Eric's answer is just don't buy it if you're not happy with the warranty [0].
I'm still willing to take the risk because Pebble smartwatches are the only ones I like and wear. I managed to give my OG Steel another life by replacing the battery. Unfortunately that seems to be harder with the Round 2 as there won't be any screws. I'm still a bit split on whether to change my Time 2 pre-order for a Round 2.
There was a number of games that allowed similar things in these days. My favourite was San Andreas Multiplayer. All you needed was a copy of GTA: San Andreas and download the client, the server was community scripted. This gave birth to a number of unique servers: racing, deathmatch, role play, etc.
Multi Theft Auto (another GTA multiplayer mod, still alive today) allowed for similar things. And so did the source games (Counter Strike, HL2: DM, Day of Defeat, etc.).
Apart from all the awesome annoucements, what really makes me happy is how quickly this went from internet drama to both parties moving towards doing whats best for the community.
Props to Core and Rebble for making Pebble what it is today and casting a bright future for theses watches. Been happily wearing my Pebble Steel for the past month after replacing its battery, looking forward to the PT2!
Also daily driving Bazzite on my gaming laptop, everything is supported out of the box (iGPU / dGPU switcher, fan control, LED keyboard, low/high screen refresh), there's barely any maintenance needed and it runs really smooth. The other day I connected my G27 (wheel, pedals and gear shifter) to play BeamNG, it just worked, no drivers, crapware or configuration needed.
I also use the same machine for dev work and everything works amazingly well.
> Subpar tooling outside of Windows (I'm looking at you C# Dev Kit)
JetBrains Rider is excellent and runs on Windows, Mac and Linux. It has a few Windows only features but nothing important for me, it's the best IDE for C#/.NET you can get on non-Windows platforms imo. And it's free for non commercial use.
Reminds me of my time in Zanzibar, where the internet was censored and some VPN providers (like Proton) weren't working. The authorities then imposed a complete ban of VPNs without permit, with threats of harsh punishment (2000 USD fine or 12m in prison). Exceptions could be made by filling a form justifying the use of the VPN and details about it (for example IP address) but reviews are slow and obscure.
The context with this article is different but the similarities are with how lawmakers misunderstand VPNs. They are an essential tool for workers and there are many other ways to circumvent censorship without VPNs anyway. The irony of this ban is that Zanzibar also wants to attract digital nomads, and the most important tool for them is an unrestricted and reliable internet connection.
My parents are both 70+ and I put them on Linux (Ubuntu and Mint) a decade ago, best decision ever. All the frustration from Windows went away overnight. They are simple computer users - browsing (email, search, booking), opening PDFs, offloading photos from a camera and watching them, editing word documents and spreadsheets, everything just works with no friction. I'm so happy they never got to experience Windows 11.
A few months ago, I switched my aunt (70+ as well) to Linux Mint after repeated issues with Windows 10 and now 11. The last straw was the printer stopped working one day out of the blue. Tired to re-install it for over an hour, impossible! When I installed Mint and looked to add the printer, it was already there and ready to work. And for the user experience, I just sat her in front of the computer and asker her to do various tasks that she would normally do on Windows without any explanation, and she just did them intuitively. She even sent me a message a few days ago to thank me for installing Linux on her machine!
Microsoft keep shooting themselves in the foot with Windows, it's like they don't even care about consumer operating systems anymore. Most popular Linux distros are stable and easy to use, for an average computer user it's perfect. I also daily drive Linux (Bazzite, based on Fedora Silverblue) and it does everything I need - coding, browsing, games, it's all there. I'm never going back to Windows.
Yet again another company hit by the consequences of being out of touch with their customers and fuelled by greed. Thankfully good alternatives exist, otherwise it would have sent a signal to the industry that this is OK.
I might be naive but why isn't any package manager (npm, pnpm, bun, yarn, ...) pushing for a permission system, where packages have to define in the package.json what permission they would like to access? À la Deno but scoped to dependencies or like mobile apps do with their manifest.
I know it would take time for packages to adopt this but it could be implemented as parameters when installing a new dependency, like `npm i ping --allow-net`. I wouldn't give a library like chalk access to I/O, processes or network.
I feel like that would require work from the language side, or at least runtimes. Is there a way of stopping code in one package from, say, hitting the network?
You might be able to do this around install scripts, though disk writing is likely needed for all (but perhaps locations could be controlled).
We've seen a lot of stunningly incompetent attacks that nevertheless get to a lot of people.
Yeah, it needs work from the language runtime, but I think even a hacky, leaky 'security' abstraction would be helpful, because the majority of malware developers probably aren't able to break out of a language-level sandbox, even if the language still allows you to do unsafe array access.
It baffles me that a ton of sites that have been translated into multiple languages still set the language based on IP rather than trying to determine it based on the client settings or defaulting to a set language with an easy way to switch it.
Countless times I landed on websites I use relatively frequently in foreign countries to see them in a language I don't understand, having to rely on my browser's translation functionality to find the language switcher. My operating system + browser are set to English, yet I still get served the one in the language I don't understand.
The worst offenders in my opinion are the ones assuming language based on IP for multi-lingual countries like Switzerland. People living in the French or Italian parts almost always get served the German content. It's bad UX.
But even setting the client right is not really possible. I'm danish. I understand english and german. Norwegian and swedish are similar enough to danish that I can read it without too much trouble. Websites, if they're translated at all, usually offer their native language plus an english translation. So if I visit a website in any language I understand, I'd prefer the original. But for any other language I want the english version.
If I set my accept-language to "da,en", I get a lot of horrible machine translated danish on a lot of websites. If I set it to "en,da", all danish government websites are now english. I can't win.
I'm still willing to take the risk because Pebble smartwatches are the only ones I like and wear. I managed to give my OG Steel another life by replacing the battery. Unfortunately that seems to be harder with the Round 2 as there won't be any screws. I'm still a bit split on whether to change my Time 2 pre-order for a Round 2.
[0] https://bsky.app/profile/ericmigi.com/post/3maubss6mqc25
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