IcedRaktajino

Android 12 is where they started making everything worse with the quick action and settings redesign, and it's been going downhill since.

After dying a painful death at the hand of the iPhone’s revolutionary capacitive touchscreen, the QWERTY smartphone is rising up from the graveyard this year.

Whether it’s nostalgia for a physical keyboard, frustration at iOS’s ever-worsening software keyboard, or just plain boredom with glass slabs, companies are rebooting QWERTY phones this year for some reason.

At CES 2026:

• Clicks, the company behind the Clicks keyboard case and the new Power Keyboard, announced plans to sell the Communicator, a “second phone” with a QWERTY keypad
• Unihertz also teased a new phone with a physical keyboard. The Titan 2 Elite seems to be a less gimmicky version of the Titan 2, which itself was a BlackBerry Passport knockoff but with a bizarre square screen on the backside.

[T]wo QWERTY phone announcements in this still very new year suggest there may be some kind of trend. Maybe after 19 years of the iPhone and touchscreens defining the mobile experience, it’s time to go back to the physical keyboard and its more tactile typing.

My electric rate got hiked again.

I'm already planning a ~7 KW solar setup in the spring but I may see if I can go bigger and sooner.

The line between a Linux user and a Linux power user is a bit gray, and a bit wide. Most people who install Linux already have more computer literacy than average, and the platform has long encouraged experimentation and construction in a way macOS and Windows generally aren’t designed for. Traditional Linux distributions often ask more of their users as well, requiring at least a passing familiarity with the terminal and the operating system’s internals especially once something inevitably breaks.

In recent years, however, a different design philosophy has been gaining ground. Immutable Linux distributions like Fedora Silverblue, openSUSE MicroOS, and NixOS dramatically reduce the chances an installation behaves erratically by making direct changes to the underlying system either impossible or irrelevant.

SteamOS fits squarely into this category as well. While it’s best known for its console-like gaming mode it also includes a fully featured Linux desktop, which is a major part of its appeal and the reason I bought a Steam Deck in the first place. For someone coming from Windows or macOS, this desktop provides a familiar, fully functional environment: web browsing, media playback, and other basic tools all work out of the box.

As a Linux power user encountering an immutable desktop for the first time, though, that desktop mode wasn’t quite what I expected. It handles these everyday tasks exceptionally well, but performing the home sysadmin chores that are second nature to me on a Debian system takes a very different mindset and a bit of effort.

The project is still cool, but it's a custom Android launcher with an LCARS theme with the actions being handled by Tasker.

What I really want, and if anyone has any links to resources please share, is an LCARS interface for HomeAssistant. Technically HA could be plumbed into this project, but I'd prefer a web UI to a custom launcher so I could use it in multiple rooms without having to custom-configure specific tablets.

First impressions with the T1000e weren't great, TBH, but I finally got it going and think I'm going to like it compared to my old Heltec V3.

Initial Setup

The erase and flashing procedure on these is a lot more involved than with its ESP32-based cousins. Technically speaking, it's easier since you basically just drag/drop a firmware file like you're copying it to a flash drive, but there's also a lot more clicking around, mode switching, and a separate erase procedure. Not a complaint, just different and annoying. On the plus side, this model is able to update the firmware over Bluetooth in the app so that's a plus going forward.

For whatever reason, it just would not load my imported channel config either from my provisioning script or from restoring a backup. The imported config also seemed to keep disabling Bluetooth on it which was frustrating. Finally just did it manually in the app, and it finally worked after a couple of factory resets.

I had to play around with it a bit to get the GPS and light/temperature sensors working, but those are reporting nicely now.

Hands-On

Bought a couple of extra charging adapters since they don't use USB-C and decided to 3D print a little cradle to drop it into.

I'm definitely going to miss being able to send canned messages from the device itself. My old EDC node didn't have a rotary encoder, but the 2.7 firmware added the ability to use the single button to send them which was awesome since I never liked carrying my larger nodes that had the rotary encoders.

Other than that, I think this is my new favorite thing.

Battery Life

Cannot yet say, but probably a lot better than my Heltec. This one has a 700 mAh battery and most of the reviews I've read say it gets a day or two per charge. That beats the ~18 hours my Heltecs get on a 2,000 mAh battery.

Bonus

I also like that it has not one but two pop culture references built in:

First, it looks a lot like the locator card that saved M's ass in "The World is Not Enough". And it has GPS, so it kind of is an IRL version of that prop.

Locator Card Movie Prop

Also, the notification tone is the Cisco ringtone better known as the "CTU Ringtone".

"Old Reddit" was fine when it was all there was but the "new" UI was better and easier to follow. When I say "new" I mean circa 2020-2023 not whatever they're doing now which looks awful. And by better I mean the look, feel, and UX and ignoring the shit video player and tracking code.

cross posted from https://lemmy.world/post/41385738

So I've always recommended the Heltec kits as a good entry-level kit but I can't anymore due to issues with the USB->UART chips in them. What I originally chalked up as a mild annoyance has now proven to be a safety concern.

I've had 11 of them total. Of those, two had the USB->UART chip fail within the first week. Everything else still worked, so I was able to repurpose them as "repeaters" and manage them over LoRa. Firmware updates were a brute since I had to crack them open and use an external serial connection, but, still, I was willing to continue recommending them as entry level kits.

Cut to today and that is no longer the case after my everyday carry node decided to self destruct in a way that I am very fortunate wasn't a fire.

I woke up and noticed the charge light was kicking on and off in a weird cadence. Clicked the button to see if it was even running (it was) but the battery was down to 30%. It was also hot. Very hot. It's uptime was only about 5 minutes which was also odd.

So I unplug it and crack open the case. Everything on the board looks normal, so I pull the battery and hook it into USB. As I feared, it didn't enumerate at all. Another one down, I sighed. But then things got worse. As I was holding the board in my hand (still connected over USB), I notice my finger started to get painfully hot. The hot component was the USB-UART chip.

On a hunch, I hooked my USB-C power meter inline with the cable, put it back on the USB charger it normally uses, and lo and behold, it was showing 9V. To rule out the USB charger, I tested it with another one of my Heltecs with a dead UART chip, and it was a steady 5V as expected.

So my best guess is the USB-UART failed in such a way that the data pins triggered the wall charger to go into quick charge mode and destroyed it with an over voltage. I'm genuinely surprised the battery didn't catch on fire as hot as that chip was getting since it was right on top of the battery inside the case.

Basically just five seasons of the cast getting together, having drinks, and playing poker more or less in character. Call it "Galaxy [Class] Series of Poker". TV gold.