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fraggle's posts Back to profile
11 posts total
fraggle

Latest infuriating tech trend

Twitter post by Josh Whiton: A crazy experience — I lost my earbuds in a remote town in Chile, so tried buying a new pair at the airport before flying out. But the new wired, iPhone, lightning-cable headphones didn't work. Strange. So I went back and swapped them for another pair, from a different brand. But those headphones didn't work either. We tried a third brand, which also didn't work. By now the gift shop people and their manager and all the people in line behind me are super annoyed, until one of the girls says in Spanish, "You need to have bluetooth on." Oh yes, everyone else nods in agreement. Wired headphones for iPhones definitely need bluetooth. What? That makes no sense. The entire point of wired headphones is to not need bluetooth. So I turn Bluetooth on with the headphones plugged into the lightning port and sure enough my phone offers to "pair" my wired headphones. "See," they all say in Spanish, like I must be the dumbest person in the world. With a little back and forth I realize that they don't even conceptually know what bluetooth is, while I have actually programmed for the bluetooth stack before. I was submitting low-level bugs to Ericsson back in the early 2000's! Yet somehow, I with my computer science degree, am wrong, and they, having no idea what bluetooth even is, are right.
My mind is boggled, I'm outnumbered, and my plane is boarding. I don't want wireless headphones. And especially not wired/wireless headphones or whatever the hell these things are. So I convince them, with my last ounce of sanity, to let me try one last thing, a full-proof solution: I buy a normal wired, old-school pair of mini-stereo headphones and a lightning adapter. We plug it all in. It doesn't work. "Bluetooth on", they tell me. NO! By all that is sacred my wired lightning adapter cannot require Bluetooth. "It does," they assure me. So I turn my Bluetooth on and sure enough my phone offers to pair my new wired, lightning adapter with my phone. Unbelievable.
I return it all, run to catch my plane, and spend half the flight wondering what planet I'm on. Until finally back home, I do some research and figure out what's going on: A scourge of cheap "lightning" headphones and lightning accessories is flooding certain markets, unleashed by unscrupulous Chinese manufacturers who have discovered an unholy recipe: True Apple lightning devices are more expensive to make. So instead of conforming to the Apple standard, these companies have made headphones that receive audio via bluetooth — avoiding the Apple specification — while powering the bluetooth chip via a wired cable, thereby avoiding any need for a battery. They have even made lightning adapters using the same recipe: plug-in power a fake lightning dongle that uses bluetooth to transmit the audio signal literally 1.5 inches from the phone to the other end of the adapter. In these remote markets, these manufacturers have no qualms with slapping a Lightning / iPhone logo on the box while never mentioning bluetooth, knowing that Apple will never do anything.
From a moral or even engineering perspective, this strikes me as a kind of evil. These companies have made the cheapest iPhone earbuds known to humankind, while still charging $12 or $15 per set, pocketing the profits, while preying on the technical ignorance of people in remote towns. Perhaps worst of all, there are now thousands or even millions of people in the world who simply believe that wired iPhone headphones use bluetooth (whatever that is), leaving them with an utterly incoherent understanding of the technologies involved. I wish Apple would devote an employee or two to cracking down on such a technological, psychological abomination as this. And I wish humanity would use its engineering prowess for good, and not opportunistic deception.
31 May at 19:40 | Open on octodon.social
Show previous comments
Krizzzn

@fraggle ~4 years back I ordered a cheap lightning to 3,5mm adapter on amzn because I l lost mine. It turned out to do exactly the same blouetooth trickery. I never used it.

2 June at 16:23 | Open on muenchen.social
DELETED

@fraggle

I can't get over how condescending this person is towards a group of people who just use whatever they can. Like if they did or didn't know what PrOpEr Bluetooth is, matters in their lives.

2 June at 20:43 | Open on mas.to
drew Mochak

@fraggle Sounds like somebody needs to buy an Android!

2 June at 22:00 | Open on akkomane.social
fraggle

This is the kind of sarcastic documentation I live for

Note: Ubuntu 14.04 decided that any serial device plugged into a post-2014 computer MUST be a modem (a type of hardware used with telephone land lines back in the 20th century), and have a hotplug daemon send random AT commands at any new serial device, which confuses the Numato firmware loader. If you are not particpating in the Great Modem Revival, you need to sudo service modemmanager stop. See here for details.
5 Apr 2023 at 0:52 | Open on octodon.social
adlerweb // BitBastelei

@fraggle No worries. As far as I know the latest version stopped treating all serial ports as modems. Now they think it is a braille terminal.
askubuntu.com/questions/140370

5 Apr 2023 at 20:46 | Open on social.adlerweb.info
fraggle

Lions are known as the "King of the Jungle", a place they definitely live. On an unrelated note I am unilaterally declaring myself champion of my local tennis club, which I definitely am a member of

10 Jan 2022 at 15:50 | Open on octodon.social
fraggle

Doom E1 but every monster has the flag set that makes it not wake up in response to sounds. The WAD title: Knee-Deep in the Deaf

27 Nov 2021 at 15:51 | Open on octodon.social
fraggle

Giant magnet strong enough to lift an aircraft carrier on its way to France, it will form the core of the ITER prototype fusion reactor:

newscientist.com/article/22807

14 Sep 2021 at 17:46 | Open on octodon.social
fraggle

What an insult to George Boole to be abbreviated to bool

20 Feb 2021 at 4:11 | Open on octodon.social
fraggle
fraggle

Indiana Jones and the Search for the Lost Netflix Tab

8 Jan 2021 at 4:10 | Open on octodon.social
fraggle

What the fuck? emoji® is a trademark?

We are emoji® – The Iconic Brand. emoji-company-licensing-titleline emoji.com emotional. multicultural. official. joyful. iconic. Welcome to the emoji company. We are the creator of one the most expressive and influential lifestyle brands in the world. We are the exclusive rights owner of the registered emoji® trademark in up to 30 classes and in more than 100 countries around the globe. Our company developed and owns the world’s largest library of emoji® brand icons protected under applicable copyright laws and available for legal licensing, merchandising, for promotions, events, for marketing and advertisement campaigns.
6 Jul 2020 at 20:09 | Open on octodon.social
Eugen Rochko

@fraggle I don't believe them unless they're a Japanese company, in which case it may be true.

6 Jul 2020 at 20:13 | Open on mastodon.social
fraggle

So it turns out Wikipedia doesn't even have any kind of dedicated page about the Native American Genocide, just a redirect to a three paragraph section of a larger page about genocides. 130 million native people were killed and apparently that's not worthy of much more than a footnote

23 Jun 2020 at 22:46 | Open on octodon.social
fraggle

So they rebooted Sabrina the Teenage Witch, it's no longer a comedy, and Sabrina is the Queen of Hell? Very curious how the boardroom pitch for *that* one went down.

28 Jan 2020 at 2:51 | Open on octodon.social
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