I tried a true dumb phone but was breaking out my laptop too much for everyday tasks (dumb phones these days can do hotspot).

The flip phone I have runs Android 11, so I have the bare minimum necessary chat apps, email, GPS maps, and such. The main draw is that those work well enough, but anything more than that is possible but very frustrating. That’s kind of what the Minimal is about: e.g. yeah, you can watch YouTube videos on it, but you won’t want to.

Then, when the detox period is up and you’re fully off the addiction, you can get the standard phone back.

That’s kinda what I did. I used my flip like a true dumb phone for 30 days as a challenge and then un-dumbed it a little bit back to where only my basic needs were met and nothing more. I assumed I’d have rushed back to my old smartphone, but after breaking a bunch of habits, I found I didn’t really want to. Plus, I really missed T9 texting as weird as that sounds lol.

Yeah the marketing for it was lost on me. I already digitally detoxed last year when I switched to the flip phone I’m currently using, so I ignored the sales pitch and just looked at it from the cool hardware perspective and mostly reasonable price.

Credit where it’s due, though: I tried unsuccessfully to just uninstall the time sink apps from my regular smartphone and always ended up just reinstalling them. It took using a device that couldn’t feasibly run those (plus a weaning-off period) for me to fully let go. Seems like that is what the marketing is trying to target.

I honestly don’t think they’d tell me, but I’d also be interested to know. Fingers crossed they have some stock on hand for the occasional replacement.

It does have a physical keyboard, too. Sadly can’t give it much of a review given the circumstances, but it does have a good feel and seems like it would be pleasant to type on.

Yeah, I have a ticket in with support but haven’t heard back yet. I did ask specifically about the turnaround time for a replacement. Hopefully that’s a reasonable amount of time. I definitely don’t want $400+ tied up until the next batch ships in September.

Mostly the e-ink display and the QWERTY keyboard.

By its nature, it’s not great for doom scrolling, TikTok, or videos (the major time sinks with most phones). Those aren’t my use-cases anyway; I’m more of a reader than a watcher so I figured this would be like a supercharged version of my Kobo (which I love) that has a physical keyboard (which I have missed terribly in smartphones).

Edit: Plus, its 4:3 e-ink display and keyboard just scream “install Termux on me!” Also planned to use it as a nice portable SSH terminal like I used to have back when smartphones had slide-out keyboards.

I’m rocking an aging Cat S22 Flip right now and have been trying to figure out what to replace it with. The Minimal Phone seemed like exactly what I wanted. Sad that it arrived DOA and am probably not going to bother replacing it; waiting weeks for something that arrives DOA is a hard thing to recover from.

Well, I don’t even know what to say to that. Except that in Puerto Rico, a McFlurry it’s called a Señor Flurry.

Just defederated from usagi [dot] reisen just in case federation starts working on that end.

Web app, specifically, or any apps?

I’m also familiar with these three (web) apps:

• Alexandrite: https://alexandrite.app/
• Mlmym (Old Reddit Lookalike): Not sure if there’s an “open” instance of it, but several instances offer it. See https://old.lemmy.world/ for an example (not sure if SJW offers Mlmym or not).
• Voyager: https://vger.app/

Might also also check out https://lemmyapps.com/ which has a good list that you can filter by platform/feature.

Yeah, I found that out when I was using my old phone with T-Mobile. It was listed as supported, and it mostly worked, but there was at least one LTE band it didn’t support.

T-Mobile uses multiple bands in the same area: one higher frequency, higher bandwidth, lower range one for fast data and a lower frequency, lower bandwidth higher range one to fill in the gaps. My phone didn’t support the lower frequency one so I would lose coverage if I was too far away from a window in my house (despite living close to 3 towers).

Not to mention, they can and do reallocate spectrum periodically so while you may be fine for a while, if they reallocate and the device doesn’t support the new bands, you may suddenly lose service.

TL;DR: If it’s listed as Verizon-incompatible, treat it as such.

It should work, technically, but there’s no guarantee. While Verizon shut down their CDMA network in 2023 and everything uses 4G/VoLTE now, it may have other limitations that prevent it from working as expected.

You’d need to make sure the LTE bands it supports are used by Verizon in your area. If it doesn’t support the bulk of Verizon’s bands, you may find yourself (artificially) without coverage.

Verizon may also refuse to allow it if it’s not on their compatibility list (though you can possibly SIM-swap into it from an already activated device). It’s been a while since I dealt with them, but from memory, they’re pretty strict about what devices they allow on the network.

I rarely go to Walmart. This is from the local Kroger (grocery store).

Good. May other retailers and grocery chains follow.

I hate those things - they treat you like a thief by default. I rarely use them and prefer to wait in line for the 1-2 cashiers, but I did the other day because I only had a few bottles of water to check out, and it was unsurprisingly horrible.

Scanned and bagged all my stuff. More slowly than I’d have liked, but otherwise uneventfully. I unpocket my wallet to get my shopper’s card and debit card out. “Oh no, you didn’t!” the machine said as it called for backup. Cue waiting 3-4 minutes for the attendant to get to me.

The machine asked the attendant if I was stealing and showed a replay of what it assumed must be me trying some Ocean’s 11 level of grand larceny. In the video? It was me getting my wallet out to pay.

Absolutely no time was saved. Nothing was more convenient, and to top it off, I was once again accused of stealing by a bathroom scale with delusions of grandeur.

Yeah. I’ll do what I can from mobile

Which alt (s) do you want me to add as a mod for it?

Edit: I added your dubvee alt as top mod and @BoozeOrWater@piefed.social as well.

!dundermifflin@dubvee.org

It does, but I’m talking more about scheduled posts. Many instances require those to be tagged as bots.

Maybe dubvee? That’s kind of the exact vibe we’re fostering.

Site info: https://dubvee.org/site

I’m looking for a instance with…

• the fewest trolls (they’re site-banned upon discovery)
• [the fewest] bots (see rule 2: “No fscking bots”). Some bots are allowed, but only ones that are just a human queuing up things to post on a schedule.
• and anyone that likes to take things to the extremes (See Rule 8)

Cons are that a lot of accounts are banned (rule 8) and we don’t federate with some instances: .ml, grad, hexbear, lemdroid (too much spam originates there). We’re kind-of the opposite of lemm.ee in a lot of ways, so it might be a bit jarring if that’s where you’re coming from.

AFAIK, yes. Though I haven’t tried it with WPA3.

While WEP is dead, you can still use it to capture the WPA/2 handshake and run it through something like John the Ripper to try to recover the passphrase.

Admittedly, I haven’t messed with it in years.

Either way, you still need a wireless adapter that’s capable of promiscuous mode as well as a driver for it that supports packet injection (not sure how rare that is nowadays).

When I was in college, I rented a house just outside my budget and found I couldn’t afford things like cable internet.

I had a wifi->ethernet bridge that was originally to connect my OG Xbox to a wifi network. I also had neighbors with Wifi using WEP encryption. An idea was born.

Was able to use aircrack-ng on my laptop to crack their WEP key in about 15 minutes. Plugged that key into my wifi->ethernet bridge, and then hooked that into my router. Bam, my whole house was online.

That worked for probably a year and a half.

Dude, it’s your platform, Meta.

I was gonna say…“just stop selling them the ad space”. Like, wtf?

Yep, known issue: https://feddit.org/post/13613230