
Fifty years after the fall of Saigon a generation of adoptees wrestle with Vietnam’s legacy of transnational adoption

The rescued Vietnamese infants of Operation Babylift have grown up
Fifty years after the fall of Saigon a generation of adoptees wrestle with Vietnam’s legacy of transnational adoption
Filled with some images as well, I wasn't expecting Verge to do a deep dive on Vietnam of all things
Infinix has launched its next generation of midrange smartphones - the Note 50 series. There are three models differing mostly in performance and camera...
This is a regional release from the brand apparently for Nigerian market only which explains the fact that despite having decent specs( things like 90W charging, 8 GB RAM and 144 Hz high PWM dimming display), it is a 4G phone only.
Though it is gimmicky in some respects. It has a SpO2 sensor apparently built into the back but skips out on basic things like micro SD or 3.5 mm jack (but hey, they do give free USB C headphones; now I can switch from Sennheiser's IE 600 to an upgraded variant :p).
India now has the largest population even though the latest official census data hasn't been done. Either case, unlike China, which has its own local variants of global giants; India usually doesn't. So of course it will be represented in correlation with its growing internet population.
I think there used to be subreddits as well like indianpeoplequora and one dedicated to LinkedIn as well for Indians. Both were fun and frolic usually. The former died out since Quora became a nuthouse in general and most folks abandoned it.
I looked up the original post and it gets worse.
Ideally judiciary should change
What the heck does Judiciary have to do with girls? I think I have an inkling what he wants to say (Indian law in some cases favors the female sex more but that's because conditions forced lawmakers to come up with that way; in some rural areas the plight of females was quite bad and male dominance so much that law had to be slightly biased to provide everyone equality). In some cases, it leads to woman misusing the laws to their own ends (often seen in urban areas) and this guy wants to change the equations.
Eithercase, this is only what I think he might have had in mind because his statements make nothing clear at all. But then, I visited his company page even and the crypto currency laced language dongles my mind.
But in the vast seas of phones, Lineage OS still supports a very small subset. Major players like Google or Samsung are covered but a LOT are skipped.
If one's phone supports Lineage OS, well and good but it's not a fix all
I think even some Chinese OEMs throttle somewhat post 80% (and/or give user the option to limit charging upto that point only). I have a spare entry level Samsung phone. It supports 25 W charging though it gets very slow post 80%. It's not a big deal because the battery capacity is good and with an efficient chipset and 60Hz display, it does way better than my main Realme phone which I need to charge almost twice daily.
Samsung somehow thinks it's okay to charge $499 while delivering no tangible upgrades.
It is a half baked review, IMO. The author says that despite having 45 W charging, the phone takes 75 mins to charge. Samsung really slows down it's charging speeds post 80%, so testing from 0 to 100 is not a good criterion at all.
Plus, he forgets to mention that Samsung skips on a microSD card for A56 which was present on A55. Though in Samsung's favor, they are offering 6 OS upgrades and I doubt any other OEM except Google matches it.
Back in the day, malware makers could only dream of collecting as much data as Gemini does.
For a minute, I thought I was in [email protected] community.
A few years before USB took over the world of peripherals, another upstart standard aimed to do the same thing. And I’m not talking about FireWire.
The LDAC and aptX codecs do support higher bitrates provided both phone and Bluetooth model earbuds support it. Of course, that's not my primary concern. I can hardly hear the difference, even with a proper set of wired IEMs.
That's why I didn't mention all the anticipation over Spotify Hi-Fi which many folks have been waiting for eons.A look at their Forums/Community section and one can see lots of folks giving ideas/venting frustration over lost/non-introduced features that can massively improve usage. Take the queue for example. One presses back and Spotify loops back to the first song BEFORE the queue, no matter how many songs where in there. Other streaming services don't behave in this manner, neither do local music players. Spotify could either tweak it or preferentially, give users the customization/flexibility option.
Of course, I had my fair share of criticism of YT Music as well when I used it from no proper third party clients to a weak Wear OS app to no custom cover images [they have fixed that now which shows that competition is catching up as well].
My experiences with Spotify
I originally used Spotify a long time ago before switching to Premium again from YT Music. I mainly liked the fact that it supported third party clients ( I got a low overhead terminal based client on Linux setup that supports proper keybindings and Spotify connect as well). I also liked the fact that it had a good Wear OS app better than ironically, Google's own offering.
Sadly, my positives end there. The Wear OS itself had a giant bug for me where songs wouldn't add to custom playlists (they would add to liked songs, but not to any custom playlists NOT at the first position). Also, for some reason, there is an outstanding bug on Spotify Forums relating to Bluetooth multipoint that causes playback issues dating back to 2020 which has not been fixed till now.
People wax poetically about Spotify Wrapped and other services like YT Music have copied it in form of Recap but since I use Last.fm ; that did not play a significant factor for me. What I wanted was customizability. Th
I am on Boost. It's a one time purchase for Android Atleast. The dev is same behind Boost for Reddit(now deprecated) and it implements a similar UI as the previous Reddit Client.
Of course, as you said, there are many FOSS solutions as well. I have heard good praise for Voyager and I think Atleast couple of more clients like Jerboa also exist on F-Droid.
The official Reddit app is an exercise in travesty. Any third party client for either Android or iOS in the past was better the official solution is even now. It's slow, bloated and UI looks like it's designed for toddlers in mind.
Rise of cars in India
Pre 1990s, there was supply side limit in my country and long waiting time(like years) for cars. This meant that car ownership flourished in the hands of elite only. Post opening up of economy, owning a car has become a status symbol and even villages, where once the ubiquitous sustainable cycle was the way of life, cars now rule.
Cars choke the street like pollution choke my country's cities. Trains carry hundreds of passengers, buses dozens, autos multiple, but a single vehicle mooching on the street just for sake of a single person. Since parking is a joke, people park their cars anywhere on the side of roads creating more traffic (Yes, it's a developing country). Folks here love to blame shared autos or government(and some criticism is valid) but none wonder about cars. What is the need for a single person driving an SUV that takes nearly half the space of a small bus?
I see old images of Bangalore from 1960 or Delhi from 1930s and it was wide open spaces/streets. Now it i
I have Waterfox setup as an alternative browser but it does not have much stuff to differentiate itself from mainstream FF, as you said.
Discord reminds me they are introducing ads to their mobile platform right?
As for the article, one of the reasons for the demise could be that instead of signing up on dozens different forums, users now just do it on Reddit. I don't appreciate it, because Reddit's conversations only focus on newer active threads and even if one replies to older ones, it does NOT bump them. This isn't the case with forums, where usually you can respond to old conversations and it gets bumped up.
Firefox can do so too with TST or one of the other extensions in the store. Sometimes(atleast for me), they introduce slightly more lag when opening the browser but otherwise, they can do much of the job. I use Tree Style Tabs even though I might not be a power user of it (read:not actively using every nitty gritty of the extension).
I think I remember Opera Mini's layout though I didn't much use it. It was a great alternative especially on mobile more than a decade back.
But yes especially after changing ownership, switching browser engines and years down the line; things have changed.
I think I gave their desktop variant a try sometime ago but didn't find it compelling enough. I haven't even used their Android fork. I keep using a Firefox fork only :p.
I think 4K is only available on Edge on Windows for Netflix. I never bothered with 4K since that's above and beyond my device's native resolution but I didn't have too positive a experience with Netflix, IMO.
I just want to watch something in full HD without intermittent streaming or buffering. Legal streaming services including Netflix treat one like a criminal by forcing them to watch in a Web browser with constant Internet connectivity forced upon them. I can use keyboard shortcuts to increase playback speed by 0.1x each time in mpv, does Netflix allow me to do the same? No, instead it gives me a dusty experience.
I gave Vivaldi a try way back in its early days when I was on Windows. IIRC, it was bundled with lots of features even then and I think, for some weird reason, had Philips Hue Lighting support integrated (unless I am really confusing it with something other, this is multiple years old experience of mine).
I used it as my main browser for Atleast couple of months then.
I am surprised they abandoned it. It was originally launched as a macOS variant only, correct? And Mac users praised it a lot, on the Web. I thought with that level of traction they will keep going.
In contrast, there are projects that have a much lower user base though vocal (read: Pale Moon) and despite struggling with half of the available modern Web pages, those projects still keep going.
Many sites have become worse. I think stuff like Cnet, PCMag (which still has a digital magazine I think)were much better in the previous era.
I will give Zen browser a try. As for Netflix, I only used it for a one month since it's quite expensive in my country and it crawled like anything on Firefox for Linux. I was getting consistent 720p video but not sure about full HD. Eventually I canceled it.
If you're finally ready to leave Chrome behind, these are my top recommendations and when to use them.
The title is err, not correct because the top 2 alternatives Opera and Arc are based on Chromium engine. I have seen tons of people swear by Arc, but I am seriously asking (since as a Linux user I can't use it), how much good can a browser be in this day and age if ultimately it's ad blocking breaks and it will since Manifest v2 will go soon(unless Arc folks have a solution for it)
The rest alternatives are Firefox, Zen (FF fork but honestly Atleast this was something new I learned from this article) and Tor (which is weird since it is not meant for normal web browsing and using it will not only be slow but put additional strain on the nodes, correct me if I am wrong).
Weird Keyboard Layouts: A Showcase
An old article but still atleast introduced me to one really weird Keyboard layout
5 reasons why Qi2 Android phones haven't arrived yet
Qi2 was announced in January 2023, but mainstream Android phones haven't adopted it. Here are five reasons why brands have hesitated so far.
Google's Mike Abary talks to Android Authority about the company's plans to unseat competition and make inroads in India's premium smartphone market.
The market is India. 4 out of top 5 phone OEMs are Chinese in origin (last I saw data) with other being Samsung.
Google does not have the same brand value as Apple in India, despite still somehow expecting people to pony up in the same price range. Add to it their custom heating Tensor chips in the past years in a hot climate like India and it doesn't make for a good showcase. Brands like Nothing have made faster inroads in the Indian market both by local production and complete array of their products available from launch time.
Never Forgive Them
In the last year, I’ve spent about 200,000 words on a kind of personal journey where I’ve tried again and again to work out why everything digital feels so broken, and why it seems to keep getting worse, despite what tech’s “brightest” minds might promise. More
Samsung's new phones deliver on cameras and battery life, but AI is finally finding its footing, too.
Too bad S25 base model still has only 25W charging support and a relatively short battery capacity of 4000mAh
The scourge of subscriptions
Even simple apps nowadays have become subscription only. Whilst I used to pirate most stuff in the past, but if the app in question is a small one time purchase, it's not bad considering you don't need to sideload updated apk's from Mobilism each time a new version is released (looks at some great cheap apps like Pano Scrobbler).
However, the trend has shifted towards the other side with everything from video recording apps(AZ Recorder), Weather apps(Today Weather) and Battery monitoring apps(Battery guru) offering subscriptions. Some have a high one time purchase option but some like the latter don't.
Battery Guru is an example of enshittification. If phones still came with removable batteries and companies supported them, then for the price of say, a 4 year subscription to the app, I could have just gotten a new replaceable battery. It's not like the app will magically stop my battery from degrading.
Whilst I have done piracy ( and still pirate stuff like films because no al
Effects of non regional pricing and piracy
Some companies, most notably Google, have regional specific pricing for their products. So for example, YouTube will be significantly cheaper in India, let's say, than in the US because former's purchasing power is much lower.
However, not all companies do so and that is a prime motivator towards piracy, even for customers who want to go the legal route. There are many examples from niche ones like the streaming app History Hit to mainstream newspapers like New York Times.
I would like to focus on the latter. It's no secret that it's news app in moddable form is easily available though the games section is still off limits, I think. Still, I went to see how much their legit variant cost in my country, India. For first year, it was INR 1000, not bad, considering that rival newspapers in my country have a similar structure. The small thing is that after first year, it will jump eight fold. So, a subscription to a newspaper will cost annually more than any streaming service I c
Google helped pioneer widgets with Android but has neglected them since. Even Google's iOS widgets are better than their Android counterparts.
Xiaomi 15 Pro review - One of the most efficient flagship smartphones thanks to a special display
The OPPO Find X8 Pro takes longer to charge than it's predecessors but that should be good news for long-term battery health.
From huge performance gains to much-improved fingerprint scanners, here's what we expect from flagship Android phones in 2025.
I was excited to dive into my new smartphone only to once again waste precious time uninstalling bloatware before I could enjoy it.