Don’t forget Algol-60. Per Tony Hoare, “Here is a language so far ahead of its time that it was not only an improvement on its predecessors but also on nearly all its successors.”

Back in my day, we only had ones and zeros, and sometimes we ran out of ones!!! (From old song, https://youtu.be/p1fBd7UbQPA?t=60 )

When I say it runs Android, the implication is that it is full of smart phone features, which it is. The idea of a dumb phone is that it is impossible for the user to get the phone into a confusing state, and there are no states that the user might want to enter but can’t figure out how. For example, if the phone can play music, the user will want to know how to activate the music playing feature, which means they will hassle you (you are the involuntary unpaid 24/7 tech support for this phone) to explain it to them, possibly multiple times per day.

So it is an IMHO essential feature of a dumb phone that it NOT have a music player, or any other feature that is not constantly visible in the UI. Phones of the 1990s could do that, but the technology has since been lost. ;)

Locked phone usually means you are stuck with that carrier’s expensive plans. A very basic MVNO plan for an unlocked phone is $5 per month or less. I don’t think Boost has anything like that.

Added: Hmm, here is a $65 “NeoFlip” phone that might not be locked: https://www.redpocket.com/shop/flip-phone/neo-flip-lte

Thanks, that’s kind of interesting, though it is an Android (AOSP) phone with a physical keypad more or less. $60 isn’t too bad but it appears locked to Boost Mobile. An unlocked Moto G Play 2023 is $100 cash at Best Buy so that’s probably more attractive given a suitable dumbifying app.

There was a famous incident of a badly designed PD cable frying Benson Leung’s fancy ($2000) Pixel Chromebook or something like that.

Looks still unreadable. Better to edit it down to about 1/10th the size at most.

Will they ban ad blockers next?

$210 lol and it’s a semi smart phone that plays mp3s. The defining feature of a dumb phone IMHO is there’s no app switching. Front panel is completely static. Keypad plus some preprogrammed speed dial buttons that never change.

I looked for this and it sort of doesn’t exist. I need it for a technologically challenged family member who gets hopelessly confused by smart phones. I have had the idea of writing an Android dumbify app that runs in kiosk mode (i.e. there is no way to exit it) that just disables everything except phone calls, and keeps the phone keypad permanently on the screen, like an old fashioned phone with physical buttons. It’s on my infinite todo list.

Once you say google maps you are back in smartphone territory so forget that.

Fwiw woot.com had an older (4G) model Samsung Galaxy XCover for around $100 a couple of days ago, that might still be there. It’s one of the few Android phones with a swappable battery.

Can anyone explain why Wayland exists or who cares about it? X has been around forever, it sucks but it works and everything supports it. Alternatives like NeWS came around that were radically better, but were too soon or relied too much on corporate support, so they faded. The GNU project originally intended to write its own thing, but settled for using X. Now there’s Wayland though, which seems like a slight improvement over X, but mostly kind of a lateral move.

If you’re going to replace X, why not do something a lot better? If not actual NeWS, then something that incorporates some of its ideas. I think Squeak was like that but I don’t know much about it.

Most everything everywhere is virtual these days, even when the host hardware is single tenant. Companies running hosted applications on bare metal are rare. I run personal stuff that way because proxmox was too much hassle, but a more serious user would have just dealt with it.

Put on some music that’s about the right length, or work out through some number of songs, or pedal some number of “miles” if the bike has an odometer.

You get used to driving, and automatic is probably easier to learn with but afterwards it’s not an issue.

“Best” often is a literary work that can be slow to read and/or very long. You want stuff that is short and quick, which is fine, I read a lot of fanfiction for that purpose. But I’m going to recommend Pohl and Kornbluth’s “The Space Merchants” and their other short novels from that era (1950s). Their cynicism is absolutely prescient. The Space Merchants is about a world run by advertising agencies. A quick read while hard hitting.

Um lol no. It would have to be 3x the physical size of the original battery to have 3x the capacity. But if they made a new, thicker phone case to accommodate it, that could work and such things have been done a few times for other phones.

Sad to hear. Newpipe is still working fine (as of a couple minutes ago) if that helps. That’s through a residential IP. I will try yt-dlp from a data center IP when I get a chance. I hope they haven’t blocked that.

Org mode has a time tracking feature, dunno about report generation.

Only if you say sudo.

deleted by creator

Off the topic of my head, maybe these can get you started:

Hackers, by Stephen Levy

The Hacker Ethic, by Pekka Himanen

True Names, by Vernor Vinge

Free Culture, by Lawrence Lessig

A Fire Upon The Deep (SF novel), by Vernor Vinge