Well, I’d start with physical buttons. Forget stuff like face ID. A button that scans your fingerprint is a lot simpler to “get”. Same goes for volume keys.

Automatic screen brightness is pretty good, but if it weren’t a thing, buttons would work there. That’s how laptops do it.

I’d add a feature that makes certain settings reset to “default” after a configurable amount of time (or never). Airplane mode or mute could turn off over night, so grandma can never “disable” her phone and become unreachable, or unable to reach anyone. (Except by turning it off, a concept almost no-one has to be taught)

Give me the ability to disable quick settings in the notifications shade, grandma doesn’t need to toggle nfc, wifi, her data connection, or start screen recording (I literally tried to remove all the quick settings, but there’s a minimum!). Hell, get rid of the notification shade completely and make it a physical button that just opens your messages from whatsapp, sms and email, all in one list.

I don’t think we need to dumb down everything a phone can do. And I think we can assume an elderly person can get help with changing settings or setting it up to begin with. As such, what I wish fir, is for the simple stuff to be even simpler, and for the complicated stuff to be hidden away and essentially have configurable child locks, so they can’t be touched, except by someone who knows what the stuff does.

It should be possibly to put a device in a mode where it is “senile-proof”. But it isn’t. My grandmother can, and has, put her devices in a state where they do not work, simply by turning on airplane mode without realizing. And our current solution is to use Life 360, so we can check that her phone is still “online” and have someone visit her to fix it, if it isn’t.

I’ve done it over phone many times. I have a system.

I have them read whatever is on screen until I figure out what they’re looking at.

Then I use one of my own devices to follow along, so I have an idea of what they’re seeing, so I can give extremely specific instructions.

Sounds ok.

But limiting. My grandma is still able to learn and think.

She currently uses a tablet and a phone. Android, set up by me, and locked down as much as possible.

One home screen, with the apps she wants on one half of the screen, and a widget that shows notifications on the other half. (Limited only to notifications from apps like whatsapp, etc., she doesn’t need see that the phone updated the OS during the night etc.)

This way, all I had to do, was tell her how the home button works, and how the back button works. No explaining quick settings or the notification shade.

From there, she’s slowly learned each app, always safe in knowing she can hit home/back if confused, and take it from the beginning.

The notification widget has been especially good, as it is always there showing her her messages, and she can tap them to go straight to replying.

It’s infuriating to me that all modern devices require extra steps, just to see messages you’ve received. The way a message would be shown on the lock screen and then be “gone” upon unlocking the screen was infinitely confusing to her.

I’ve never lost patience with my grandma like that. She’s old, a sweet person (most of the time) and perfectly intelligent if you let her be.

In fact when guiding her with tech, I hate the way she calls herself stupid and slow when she makes mistakes.

We just don’t make tech for old people the way we should. There are “accessible” phones but the ones I’ve had experience with are atrocious hackjobs with deal-breaking quirks, when the whole point is to be simple.

It’s not permanent. At least it wasn’t for me.

Ripping youtube or ytm will cause them to ratelimit your ip and/or account (media not available error).

For me, access was restored after 48h.

It was really inconvenient, so I found other ways. A mix of buying whats available on bandcamp, and ripping qobuz using a trial account (which btw is so much faster, ytm was taking days to rip just a couple artists).

I use Symfonium with Jellyfin for music now, if you tag everything with Picard, the “smart” playlist capabilities are competent.

Still pop into ytm to discover new stuff, tho.

Oh I like that

That’d be like paying for internet service being used to screw you.

A usenet account is not in itself proof of anything.

It was probably said as a joke at some point, and just became normal.

The same way I’ve started using irradiate. It’s technically accurate, but normally a word used in much more concerning context.

Hence, funny :D

I’ve also used “nuke” but recently “irradiate” has been funnier.

I wouldn’t mind having that on one of the walls of my apartment.

It is also used for system suspend.

Disabling swap will prevent a system from suspending, which might be fine, but I use it.

And swap isn’t some ancient relic. Sure, my 32GB desktop barely uses it, but my home server benefits greatly from having 64GB of swap in addition to 16GB of physical memory. It may not need to use much more than 16GB at any one time, but shit runs a lot better using a giant SSD swap with how many services I run.

System config is case by case, not “current year”.

@[email protected]

Yeah… I’m not gonna be asking the stuff I already found answers to via an internet search.

I feel like you must have said something dumb online, and gotten absolutely dogpiled for it, to draw this comic.

Ah. Beans.

Those get taken down on a regular basis. Not to mention the atrocious bitrates that is all they can manage.

Meanwhile, a high quality BluRay rip on my drive ain’t going anywhere.

You can’t seed properly.

“Why store anything? Just re-download it from someone who’s still storing it!”

You see the catch 22 here?

There should be a library type called “Home videos and photos” for that.

Huh? Like just sitting there?

Or is it running a heavy background task like trickplay generation? You can disable trickplay (scrobbling previews) if your system isn’t beefy enough to keep up with them.

I run video game servers on my system, and while stream transcodes used to interfere with them, even that was fixed my assigning JF and the games to run on separate CPU cores.

YouTube isn’t a piece of software. It’s a web service.

You can’t “crack” it to trick it into thinking you have a license to use all of its features. The authentication required to access the paid content is a lot more complex than a program running on hardware you can control.

You’re essentially asking the same question as people who want to access netflix for free.

The answer is no. But someone else might’ve ripped the content you want to see and made it available as a torrent.