVNOs are still offering fully unlimited data plans. It's definitely possible to get Unlimited LTE service in the USA, just not from Verizon, ATT or Tmobile.
Of course, then you're going to be on Sprint's weirdo CDMA network, but if you're in a a reasonably urban area, it's probably fine.
I know several people who have gone through any number of calisthenics to maintain their "unlimited" data plans on Verizon's network. This generally involves sticking with an updated phone or paying retail to buy a phone outright. Verizon really does have the largest network with the best overall coverage within the United States and there are plenty of places that there really isn't a better option.
For example, Verizon LTE service is often a better and more attractive internet option than marginally-available DSL or laggy, data-capped satellite internet for rural homeowners.
Granted, I'm not using 200GB/month through my phone either, but I certainly do recognize that this is a real problem for a lot of people, especially who aren't necessarily close to any other sort of fat data pipe.
I've not experienced this issue. At the same time, LG is also the only company making a phone with hardware that works the way all smartphone hardware should. I don't believe the matter is "never buy LG" but "don't buy any smartphone that doesn't at least have a removable battery and an SD card reader" and that doesn't leave us with very many options, does it?
As long as they don't abandon the construction techniques or baseline selling points of the existing G3/4/5, I don't care about modularity, although if I was in the right place in my phone lifecycle to get a G5, I definitely would have.
LG is the only company making a flagship phone with a removable battery and a card reader. Being able to swap a battery after shooting a lot of photos or video is infinitely better than being tethered to an external battery, and moving cards around has obvious benefits as well.
But the G3/4/5 are also held together with actual screws. You don't have to delaminate any glass. You don't need suction cups or special pry tools to fix one. I can completely field strip one to its components in about 90 seconds. This is a huge selling point, especially after some of the bullshit I've had to do to work on newer Apple and Samsung phones.
As long as the G6 keeps those aspects, it's all good.
One of my customers, someone who is in no way a techie but runs a reasonably successful business, uses a 4kg. 17" Alienware laptop. His previous Alienware had its GPU die four times in two years and I suspect this one won't be any better, but since he sits in his office and plays some MMO or other at least four hours out of every work day and he makes enough to keep buying new ones, it's not like I can stop him from doing that.
I will say that an nVidia Shield tablet with bluetooth input devices can do pretty well for internet-based game streaming, and it's a shit-ton cheaper than a born-to-die gaming laptop.
The only place where offline syncing is even all that interesting is iOS clients, since everything else has some kind of facility for directly copying the files you'd like to watch. You can't sync from a shared library, either. So either you have the technical knowledge to set up a Plex Media Server and point it to all your data but NOT the understanding of how to move a 2GB file on to a mobile device using an SD card or FTP/SMB client, or Offline Syncing isn't that big of a deal either unless your mobile OS prohibits FTP/SMB/SD Cards.
I'd say Kodi because I think Plex handles audio poorly; I don't really like its flat organizational structure and the ongoing inability to customize your view of that. Plex also insists on interacting with metadata I don't want it to. There's no way to fix Plex, so I just don't use it for music.
I'm a big fan of using the Music Pump Kodi Remote for Android. I like the way I can browse my music from that and send the output to whatever Kodi device I feel like using with it. How useful that is depends on where and how you access Kodi devices; it's glacially slow on an Rpi or other old ARM device, but it's fast, fast, fast if your Kodi system is running on a decent x86 box. Kodi also gives you better options for playing back DTS-HD and other exotic formats, which is something to keep in mind of you have a multichannel setup and a bunch of SACD rips somewhere.
Can you clarify what product has a working "music DNA" function? I'd love to see something like that actually work. In my experience and for my taste (contemporary classical music) it seems that nothing does what it's supposed to.
Plex is supported on hardware that won't run Kodi, like a lot of Smart TVs and iOS. You can also use it to share access to content with other Plex users, so for example my brother in Prague can watch stuff on my server without me having to walk him through setting up a VPN connection
Kodi for highly customizable local access and Plex Media Server for external access and transcoding for STBs, mobile devices and less capable clients (cough iOS cough)
Plex has had user authentication for a while, something that Kodi just got recently, and it's easier on Plex to track viewing where Kodi needs the gymnastics of a third-party database and some time investment to get that running. On the other hand, Kodi is much more flexible for playback formats and presentation, and it has a much better addon ecosystem. Plex has Channels but they're an afterthought for most people, and the Plex presentation on a given client probably sucks unless you really love scrolling through long lists one title at a time.
I'm not sure why this is news, since PlexBMC has been an available plug-in for Kodi for at least the past several years.
I suppose it's just a matter of that the Plex plugin for Kodi was essentially a DLNA client, which the usual crummy presentation that goes along with that, but IIRC it did show friends' Shared Libraries.
I use Kodi at home for personal media access, but I have a Plex Server that shares the same content for external access as well. I hardly ever use it, but I certainly can. The libraries between the two are already lined up, though Kodi and Plex each have their own database and metadata storage. If the two can reconcile those two things so that I only need one back-end for both, that's something I care about.
(Why Kodi/SPMC over Plex? Kodi offers better support for high resolution audio and has support for third-party tools for video playback, just in case I feel like throwing a GTX1080 at 4k upscaling or something).
If, on the other hand, this is just about getting a more polished interface for Plex libraries in Kodi than the one I had via the old Plex plugin, all I can say is "meh."
I'm a lifetime Plex Pass member, but they haven't done anything in years that makes me think a Plex Pass is anything but a donation to the project. I don't care about Kodi integration. I'd rather they work on getting music libraries to suck less or improve content filtering than get cloud streaming or Kodi integration or whatever other bullshit they've been doing lately.
I pay $2/month on top of Prime for functionally unlimited (250,000 tracks) music storage. I'm ok with that. I also have a 144TB file server in my spare bedroom that has all the music I could ever dream of hearing on it and a bunch of Kodi devices where I can play content. But you you know what I can't do with that stuff? I can't talk to it and have it do something.
I've bought pretty much all my audio CDs from Amazon (well, CDNow, originally) since about 1997. I buy a lot of music on disc. Turns out it's kind of hard to pirate contemporary classical music. In any case, I had a massive library of content available through Amazon's Cloud starting from the day they announced that everyone's music purchases would be put in there. That stuff just plays through the Dot. That's kind of great, really. I say "Alexa, play Kevin Puts And Legions Will Rise" and Kevin Puts plays. "Alexa, play Pandora; Alexa and set a sleep timer for 30 minutes." and I get a half hour of music random music.
Something else that's great? "Alexa, give me a news briefing" No more timing my shower so I catch the news at the top of the hour while I'm getting ready for work.
I can do that stuff about 10 different ways in my house, but the voice activation is legitimately handy. Especially since it's one step closer to getting to be Deckard in the middle of Blade Runner. Easily worth $50, anyway.
"Just let Apple Do It" is also subject to the availability of a nearby Apple store. I'm sure they're on every corner in southern California and the east coast of the US, but in flyover country the damned things are practically tourist destinations.
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The Indiana exception isn't about DST but that some parts are on Central rather than Eastern time. As somebody who lives about 15 minutes from that border, it's pretty aggravating and causes way too many problems for us but we still forget and assume everyone is the same time we are.
You have options already if that's what you need.
I'd rather have a removable battery. There's plenty of water resistant phones. Give me one that lets me swap the battery and storage.
The combination of removable battery and card reader was unique to LG over the past two model years of smartphones. They even based their marketing around providing both. It's a sad day for anyone who feels that both are essential to decent phone experience.
The G3, G4 and G5 are also supremely easy to repair. It's not just the loss of the removable battery, although that's also a huge issue. The G-series was a huge favorite for me because I could fix one in just seconds with nothing more than a precision Philips head screwdriver.
But yeah, since I don't want a phone any larger than a G4 or G5 and I can't get both removable battery and SD reader, I guess I'm done upgrading my personal phone.
We're talking about disabling application packages. Not even rooting or unlocking it. There's literally no danger. Worst case, you might have to plug it back in and re-enable something or download an alternative equivalent.
Here, I'll make it easier:
https://forum.xda-developers.c...
Never actually tried it myself, but it makes a nice GUI with boxes you can un-check.
Is it really too much to ask to dig up the Android SDK and the relevant drivers for USB connection in your OS of choice? Do we complain about needing to get Python or .NET runtimes if we're using platforms that occasionally need those as well? Is a USB cable that much of an ask?
Hours? I'm talking about minutes here. Not even very many of them.
The practice *I* want to continue is the ability to purchase phones that have removable batteries and card readers that I can repair with no tools other than a screwdriver. The only contemporary phones that still have those features are made by LG. I'm willing to accept five minutes of inconvenience in plugging in my phone and typing a few commands to kill a few apps I object to so that I can continue to get proper hardware, rather than accept a lame device with hardware that I'll NEVER be able to modify.
If you know how to use adb, you can disable all the stuff you want on your Android device. Literally everything is modular, so if you like the dialer on your Asus phone better than the one Samsung gave you, go ahead and switch.
There's no reason to do anything but buy the right fit of hardware. Everything about the software load is adjustable even if you don't feel like dealing with root access.
Even the Pixel has what I'd call annoying bloat, but since it only takes about five minutes to clean all of it up on a device I'll probably use for a few years, this isn't much of an inconvenience.
Among US Cell carriers, Sprint and some of its associated MVNOs are still offering fully unlimited data plans. It's definitely possible to get Unlimited LTE service in the USA, just not from Verizon, ATT or Tmobile.
Of course, then you're going to be on Sprint's weirdo CDMA network, but if you're in a a reasonably urban area, it's probably fine.
I know several people who have gone through any number of calisthenics to maintain their "unlimited" data plans on Verizon's network. This generally involves sticking with an updated phone or paying retail to buy a phone outright. Verizon really does have the largest network with the best overall coverage within the United States and there are plenty of places that there really isn't a better option.
For example, Verizon LTE service is often a better and more attractive internet option than marginally-available DSL or laggy, data-capped satellite internet for rural homeowners.
Granted, I'm not using 200GB/month through my phone either, but I certainly do recognize that this is a real problem for a lot of people, especially who aren't necessarily close to any other sort of fat data pipe.
I've not experienced this issue. At the same time, LG is also the only company making a phone with hardware that works the way all smartphone hardware should. I don't believe the matter is "never buy LG" but "don't buy any smartphone that doesn't at least have a removable battery and an SD card reader" and that doesn't leave us with very many options, does it?
As long as they don't abandon the construction techniques or baseline selling points of the existing G3/4/5, I don't care about modularity, although if I was in the right place in my phone lifecycle to get a G5, I definitely would have.
LG is the only company making a flagship phone with a removable battery and a card reader. Being able to swap a battery after shooting a lot of photos or video is infinitely better than being tethered to an external battery, and moving cards around has obvious benefits as well.
But the G3/4/5 are also held together with actual screws. You don't have to delaminate any glass. You don't need suction cups or special pry tools to fix one. I can completely field strip one to its components in about 90 seconds. This is a huge selling point, especially after some of the bullshit I've had to do to work on newer Apple and Samsung phones.
As long as the G6 keeps those aspects, it's all good.
Stupid gamers do.
One of my customers, someone who is in no way a techie but runs a reasonably successful business, uses a 4kg. 17" Alienware laptop. His previous Alienware had its GPU die four times in two years and I suspect this one won't be any better, but since he sits in his office and plays some MMO or other at least four hours out of every work day and he makes enough to keep buying new ones, it's not like I can stop him from doing that.
I will say that an nVidia Shield tablet with bluetooth input devices can do pretty well for internet-based game streaming, and it's a shit-ton cheaper than a born-to-die gaming laptop.
The only place where offline syncing is even all that interesting is iOS clients, since everything else has some kind of facility for directly copying the files you'd like to watch. You can't sync from a shared library, either. So either you have the technical knowledge to set up a Plex Media Server and point it to all your data but NOT the understanding of how to move a 2GB file on to a mobile device using an SD card or FTP/SMB client, or Offline Syncing isn't that big of a deal either unless your mobile OS prohibits FTP/SMB/SD Cards.
I'd say Kodi because I think Plex handles audio poorly; I don't really like its flat organizational structure and the ongoing inability to customize your view of that. Plex also insists on interacting with metadata I don't want it to. There's no way to fix Plex, so I just don't use it for music.
I'm a big fan of using the Music Pump Kodi Remote for Android. I like the way I can browse my music from that and send the output to whatever Kodi device I feel like using with it. How useful that is depends on where and how you access Kodi devices; it's glacially slow on an Rpi or other old ARM device, but it's fast, fast, fast if your Kodi system is running on a decent x86 box. Kodi also gives you better options for playing back DTS-HD and other exotic formats, which is something to keep in mind of you have a multichannel setup and a bunch of SACD rips somewhere.
Can you clarify what product has a working "music DNA" function? I'd love to see something like that actually work. In my experience and for my taste (contemporary classical music) it seems that nothing does what it's supposed to.
The Plex server can also govern the bit rate being delivered, which can be a lot more efficient if CPU cycles are less precious than bandwidth.
Plex is supported on hardware that won't run Kodi, like a lot of Smart TVs and iOS. You can also use it to share access to content with other Plex users, so for example my brother in Prague can watch stuff on my server without me having to walk him through setting up a VPN connection
Re: Why run two?
Kodi for highly customizable local access and Plex Media Server for external access and transcoding for STBs, mobile devices and less capable clients (cough iOS cough)
Plex has had user authentication for a while, something that Kodi just got recently, and it's easier on Plex to track viewing where Kodi needs the gymnastics of a third-party database and some time investment to get that running.
On the other hand, Kodi is much more flexible for playback formats and presentation, and it has a much better addon ecosystem. Plex has Channels but they're an afterthought for most people, and the Plex presentation on a given client probably sucks unless you really love scrolling through long lists one title at a time.
I'm not sure why this is news, since PlexBMC has been an available plug-in for Kodi for at least the past several years.
I suppose it's just a matter of that the Plex plugin for Kodi was essentially a DLNA client, which the usual crummy presentation that goes along with that, but IIRC it did show friends' Shared Libraries.
I use Kodi at home for personal media access, but I have a Plex Server that shares the same content for external access as well. I hardly ever use it, but I certainly can. The libraries between the two are already lined up, though Kodi and Plex each have their own database and metadata storage. If the two can reconcile those two things so that I only need one back-end for both, that's something I care about.
(Why Kodi/SPMC over Plex? Kodi offers better support for high resolution audio and has support for third-party tools for video playback, just in case I feel like throwing a GTX1080 at 4k upscaling or something).
If, on the other hand, this is just about getting a more polished interface for Plex libraries in Kodi than the one I had via the old Plex plugin, all I can say is "meh."
I'm a lifetime Plex Pass member, but they haven't done anything in years that makes me think a Plex Pass is anything but a donation to the project. I don't care about Kodi integration. I'd rather they work on getting music libraries to suck less or improve content filtering than get cloud streaming or Kodi integration or whatever other bullshit they've been doing lately.
I pay $2/month on top of Prime for functionally unlimited (250,000 tracks) music storage. I'm ok with that. I also have a 144TB file server in my spare bedroom that has all the music I could ever dream of hearing on it and a bunch of Kodi devices where I can play content. But you you know what I can't do with that stuff? I can't talk to it and have it do something.
I've bought pretty much all my audio CDs from Amazon (well, CDNow, originally) since about 1997. I buy a lot of music on disc. Turns out it's kind of hard to pirate contemporary classical music. In any case, I had a massive library of content available through Amazon's Cloud starting from the day they announced that everyone's music purchases would be put in there. That stuff just plays through the Dot. That's kind of great, really. I say "Alexa, play Kevin Puts And Legions Will Rise" and Kevin Puts plays. "Alexa, play Pandora; Alexa and set a sleep timer for 30 minutes." and I get a half hour of music random music.
Something else that's great? "Alexa, give me a news briefing" No more timing my shower so I catch the news at the top of the hour while I'm getting ready for work.
I can do that stuff about 10 different ways in my house, but the voice activation is legitimately handy. Especially since it's one step closer to getting to be Deckard in the middle of Blade Runner. Easily worth $50, anyway.
"Just let Apple Do It" is also subject to the availability of a nearby Apple store. I'm sure they're on every corner in southern California and the east coast of the US, but in flyover country the damned things are practically tourist destinations.
We already know that Apple's reality distortion field will be in full effect regardless. I'm not happy about that either.