I think the TS100 has a big advantage that you can easily rig up a barrel DC connector to XT60/XT90 connector, and use it to solder directly from a charged portable lipo battery.
I want to say the Pinecil, which I've been anxiously awaiting, is significantly less expensive... But shipping of $11 (though looks like I accidentally selected courier shipping so it's more like $50) brings it up closer to parity with the TS-100 kits you can get on Amazon for the TS100s.
I'm still really excited about the Pinecil though! I don't solder a lot, so I'm looking forward to having a quick kit I can whip out instead of my whole toolbox of soldering tools with my ancient but trusty Weller.
Same, super excited to have something on my desk rather than setting up my Weller! I would argue this is closer to a TS-80 than a TS-100, which cost usually around $75.
Does anyone have first-hand experience with the pinephone as daily driver? I'm thinking about getting it, but I'm worried I wont be able to do my usual stuff, including using things like Signal or WhatsApp.
Would be very interesting to hear some practital experiences!
I've had one since July and unless your needs and expectations are very low, it still has a long way to go to achieve daily driver status for me. If you only need it to replace a very low end smartphone (i.e. just making phone calls and text messages with very low expectations for apps/web as you might use a sub-$100 smartphone for) then it might work for that definition of daily driver. What it is right now is an excellent mobile Linux device that is perfect for me in many situations that I'd previously consider using a SBC or don't want to lug a laptop around for a few minute task. It will get there eventually, but the software still needs a lot of work and the hardware probably needs to advance a generation or two.
For a daily driver, I literally just went out and picked up a new Android device this weekend because I can't see the Pinephone being able to take on that role for me from a software standpoint for quite some time or with this generation of hardware.
I have it and I like it (Convergence edition on Mobian). My issue is MMS has been non-functional, and because of that, I can't use it as a daily driver.
Mobian has Anbox functional (though it is still experimental), so you can install apps on that. WhatsApp and Signal with without play services so that shouldn't be an issue.
Slightly off topic, but I'm curious why the lack of MMS is a show-stopper for you. Personally I've always found it to be a waste of time and money; there's better and cheaper ways of transferring both text and images (especially images due to the compression).
Obviously you do have a use-case; please don't think I'm trying to say it's invalid, I just honestly don't understand what it would be and would really like to be enlightened.
I'm from the U.S. and everyone I know uses SMS/MMS to communicate, including a few MMS group messages. Practically no one I know uses whatsapp/telegram/etc.
Does MMS make it easy to have a group conversation, or does everyone have to remember to do the equiv or "reply-all" (add everyone's number in) when sending a message to the group?
Do you get free SMS/MMS included in your plan? (My American Aunt has always insisted SMS was obscenely expensive and refused to use it to communicate.)
Do you get Data as standard with the plan? (Eg is it that people can't easily use WhatsApp because they don't have data when out and about or is it that people just won't agree which IP product to use in the first place?)
- Most MMS/SMS apps treat a MMS group as a threaded conversation, so you only have to set it up once (or it’ll automatically populate all the numbers when someone sends you a text from a mms group)
- MMS has been free and unlimited for the last decade or so on most major carriers (maybe more like ~7 years but we got it waaay before unlimited data made a comeback).
- Data comes standard most of the time, most people have at least a gig or two a month, going all the way up to unlimited. It’s not a problem of data use (since you’d be hard pressed to burn through two gigs of text and meh resolution images), but it’s that MMS is a lowest common denominator. Everyone has it, so you know you can reach them (except for the 10% of the time a message doesn’t go through and you don’t know about it :P). I’m in the US, and I don’t know anyone who uses something other than MMS or iMessage (which is invisible and acts exactly the same) for most of their communication. Some of us have Discord but we only use it on desktop. I think my parents may use Facebook Messenger for something.
Really appreciate the reply - thank you. It's always intriguing to see how the other half lives, as it were.
MMS never seemed to catch on in the UK and never seems to be included in the free allowances which probably doesn't help (eg I have unlimited calls, sms, >100gb data but MMS still costs me 50p each). I think the only time I've seen it used in years is very occasionally when I ask an iPhone user to send me a photo and they don't realise I'm on Android and won't automatically have it funnelled via Apple, so instead I get badly compressed unreadable photos of printed letters.
I think part of the reason it caught on here (US) is that it's been included with the plans for so long and as such is considered baseline functionality. You don't know if someone you're talking to will be on WhatsApp, Signal, etc but in the US you can pretty much assume the person you're talking to can receive MMS.
...until you can't, as this thread shows. This is also part of what's keeping me from using my PinePhone as a daily driver.
I think most people my age (22) in the US use Facebook Messenger. It’s certainly how I do most of my communication.
Facebook Messenger is like iMessage except you can generally assume everyone is on it. The main caveat is that you get the best experience if everyone is friends on Facebook, so it works great for friend/family convos but poorly for stuff like online dating (mostly SMS, Snapchat, and iMessage) and coordinating loosely attached groups of people (GroupMe used to be popular for this, but I haven’t seen it in awhile, iMessage also gets used for this but strongly excludes half of all people).
> Does MMS make it easy to have a group conversation, or does everyone have to remember to do the equiv or "reply-all" (add everyone's number in) when sending a message to the group?
It depends on the client, but yes, MMS makes it pretty easy to go.
> Do you get free SMS/MMS included in your plan? (My American Aunt has always insisted SMS was obscenely expensive and refused to use it to communicate.)
Most common plans that I know of have unlimited SMS/MMS/Phone calls (unless you get a really cheap one).
> Do you get Data as standard with the plan? (Eg is it that people can't easily use WhatsApp because they don't have data when out and about or is it that people just won't agree which IP product to use in the first place?)
Data is generally standard with a plan. SOme only give you a limited allotment, and some give you some version of "unlimited" (i.e. if you use too much they will start to throttle you).
>Do you get free SMS/MMS included in your plan? (My American Aunt has always insisted SMS was obscenely expensive and refused to use it to communicate.)
I have a phone plan with a Sprint reseller that costs $6/month and still have unlimited texts. It's really rare for a plan to not include unlimited SMS, unless maybe it's prepaid.
> Do you get free SMS/MMS included in your plan? (My American Aunt has always insisted SMS was obscenely expensive and refused to use it to communicate.)
It was for a long time, and still is with some services. I used a tracphone flip-phone for a while, and a single SMS is like half a minute of phone time IIRC.
Because I'm a grump, I stuck with google voice for years specifically because it didn't support MMS. It cut down on a lot of spam from my family. I did manage to push people to email for group conversations. SMS/MMS are interrupts where email has a some what built in understanding that replies will not be immediate.
How do WhatsApp and Signal run at all? It is not a Android OS. Through a android vm? I thought that does not really work yet, at least not on the pinephone.
I've been waiting on Librem 5 for years, and had hope for Pinephone too. Broken MMS is a big deal, because it is widespread in the U.S., and I can't communicate with family without it. It looks like MMS is still a long way out, and is not really being developed. I finally gave up and ordered my first iPhone last week.
Yeah it is honestly frsutrating for me too. I did a bit of work to figure out how feasible it is to get MMS to work (all of the pieces are there, but the actual framework to get it to work with Chatty is missing).
I really wish Pine64 would step in to help with these sort of base issues, or have a bug bounty for it.
> Does anyone have first-hand experience with the pinephone as daily driver? I'm thinking about getting it, but I'm worried I wont be able to do my usual stuff, including using things like Signal or WhatsApp.
I don't have the first hand experience, but I was doing research on this very topic earlier today. https://www.github.com/nanu-c/axolotl looked promising. (ubuntu touch only)
As others have mentioned, anbox is another alternative.
I ended up going with the xcover pro instead, but I'm still highly considering getting a pinephone to do dev work on. There's exciting stuff to reinvent over here!
Don't know much about stereograms, two general questions:
a) Is it possilbe to render color images this way?
b) Is it possible to have the random dots not change all the time? E.g. When I don't move in this example, I dont see the need to draw new random dots. Also when moving sideways e.g. would it be possible to keep the dots where they are, relative to the world?
It's possible to use color in that the dots don't have to be black and white, and don't have to be totally random. The way an autostereogram works is that there's a repetitively tiled base image (or vertical column repeated horizontally). The stereographic angle information is encoded in mutations of the repeating image. That base image can be anything (including a photo).
However, this color image will not correspond in any way to the 3D geometry of the scene. I don't know of any way to get color information to correspond to BOTH the 3D geometry and the stereographic information (without using two images).
In the Wikipedia article on autostereogram [1] there is an example of a chess set [2] where the 2D image directly corresponds to the 3D autostereogram image. It is apparently a type of wallpaper autosterogram, instead of random dot, which requires horizontal repetition for the effect to work.
That picture in particular has a really interesting parallax effect - view it in stereo and move your head around. For me, the back rank seems to shift a lot with head position, even though the image itself is (obviously) stationary.
Regular Magic-Eye pictures do this too, but to a much less noticeable degree.
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