ThrowAway237s

Sam Tucker (SAMTIME) is a comedian who makes parodies of tech company spokespeople excusing their anti-consumer practices.

In the video "Android is losing a big feature" (video ID dfccCB2Vz-M), Sam used his comedic style to step on Google's decision to restrict "sideloading" (APK installation), one of the primary selling points of Android smartphones over Apple iPhones. He also exposed how Play Integrity API restricts freedom.

That was too much for YouTube and they took it down. But you can find it outside of YouTube if you look for it.

The freedom afforded by "sideloading" allows people to use applications not available in the Play Store. Some types of apps are not allowed by Google, for example YouTube downloaders that would compete with YouTube's paid premium subscription, but can also be taken down by their author. A famous example is Flappy Bird.

Thanks to APK files, Android users could play Flappy Bird even after its author took it down from the Play Store, while iPhone users were out of luck and had to resort to using garbage web-based remakes that require Internet connection.

Another use for "sideloading" is to go back to older versions of apps. Sometimes, updates make things worse. APK files allow installing and distributing older versions that are superior. One such example was ES File Explorer. It turned into adware but APK files allowed installing pre-adware versions.

• Edit 2025-10-28: Added video ID.

I hereby release this post into the public domain under CC0 1.0.

From what I understand, 7z can do everything the others can do, so what is the point of having those separate editions?

In June 2016, Instagram changed their API in a way that restricted access to third-party search engines and web viewers.

This was bad because back then, Instagram's built-in searching capabilities were severely limited. You could only search user names and single hash tags, but not more advanced things like descriptions, multiple hashtags, and date ranges. I don't know if they added it by now because I haven't used Instagram for several years.

Third-party tools like Hashtag Pirate had searching capabilities well beyond Instagram's built-in searching tool. From what I remember, Hashtag Pirate allowed filtering by type (photo or video) and date range, and allowed filtering by multiple hashtags. There was also a search engine which could search descriptions but I don't remember its name.

Third-party viewers like Websta.me, Enjoygram (later renamed to Pikore), InstaGravity, Instaliga (the few I remember), Gramfeed, Mixagram (mentioned in Mac Rumors article) also were usually more lightweight than Instagram's own website, therefore working more smoothly on older devices. Instagram's own website always relied on heavy JavaScript and consumed lots of memory.

Some also showed details about a post that were not shown by the Instagram website, like the exact date a post was uploaded. Instagram itself used to show "weeks ago" only, but they added exact dates in the late 2010s I think.

Third-party viewers also featured different layouts that may be preferrable to Instagram's own web interface. For example, Websta.me had a side-by-side view, meaning it used to show pictures on the left column and description+comments on the right column, and you could change the view ( I found in the archives).

The API was also used by bulk exporting tools like InstaPort.me, which also ceased to work.

I hereby release this post into the public domain under .

Recently, a friend of mine had a "disliked videos" playlist removed from his channel for allegedly endangering children, even though it contains nothing that would endanger children.

The channel has no videos and was purely used for commenting and playlists.

If all playlists must be child-friendly, they would also need to remove all sexual education playlists and many music video playlists, including every playlist with "Wrecking Ball" in it. Funnily enough, Wrecking Ball appeared in Rewind 2013.

It seems any kind of public disliking is unwelcome on YouTube. They removed the public dislike count and they made clear they want no dislike playlists either.

For whichever reason, YouTube does not like people having local copies of videos. From YouTube help center article 3037019:

In order to protect the YouTube community, we may prevent signed-out users from accessing YouTube videos when they’re attempting to download material for offline use.

Protect against what? What's wrong with offline use?

They word it as if it is a nefarious thing to do. In fact, they should be glad about it because it saves them bandwidth. If people watch from a local file rather than streaming from YouTube each time, it reduces the server usage at YouTube.

YouTube Premium members are graciously allowed to store videos on their devices for 29 days, after which they are forcibly deleted. The videos are stored in a locked-in location inaccessible from file managers and in a proprietary format that is unplayable by anything besides the YouTube app.

At the end of the video "Google is locking down Android" by Mental Outlaw, he explains that there are legitimate reasons for having local copies of videos, such as an extended period with no Internet access, using Creative Commons media, and preserving history.

YouTube lets people publish original content under a Creative Commons license that explicitly allows reuse, yet does not want people to download the same. They also don't allow videos mentioning any tools for saving videos. (Example: video ID xkyqFiUrhTc.)

My closest guess is that YouTube wants to force people to watch advertisements or pay for YouTube premium.

When YouTube ceases operations, lots of Internet history will be destroyed.

Quote by Karl Voit:

Whenever I tell people that we need to plan for the day when YouTube goes offline, I mostly receive weird reactions. It seems to be the case that people can't think of YouTube being gone. Unfortunately, I'm convinced that most people will face the day when we lose this enormous library of videos.

(No URLs due to possible spam filtering.)

I hereby release this post into the public domain under CC0 1.0. Quotes excluded.

# MonthFolders: organizes files by monthly directories. CC0 1.0 public domain.

filecount=$(find -maxdepth 1 -type f |wc -l)
if [ $filecount -eq 0 ]; then
	echo "This directory contains no files."
	return 1; # close script because nothing to do.
fi

startyear=$(find -maxdepth 1 -type f -printf '%TY\n' |sort |head -n 1)
endyear=$(find -maxdepth 1 -type f -printf '%TY\n' |sort |tail -n 1)
yearcount=0 # initialize variable
yearcount=$startyear


if [ $filecount -eq 1 ]; then
	echo "This directory contains one file from the year $startyear."
elif [ $startyear -eq $endyear ]; then
	echo "This directory contains $filecount files from the year $startyear."
else
	echo "This directory contains $filecount files between the years $startyear and $endyear."
fi
	
while [ $yearcount -le $endyear ]; do
	# skip years with no files
	while [ $(find -maxdepth 1 -type f -newermt $yearcount-01-01 -not -newermt $((yearcount+1))-01-01 |wc -l) -eq 0 ] && [ $yearcount -lt $endyear ]; do
		yearcount=$(($yearcount+1));
	done
	
	printf "Organizing files from $yearcount..." # later completed with "Done."
	month_processed=1 # reset to January
	while [ $month_processed -le 11 ]; do
	# pad 0-9 with zero.
		monthcount=$month_processed
		nextmonth=$(($month_processed+1));
		if [ $month_processed -eq 9 ]; then monthcount=09; fi
		if [ $month_processed -lt 9 ]; then 
			monthcount=$(printf 0$monthcount);
			nextmonth=$(printf 0$nextmonth);
		fi 
		count_files_in_month=$(find -maxdepth 1 -type f -newermt $yearcount-$monthcount-01 -not -newermt $yearcount-$nextmonth-01 |wc -l)
		# Only create directory if files from that month actually exist.
		if [ $count_files_in_month -gt 0 ]; then
			printf " $monthcount"
			if [ ! -d "$yearcount-$monthcount" ]; then mkdir "$yearcount-$monthcount"; fi
			find -maxdepth 1 -type f -newermt $yearcount-$monthcount-01 -not -newermt $yearcount-$nextmonth-01 -exec mv -n "{}" "$yearcount-$monthcount" \;;
		fi
		month_processed=$(($month_processed+1));
	done
	# Separate code for December because there is no thirteenth month.
	count_files_in_month=$(find -maxdepth 1 -type f -newermt $yearcount-12-01 -not -newermt $(($yearcount+1))-01-01 |wc -l)
	if [ $count_files_in_month -gt 0 ]; then
		printf " 12"
		if [ ! -d "$yearcount-12" ]; then mkdir "$yearcount-12"; fi
		find -maxdepth 1 -type f -newermt $yearcount-12-01 -not -newermt $(($yearcount+1))-01-01 -exec mv -n "{}" "$yearcount-12" \;;
	fi
	
	printf " Done.\n"
	yearcount=$(($yearcount+1));
done

Pretty much all large VPN providers (Nord VPN, Express VPN, Private Internet Access, ...) have excluded their public-facing websites from archival.

It's not like their company websites contain any private information. It's mostly blog posts and help pages. What is it that bothers them about having their public company websites archived?

exFAT by Microsoft is the successor of FAT32. Its primary improvement is that it gets rid of the 4 GiB file size limit.

But a cross-platform file system without 4 GiB limit already existed, the Universal Disk Format (UDF). UDF doesn't just work on optical discs but also flash storage and hard disks.

exFAT was patent-encumbered until Microsoft graciously lifted it in 2019, so why didn't the camera industry just agree on UDF and cut Microsoft out of the equation?

From my experience, some video cameras simply split video files anyway once they reach 4 GiB, so FAT32 would work just fine, but exFAT was made the default for SD XC (64 GB or more).

It took until the 2020s for exFAT to arrive in stock Android for external storage. How come Google didn't just use UDF for all that time?

UDF (Universal Disk Format) existed before exFAT, was supported cross-platform (Windows + MacOS + Linux), had no patent restrictions, and supports files above 4 GiB. Why not just use that instead of waiting for Microsoft to graciously lift restrictions on exFAT?

Mittelgroßer Komödiant in den 2010ern. Hatte einen ähnlichen Stil wie Julien Bam. Leider sind alle alten Videos weg.

• Kanal:

• Kanal-ID:

Heiko war auch Mitbetreiber von Mitbetreiber von .

For now they graciously let you turn it off (using chrome://flags#enable-gesture-navigation), but remember what happened in 2019 with Chrome 75? Google took away the "disable-pull-to-refresh-effect" flag in chrome://flags that let you turn off pull-to-refresh, and then refused to reinstate it even after loads of complaints.

The same fate awaits history navigation with gesture.

There is no doubt that Google will make that mandatory too. Then you will not only refresh accidentally by swiping down, but go back to the last page accidentally by swiping right. So before each swipe, you are forced to check that you are not at the top or the left to avoid accidentally triggering that gesture.

Gesture-based navigation has no place in a web browser. It does more harm than good. It is not innovative. It is annoying.

Kiwi Browser actually had this in 2018, but Kiwi thankfully let you turn it off. I doubt Google will for long after what they did with pull-to-refresh.

If you don't want to be plagued by accidentally triggering gestures, switching to Firefox or Samsung browser is the only solution. Because Google won't listen.

Another example of something taken away (in the same year, 2019) is enable-accessibility-tab-switcher, which let you view tabs in a single-column list with longer titles and URLs, an option natively provided by Samsung Internet. Some people preferred it over the two-column tab viewer because it loaded faster, previewed URLs, and showed more of the title. It lacked thumbnail previews, but that's not important to some people.

If you stick to Chrome, don't get comfortable with anything inside chrome://flags. Know that it can be taken away without warning.

Answers to:

You must have "date" or "evidence" somewhere in your post body.

Date: Likely 2026 or 2027.

Evidence: Removal of option to turn off pull-to-refresh, refusal to reinstate it after complaints.

I release this post into the public domain, CC0 1.0.

• Titel: Rebekah Wing muss gelöscht werden

• Veröffentlicht am 1. August 2018

• Ursprüngliche URL:

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.

In the late 2010s, many German swimming pools stopped allowing photography and filming. Until the 2000s, no one was bothered by appearing on personal photos and videos people made to preserve the good memories, and videos from that time are still there such as , so something changed about the culture. It could be that people are unhappy with their looks.

Ironically, exemptions are made for the press media even though their pictures are seen by thousands of people or more, unlike pictures and videos people made for families and friends.

While Microsoft shut down Skype this May, they said they will keep user data until the end of this year so anyone who wants it can get it until then. But it seems the only way to access this data is through a Microsoft account.

How to access a standalone Skype account that is not associated with a Microsoft account? Because it was created before Microsoft accounts were required to use Skype.

There is a worldwide trend in an increase of the ages of consent. By 2050, it will probably be at least 20 in most, if not all of the EU and USA. As South Korea has shown, a sudden jump in age of consent is possible. And alcohol drinking age in the USA is 21, so this is not unthinkable.

I am not here to determine whether this is good or bad, only to make a prediction based on recent patterns.

It doesn't seem to me that YouTube in its current form is sustainable indefinitely. The first sign for the crumbling foundations of YouTube will be purging masses of old content (like Dailymotion did recently), and it will probably be paywalled. I am surprised even it lasted as long as it did.

We might be in some kind of golden age without realizing it.

As Karl Voit once said:

Whenever I tell people that we need to plan for the day when YouTube goes offline, I mostly receive weird reactions. It seems to be the case that people can't think of YouTube being gone. Unfortunately, I'm convinced that most people will face the day when we lose this enormous library of videos.

(No source link due to filters but you can find it if you want to.)

Nuke Bizzle bragged about insurance fraud in his "EDD" music video, which landed him in prison.

He will make a big comeback.