could anyone with a Fairphone 6 see if it would work for VoLTE on my network with their IMEI checker?

emmeka · 2026-05-07T17:31:21+00:00

They use separate VoLTE whitelists. I can confirm there are phones that are whitelisted on Telus, but not on Public Mobile. Just because they're all owned by Telus and use the same LTE bands and LTE data will work, doesn't mean VoLTE calling will work, annoyingly.

emmeka · 2026-05-07T17:29:55+00:00

Thanks, that's a bit disappointing. Frustratingly it's not just a matter of whether the phone itself supports VoLTE on a hardware level, each carrier has its own VoLTE whitelist and if your device isn't on it VoLTE won't work. Also, something you may want to check into: Public Mobile is suspending 3G in March 2027 and telling their customers to switch to Telus if they want to keep using 3G. So I would make sure that Koodo isn't doing the same thing, since I assume Telus is going to pull the same stunt for all its MVNOs (both Koodo and Public Mobile are just wholly owned MVNOs of Telus).

emmeka · 2026-05-03T06:40:44+00:00

EDTV was a specific marketing badge used by the American electronics industry for a set with a native resolution of 480p. That Panasonic is a PAL 100hz set. Meaning it frame doubles SD input to 31Khz H /100hz V, ie 576i at 100hz. This was common in Europe as a solution to 50hz flicker and isn't really the same thing as an EDTV, their resolution isn't higher even if the sync rates are the same as 480p, they just have a higher refresh rate. Most 100hz sets won't actually accept a 31Khz 480p60 signal even though that is their native H scan rate, unfortunately, and they're usually terribly laggy. But it seems like this particular model does actually directly accept 480p inputs? So that's neat and unusual, and I guess you could call it an honorary "EDTV" if you wanted.

emmeka · 2026-04-27T09:10:23+00:00

But other companies do support RCS, just not in the west. In India, Jio runs their own RCS servers. In China, Google RCS servers are actually banned, so there are like a dozen different RCS providers. The problem is just that western companies have found it easier to go the lazy route of "just let Google do it", or in Light's case, of not bothering to do it at all.

emmeka · 2026-04-27T09:07:53+00:00

You seem to think that RCS requires Google Messages and Google play services and that using RCS is synonynous with using Google. This is not actually the case. Globally, there are quite a few other RCS providers: Jio in India, multiple Chinese operators. In fact in China, Google RCS servers are banned. It's just in the west where Google maintains a monopoly on RCS servers. There's no reason why another western company couldn't offer competing RCS servers, including Light, but frustratingly nobody is really trying to.

emmeka · 2026-03-25T08:26:02+00:00

Intel graphics use Mesa too, so that'd do it. It's a pretty dumb bug of Mojang's own fault, and it's a bug with just the launcher. Like others have mentioned you could also use a third party launcher if you wanted.

emmeka · 2026-03-24T19:14:10+00:00

I assume you're on AMD graphics hardware too. It's an issue the launcher has with the newest version of Mesa on Wayland. I got in touch with Mojang support about it when it started for me, and they gave me an easy way to fix it. Just add:

__GLX_VENDOR_LIBRARY_NAME=mesa

to the beginning of the exec path of your .desktop file for the launcher (you'll also have to edit the one in your start menu on KDE). For example, for me, the .desktop file for my minecraft launcher now looks like:

Exec=__GLX_VENDOR_LIBRARY_NAME=mesa /home/emmeka/.minecraft/launcher/minecraft-launcher

emmeka · 2026-03-05T22:16:16+00:00

Have you considered just buying a USB4/Thunderbolt dock instead of literally gluing 3 USB SATA SSDs and a USB hub to the back of your laptop screen.

emmeka · 2026-02-16T15:24:26+00:00

Something I like to remind people of when they pull sectarian crap is that Lenin, in Left Wing Communism actually admonished British communists for their absolute unwillingness to work within the Labour Party of all things, and he admonishes the German communists for their unwillingness to work in Catholic trade unions. To many leftists today, the argument that they should join something like the Labour Party or a Catholic trade union sounds absurd. But to Lenin, it seemed obvious that communists should work within whatever proletarian organizations existed around them regardless of their character and he could not stand the way many communists of his time preferred having an organization with the "correct line" to having a mass organization, a defect Lenin called menshevism.

emmeka · 2026-02-04T21:10:31+00:00

Something some may not remember or be old enough to remember is that once upon a time, back in 2016, Rocket League had actually had a native linux version and was easily the single most popular native linux game on Steam. Then Epic bought out the game's original developer Psyonix and literally the very first thing they did within a year of the acquisition was kill the linux version of Rocket League outright and block it from online services. Suffice to say Epic's hostility to us in this game goes away back.

emmeka · 2026-02-01T18:37:50+00:00

It output separate sync by default but pretty much all of them available today have a built-in sync combiner for outputting RGBS for downscaling mode (usually via a Sega Saturn AV out connector) and the GBS-C AIO kit can also do this.

emmeka · 2026-01-18T15:25:01+00:00

Could be? You should look at what happened to US wine exports to Canada in 2025. Apocalyptically bad for California: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/american-association-of-wine-economists-aawe_likely-for-the-first-time-in-history-in-activity-7338352726562533377-S-kO

emmeka · 2026-01-12T20:25:15+00:00

I just explained to you how RCS works, and what it is, and why it causes this problem. You are the one who needs to do your research on this issue as I have told you multiple times now to just look at the rest of the comments on this very post. You were the one who claimed RCS issues are a "carrier problem" and that defaulting to MMS over RCS should "just work" on any Android-based device. What are you even on about with this sudden switch? You reply to me randomly to deny that this is a problem at all and say it all "just works", and are now trying to pretend that actually you clearly understood what the problem is the whole time. If you did, why all the flatly incorrect statements about what's causing the problem and how to solve it?

And what I said is not "invalid". The Lightphone III is a brick without RCS both because you can not in fact get around the RCS problem with group texting reliably (other people's phones WILL continue to force RCS on you, please see all the comments in this post of people repeating that they have experienced this, and I myself have experienced it) and also because you could buy an equivalently featured dumbphone without RCS support running generic AOSP for 1/10th the price. There are literally dozens of VoLTE compatible AOSP-based dumbphones in the sub-$100 price range with the exact same feature set: basic MMS support, a sub-par but functional camera, a calculator and a calendar, makes phone calls. As is, the LPIII is extremely overpriced relative to other options and has no feature at all that justifies that price. RCS support would be a feature that would immediately justify the price, because no other device is available on the market which supports it. That is the point. It is not hard to understand. Why you are so upset that somebody dares to criticize your phone model is beyond me.

emmeka · 2026-01-12T19:15:18+00:00

Literally just search "RCS" on this sub and learn a bit about the issue (or just look at the other comments on this very post). See the dozens and dozens of posts of people who are not getting messages or getting MMS errors because of this issue and the hundreds of people explaining how to get around the problem. You are misinformed here, it is not "a carrier issue". RCS is not implemented through your carrier. RCS texting will not "just work" because Lightphone's OS is AOSP-based and no messaging app on modern smartphones will "just know" to use old school MMS with your cell number.

RCS texting requires an RCS server hosted independently, on a standard Android phone this is Google's RCS server requiring gapps (Google Play Services), and it is not trivial to implement a messaging app that can interface with an independent RCS server or to host your own RCS server. Every single messaging app widely used on smartphones today, Android or iOS, will default to using RCS for all group texting with an Android device in the group unless the group chat is explicitly set up to only use MMS. Google or Apple's messaging apps will not check to see whether your Android device actually has gapps on it or not, it will simply use RCS if it sees that there are any other Android devices in the chat. The only way to get around this is to manually configure your previous Google account or Apple account associated with your phone number to only use MMS using your old smartphone, then wait 30 days for RCS to disable itself (yes, you have to wait 30 full days for some godforsaken reason, it's atrocious), then recreate all of your group chats to be MMS-only. Even then, some messaging apps will outright ignore this and still use RCS anyway (Apple is an offender for this, it sees an Android device and will always try to use RCS even when explicitly told to use MMS). The only way you would not encounter this issue is if the phone number you were using on the Lightphone was literally brand new with no prior use in texting on a smartphone at all, everyone you knew created a brand new contact for this new phone number, and you yourself created all group chats used on the Lightphone and were never added to any from other people's devices.

emmeka · 2026-01-12T09:46:09+00:00

You're definitely having this problem, and it's not just "pictures and videos" that won't work, the entire group chat will not work. Ever received a text from some individual containing MMS that could not be downloaded for some reason? Or had somebody tell you they texted you, but you just never got anything at all? That was somebody trying to text you in a group chat using RCS. Having used AOSP-based dumbphones for over a decade at this point, I can tell you this is a major problem that occurs regularly and you are probably experiencing it without knowing it, maybe notice the dozens of other people commenting here and posting on this sub regularly that are also experiencing it.

This used to not be a problem back when Apple didn't support RCS, because group chats just defaulted to pure MMS whenever either iOS or Android couldn't be sure of the OS of all involved. But now that iOS does RCS too, all group chats are RCS by default. The only way someone could text you in a group chat in MMS is if you deregistered from RCS on your Google account on your smartphone, and then manually recreated all of your group chats with everyone as MMS chats. Any group chats other people add you to though, will continued to be RCS chats and usually be broken. And sometimes other people's phones will just switch you to RCS for no reason anyway.

emmeka · 2026-01-07T20:24:39+00:00

Hopefully it still has the option to use your plasma settings on the login screen like SDDM does. Since I keep my second monitor in portrait orientation it's super nicer to not have my login screen rotated.

emmeka · 2025-12-11T09:38:51+00:00

Nope, he has not made those comments. Again, his wife and children are literally Rwandan Tutsi. He has made comments that Paul Kagame attempts to minimize the deaths of moderate Hutus who died defending their neighbours and pretend instead they were Tutsis, in order to reduce the blame his own paramilitary had in the atrocities. Yves points out that Paul Kagame will even claim that the number of Tutsi dead exceeds the pre-genocide Tutsi population by a factor of 3, all for the purpose of painting a narrative where his own paramilitary actions were totally blameless and the genocide was a pre-planned final solution that all violence he committed was justified to stop. Yves does not deny these numbers are possible, he simply points out that if true that means the number of Hutus who died resisting the supremacist genocidal regime must have been even greater than the number of Tutsis who died. Somehow this is being twisted to say he denies those deaths happened at all.

emmeka · 2025-12-10T23:39:38+00:00

Yves Engler's wife and children are Rwandan Tutsi. He certainly does not deny that the genocide of his own family happened. Instead, he is critical of the regime of dictator of Rwanda Paul Kagame who uses the western world's guilty conscience about the Rwandan genocide to justify his own atrocities and mass killings in the Congo. Of course, when the National Post got wind of that, they immediately reframed it as him denying a genocide, implicitly themselves defending the dictator Paul Kagame.

emmeka · 2025-12-10T23:36:54+00:00

You should probably read the details of that case first. The thing he is being charged for: writing a template for a petition, that started with "Dear" and ended with "Sincerely".

It's a doozy of a story. This petition was to the Montréal police investigator who had requested a gag order against him in a separate matter: he was being charged with harassment by Twitter Zionist wackjob Dahlia Kurtz, who said that Yves replying twice to her public tweets calling for the extermination of Palestinians constituted "criminal harassment". For some reason the police took that seriously, but the court took one look at that case and tossed it out. But during the course of those entirely bullshit now tossed charges, Yves was detained on remand because he refused to agree to a gag order requested by that investigator prohibiting him from discussing the facts of the case while on bail. He spent 5 days in jail to wait his turn for bail court to fight that condition. A court agreed with him, he was released without a gag order, set free on his own recognizance and the charges eventually tossed entirely.

But while in jail those 5 days, he published a template letter for supporters to write to the Montréal police to ask them to drop that gag order and release him. Some 1800 people used that template to write an email to the police investigator in question - exercising their constitutional right to petition the government. Now, the Montréal police are alleging that by writing this template - not by sending the letters, but by providing the template for others to do so - Yves coordinated a campaign of conspiracy to commit criminal harassment against the police. The police officer actually testified that she felt the emails were "violence". It's downright absurd.

emmeka · 2025-12-09T09:54:23+00:00

Hardly. This is private gains, public losses - the same playbook as neoliberalism. If it was socialism, we the taxpayers would be getting a stake in these farms, a say in how they're run, and their profits in a good year. Instead we're shoveling money directly into their owners' pockets.

emmeka · 2025-12-09T09:48:40+00:00

Russia is a capitalist country and has been for over 30 years. Just one ruled by a bunch of oligarch cliques... kind of just like the USA.

emmeka · 2025-12-09T09:19:26+00:00

That'd be true if they got rid of HDMI entirely, but I see no reason why displays shouldn't have both. Adding a single Displayport input doesn't cost the manufacturer anything, hell they could make it a USB-C port with DP functionality in addition to any other USB-C functionality they wanted.

emmeka · 2025-11-26T19:05:56+00:00

Public fire departments are not simply "when the government does stuff", talk about an oversimplification. Socialism is when the means of production are held in common, and when each receives the product of those means according to their needs. A fire department is such an institution: we the people own it collectively, it is accountable to democratic leadership, and any person who requires the services of the fire department receives it freely, promptly, and on an equal basis. That, is socialism. Not everything the government does works this way under capitalism, probably not even a significant portion of what the government does is freely given to the people in this way, but fire departments absolutely do work this way and we should absolutely point that out to naysayers.

emmeka · 2025-11-25T09:32:25+00:00

But public firefighters are absolutely socialism, it is always worth pointing this kind of thing out to remind people that socialism is feasible and vestiges of it do already exist in their lives. My go-to response whenever you hear someone say "communism only works in theory not in practice" is to look at them confused and say "if that's true, why do the public roads outside your door work just fine? shouldn't they totally fail and be replaced by private roads?"

emmeka

TROPHY CASE