ThrowAway237s

The 7z file archival utility can not only produce 7z files, but also some other formats including ZIP.

Normally, the ZIP format only supports a time granularity of two seconds. This means ZIP can only store even seconds (0, 2, 4, 6, 8), while odd seconds have to be rounded. But 7z can nonetheless somehow store odd seconds.

How to reproduce:

touch -m -t 202501010000.00 even.txt
touch -m -t 202501010000.01 odd.txt
7z a test.zip even.txt odd.txt
7z l test.zip

How is this possible?

Note that odd seconds still appear rounded up with lsar -L test.zip.

On the Internet, you can find an avalanche of posts of people complaining about accidental refreshes when scrolling up, given that pull-to-refresh causes the same finger movement responsible for scrolling up to trigger a refresh. This is especially true after Google took away the ability to turn it off in Chrome in 2019.

Pull-to-refresh can make sense in a list where new information comes from the top, such as notifications, but it does not make sense in other places such as static websites. All it does is waste battery power and the site owner's bandwidth.

Ideally, apps would have an option to turn pull-to-refresh off. But to the developers who consider pull-to-refresh a "must have" because it is "simply what is expected nowadays", my suggestion is to add a delay of half a second to one second before refreshing. If the user releases releases their finger before that delay, no refresh is triggered.

The visual feedback for this delay could be a pie-like circle. Once the delay is over, it turns into the refresh icon. By this point, the user can refresh by releasing their finger or prevent a refresh by swiping up and releasing.

Some peoples' preference is having no pull-to-refresh at all, including myself, but this would be a good middle-ground. It would mitigate the accidental refresh problem without getting rid of pull-to-refresh entirely.

I hope my suggestion will be considered.

I hereby release this post into the public domain -

It is frustrating when smartphones lack useful features that would be so easy for phone makers to implement. One of those features is a continuous light option in photo mode, not only in video mode. It is something I wish all smartphone cameras had.

Some smartphones such as current Samsung phones only have three flash modes in photo mode: off, auto, on. But some others such as Xiaomi/Poco have a fourth mode: continuous light.

Even though the continuous light is less bright than the short flash, here are reasons it would be useful:

• Eye comfort: A sudden short bright flash in a dark environment could cause eye discomfort.

• Helps adjusting the camera: If you are in a dark environment, a continuous light feature lets you point the camera and focus and adjust exposure without depending on an external light source. With the non-continuous flash, you have to hope that the camera focuses and adjusts exposure correctly. You have no control.

• Speed: No need to focus before capturing a photo. It already focuses while the light is on.

• Avoids disturbance: Unlike a sudden short flash, a continuous light lets you take pictures in a dim room without causing people from the other end of the room looking your way.

• Prevents epilepsy attacks: Some people suffer from epilepsy unfortunately. A continuous light feature would be more convenient for them.

• Illuminated burst shots: Although I rarely ever use burst mode, illuminating burst shots with no external light source is another possibility you get with a continuous light in photo mode.

For a long time, the ability to turn on and off the light while recording a video, not only before it, was missing from most phones. Thankfully, that feature is mainstream by now. I hope this will be next.

For many years, one of the primary selling points of Android smartphones was that no big corporation could gatekeep what you can run on your phones. But these days seem to be numbered.

From PhoneArena (not linked due to being detected as spam):

Google says you should think of the new requirements like checking IDs at the airport.

Not a good comparison. The airplane is not your property but your smartphone is. Google wants to be the gatekeeper to your property.

Side note: don't use the term "sideloading" (this is why I put it in quotation marks). It is the term they invented to discredit any source for software not controlled by them. "Sideloading" is a completely normal thing to do on a computer.

There might be some legitimate reasons for it, but part of me thinks it's to hide the embarrassment from long-unsolved bugs. This is very intransparent.

This bug ticket from 2009 was blocked from public view at some point after 2016. It couldn't have been due to private information. Otherwise it would not have stayed for 7 years.

Even "obsolete" bug tickets should not be removed to maintain a historical record. But Google seems to think otherwise.

Before blocked:

After blocked:

This is the first time I have seen view counts disabled on an article.

If you go to "Tools" and then "Page information" on an article, normally you can see a line that says "Page views in the past 30 days". But for the article on a bad six-letter word (I won't say the word here but you will probably find it after a few guesses), the view counts are disabled and also missing from pageview analysis which shows view counts as graphs. The Wayback Machine shows the view counts were still there as of June 2022, so this is fairly recent. I looked up other bad words and they still have view counts.

Have you seen any other articles with disabled view counts or is this an isolated occurance?

(For clarity: I do not endorse hate. This is about a technical aspect of Wikipedia and a bad word happens to be part of it.)

The YouTube company account left this comment under the rickroll video:

can confirm: he never gave us up

This is the first time I read a comment by the YouTube company account. Is there any other known video commented by them?

Here is how it works: Search for random filenames generated by digital cameras such as MVI_0123 or IMG_0123 or P1000123, Video0010, and some other numbers. This will bring up funny videos from a time people uploaded unedited stuff just for fun. They often didn't even bother changing the file names generated by their cameras.

One I found is , a very old video in which some french students play around in a classroom in the absence of a teacher. In from the same channel, they seem to be playing badminton in the classroom! In , french students dance in a classroom. This is from a golden age before France banned electronics use by students in schools. You won't find such videos from recent years.

In it looks like a man shows how the hair of his girlfriend is raised by the subwoofer of his car. He has many other videos showing off his sound systems.

I am excited to see to see what funny videos you will discover this way!

Dailymotion recently started purging old inactive content, probably to save costs. Unfortunately they don't have the kind of financial backing that YouTube has. This is a reminder to save the content if you value it.

From the terms of use:

You acknowledge that if Your Dailymotion Account remains inactive for a significant period of time, Dailymotion reserves the right to delete, reclaim or remove Your Dailymotion Account in its sole discretion with or without prior notice to You.

In 2014, Android 4.4 KitKat was released. With that, one of the largest selling points of Android, the MicroSD card, was heavily restricted. Apps could no longer normally write to it, except in their specific directories.

Their reasoning from the Android documentation is:

Apps must not be allowed to write to secondary external storage devices [MicroSD and USB-OTG], except in their package-specific directories as allowed by synthesized permissions. Restricting writes in this way ensures the system can clean up files when applications are uninstalled.

Honestly, I would rather have some junk files than not being able to use the MicroSD card and USB OTG properly. Also, if they wanted apps to leave no "junk files" anywhere, they could just as well have applied the same restrictions to internal storage, but for some reason they didn't.

Besides, there are legitimate reasons for apps to leave files behind after uninstallation. If you use a third-party camera like Camera MX, you wouldn't want your pictures to be deleted if you uninstall it.

As a cloud storage provider, Google has a conflict of interest. They would rather have you give your money to them, not SanDisk. So this was probably an anti-competitive move.

Some people say MicroSD cards are not needed anymore with the high internal storage capacities available nowadays. But that is not true. MicroSD is about control, not only storage.

MicroSD cards let you quickly move large amounts of data between devices.

MicroSD cards let you instantly free up space by swapping it with a new card.

MicroSD cards let you access your data if you break your phone or if some update has a bug that makes your phone unuseable. You have the peace of mind that if you break your phone, you can easily access your data.

MicroSD cards are pay-once own-forever. Cloud storage requires perpetual payment and cloud storage providers may be snooping in your photos.

Many sports cameras have MicroSD card slots. If your phone has one, you can watch your sports camera video on your phone without needing bulky adapters.

What if you need more storage than you thought you would need? What if you bought a 64 GB phone but suddenly realized you need more? You don't have to replace your entire phone.

Not many phones have MicroSD card slots nowadays, probably because phone manufacturers fear that people buy cheap off-brand MicroSD cards and then blame the phone for the slow performance. This can be solved with a warning message that tells the user to buy a higher performance card or expect performance losses.

There is no excuse not to fit this tiny slot in a phone. It doesn't take much space but adds lots of usefulness.