CalcProgrammer1

While I'm not a fan of advertising or marketing in general, brands having a presence on the Fediverse would be great for Fediverse adoption, and sometimes complaining about a brand on social media is needed to get proper customer service in this world of AI and bot controlled customer service channels. I can see this being a good thing, and there are some brands/companies I would likely follow. I already do follow a few who are on Mastodon, such as Framework, Pine64, and Raspberry Pi.

As a user and not as a government agent, why should I care? If anything, having a foreign government hoard my data and spy on me is better than the government that actually has jurisdiction over me. If I were posting things critical of my own government I would rather have a foreign government hoard that data than my own government. There's a lot more of a chance that US data hoarding leads to action against US citizens than Chinese data hoarding.

I don't see how this benefits average Americans in any way. This helps the government and corporations.

I have some of those tiny keyboards, but the PinePhone keyboard case is far more convenient to use as a mini on the go PC than a separate keyboard. If such an all in one option existed for more powerful hardware it would be amazing. I love the idea of a phone that doubles as a true pocket laptop including connectivity options.

I would like a phone that has a removable battery, user replaceable screen, and expandable storage. I think Framework would do well to add one or two of their modular slots on the phone since phones already have USB-C support. I would also love to see a phone keyboard similar to the PinePhone keyboard case but using USB-C instead of I2C. Such a case could also incorporate a USB-C dock, providing more Framework module slots or at least additional USB ports, video outputs, an extended capacity battery (using USB-PD to charge itself as well as the phone), and of course also being a tiny keyboard clamshell that fits in your pocket. It could also be nice if the phone could easily detach from said case for taking calls, as the PinePhone keyboard replaces the back cover and does not separate easily when needed.

A Framework phone with 2 modular Framework sockets would be amazing. I don't care if it's thick. Make it repairable and support Linux Phone OSes like postmarketOS and I would absolutely buy it.

Hopefully more cooperating with than competing against. If NVK is good, Linux users will buy more NVIDIA cards. I don't see NVIDIA being too opposed to that. Also, if you look at the Mesa merge requests for NVK, there have been a few with @nvidia.com emails. At least a few NVIDIA people are following and contributing even if only very little (one MR I saw was regarding an unknown bit that turned out to be an NVIDIA-internal test environment flag). Also, NVIDIA hired the former nouveau kernel-side maintainer and he just published a large nouveau patch set. I really hope we're seeing NVIDIA move towards acceptance of the open driver stack even if they continue to develop and push their proprietary one. Given their focus on AI and compute maybe they see letting Mesa handle graphics as less of a concern now. Maybe they want to get everything running on an upstreamable kernelspace driver. Who knows, but it's definitely looking better than it ever has for them.

It would be nice if the major controller APIs used for feeding input into games had native gyro support. I think that's the biggest limitation with gyro on the Steam Deck - you almost always have to use it to emulate some other input method (mouse or joystick). Almost certalnly because most games use Microsoft's XInput and that's based around the Xbox controller and its lack of gyro. I know there was a gyro server to feed Steam Deck raw gyro data directly into Yuzu and it made the gyro parts of BotW playable, but the interface used didn't seem like much of a standard outside a few emulators.

Squeekboard is where it's at. By far my favorite onscreen keyboard for Linux and mainly because you can easily create your own layouts using .yaml files. I'm tired of virtual keyboards that omit keys needed for development and terminal use or shove them off to separate tabs. My custom Squeekboard layout fits my needs exactly and I'm pretty fast at typing on it (typing this on it now). I wish it were usable outside of Phosh, though tbf I haven't tried. Between GNOME Mobile, KDE Plasma Mobile, and Phosh (Squeekboard), I choose Phosh primarily because of how much I like Squeekboard.

Except that in the case of VGA (and DVI, HDMI, and DisplayPort) the i2c interface is intended for use over the cable. All of those ports have a pair of i2c pins and corresponding wires in their cables. The i2c interface is used for DDC/EDID which is how the computer can identify the capabilities and specifications of the attached display. DDC even provides some rarely-used control functionality. Probably the most useful of which is being able to control the brightness of the display from software. I use the ddcci module on Linux and it lets me control my desktop monitor brightness the same way a laptop would, which is great. I have no idea why this isn't widely used.

Edit:

This i2c interface is widely used to control the lighting on modern graphics cards that have RGB lighting. We've spent a lot of time reverse engineering these chips and their i2c protocols for OpenRGB. GPU chips usually have more i2c buses than the cards have display connectors, so the RGB chip is wired to one of the unused buses. I think AMD GPUs tend to have 8 separate i2c buses but most cards only use 4 or 5 of them for display connectors. There is also an i2c interface present on RAM slots normally used for reading the SPD chip that stores RAM module specifications, timings, etc. This interface is also used for RAM modules with controllable RGB lighting.

Yeah, the lack of proper discoverability on i2c truly sucks. You have to just poke random addresses and hope for the best to see if an i2c device exists on the bus. It's a great standard but I wish it would get updated with some sort of plug and play autodetection feature. Standardized device PID/VID system like USB and PCI would be acceptable or a standardized register that returns a part string. Anything other than blindly poking registers and hoping you're not accidentally overvolting the CPU or whatever because the register on your expected device overlaps with the overvolt the CPU register on the same address of a different device.

I use a HYTE CNVS deskpad and a Razer Firefly hard surface mousemat. I've found I prefer hard surface mats over cloth ones. I also really like the Razer Mamba Hyperflux, but they don't make it anymore. It's a Firefly mouse mat that wirelessly powers the included mouse and it's a really neat design, though doesn't work well if your desk has metal supports under where the mousemat goes. For that reason I use it at work, not at my gaming setup.

Watched this the other day, great documentary! I played Oregon Trail 2 in school in the 90's and we ended up getting it for our home PC. Nice to learn the history behind the game in such detail.