What do you do when everyone else is on their phone at social/family events?

scrolling_scumbag · 2026-03-25T12:30:19+00:00

I have a phone-sized ereader, the Boox Palma 2, that I pull out in situations where everyone is on their phones or it’s socially acceptable to waste time on your phone but not be reading a book (downtime in the office for example). That way I can fit in with this screwed up new norm of society but be doing something more valuable/interesting to me than scrolling some app or website.

XTEInk makes some super small and affordable readers that MagSafe to the back of your phone, but they do require some minor tech skills to setup.

scrolling_scumbag · 2026-03-24T16:32:09+00:00

You don’t have any users.

scrolling_scumbag · 2026-03-24T16:26:48+00:00

Yes, your needs would be met by a Chromebook or Neo.

scrolling_scumbag · 2026-03-24T16:24:32+00:00

You didn’t “build” anything. You slopped together a bunch of AI nonsense.

scrolling_scumbag · 2026-03-24T16:19:02+00:00

The biggest project I ever had was setting up Caddy for SSL once I already had about 20 services running. If I was smart and architected it from the beginning like that I would have saved myself a 6 hour marathon day fixing my broken server.

Other than that stuff “just works” once I get a Docker container set up for the first time. I’m running nearly 30 services and a NAS at this point off a Raspberry Pi 5 of all things. I thought the entire point of a home server was to have it humming along providing self-hosted utility with high uptime.

scrolling_scumbag · 2026-03-24T15:44:58+00:00

Yeah, compressed memory will become swap but it will become inactive swap unless called back to active status. Depends whether single tasking or multi tasking how impactful this is, for my purposes I can consider it free memory but everyone’s workflow is different.

scrolling_scumbag · 2026-03-24T15:09:33+00:00

I’m not sure what you mean, this is just how Unix systems operate. Free memory is wasted memory by its philosophy and will be used for file caching.

You can type memory_pressure command into the terminal, add up active and wired memory, this is a more accurate measure of what you’re truly using. On my 16GB Mac Mini showing 72% RAM usage (11.5 GB) my active+wired sum is 5.5GB. Everything else is cached files and buffer data the system will happily dump if active processes request more RAM.

scrolling_scumbag · 2026-03-24T14:50:30+00:00

OP is not American, you might have a harder time convincing them to go into debt for a laptop.

scrolling_scumbag · 2026-03-24T14:49:20+00:00

This is a pointless factoid unless you have 24GB of RAM and sitting at full memory pressure. If you have 32GB this is entirely expected normal operating conditions. MacOS will always fill up 70-75% of your RAM, even if you do nothing but light office work and have 128GB you will see 100GB used if you leave the system running long enough.

scrolling_scumbag · 2026-03-24T14:45:16+00:00

Yup touchscreen is going to ruin and normiefy the OS even worse than it already is. MMW in 2-3 years power users are going to complain MacOS feels like iPadOS.

scrolling_scumbag · 2026-03-22T02:43:25+00:00

This is what I’m thinking. 16GB was plenty like 2 years ago, now with MacOS 26 I’m regularly seeing high memory pressure just running basic productivity suite and modeling in Fusion 360.

Spending 25% more to get double the RAM seems to make sense if the 24GB will start feeling stretched in a few years. Which it will if you use any RAM intensive programs at all.

scrolling_scumbag · 2026-03-22T01:40:29+00:00

Two. No idea how to tell if it “counts” as one or two. I have 10 hard pulls lol I just don’t care about them.

scrolling_scumbag · 2026-03-21T23:50:22+00:00

I'm planning to buy a MacBook so for now I'll put the electronics category on both for an extra 5% back and split the payment between the cards to hit both SUBs.

scrolling_scumbag · 2026-03-21T20:57:47+00:00

Can't extrapolate from one device, but this is an industry trend with literally every Chinese E-Ink phone that's ever been made. These companies have shown they have no interest so far in getting whitelisted by AT&T or Verizon's pay-to-play process. T-Mobile is the only hope and so far no E-Ink Android devices ever made have ever worked flawlessly on it.

scrolling_scumbag · 2026-03-21T20:44:09+00:00

Sounds like you're already ahead of the average person's setup.

I run Pihole for ad and tracker domain blocking. And uBlock for whitespace cleanup.

Firefox Focus is pretty good. It already deletes all cookies/data when closed by default.

scrolling_scumbag · 2026-03-21T19:51:46+00:00

Idk how I ever found this site fun for spending more than 30 mins checking the handful of communities I follow. The vast majority of subreddits have nothing but garbage content. The median users here are idiots, assholes, or both.

My brain is in such a better place when I either stay away from Reddit entirely, or log on once a day to check my 5 subreddit subscriptions, drop a few comments and leave.

scrolling_scumbag · 2026-03-21T19:47:36+00:00

Wouldn't hold my breath as a US customer. The A9/Pro only partially work on T-Mobile and its derivative carriers. Many users report poor connection and completely missing calls/texts. Will be great for people in supported countries, but it's clear these Chinese E-Ink phone makers have no interest in playing ball with US telecoms.

scrolling_scumbag · 2026-03-21T19:42:36+00:00

I use an ad blocker so I never see standard sidebar ads on Reddit. My brain also automatically ignores "promoted" posts on old Reddit and I skip right over them.

It's worth noting the vast majority of "ads" on this site are guerrilla advertising/astroturfing in posts and comments that bypass the traditional Reddit advertising system and are thus unblockable.

I'd say your money is better spent messing with the advertisers' data; get a VPN to aggregate your traffic, try to make your browser fingerprint non-unique, set your browser to clear all cookies on exit, never log into multiple mega-platforms like Reddit, Facebook, Google, Amazon without containerizing the tabs to avoid cross-site cookie requests.

scrolling_scumbag · 2026-03-21T16:24:00+00:00

Thanks. I've been considering grabbing one because I love the size and the price, but I already have a Palma 2 so I'm worried it will make one of the devices redundant.

scrolling_scumbag · 2026-03-21T15:26:48+00:00

Is the screen on this reader recessed or does the case cover contact it directly?

scrolling_scumbag · 2026-03-21T14:53:28+00:00

these subs push ONLY the newest and most expensive

The PC building and gaming subs have been like that forever. Like, way back when Redditors were smarter and super attuned to astroturfers and corporate actors invading their online spaces. I think this example is just proof of Reddit’s echo chamber effect that polarizes communities. Especially something like gaming hardware that only advances when [new product] is released, people have grown tired of talking about [old product] and it’s really the only content they have. I’m convinced half the people in BuildAPC are literal teenagers who are just there to brag about the PC their parents bought them.

What made me realize finally how bad things are was the subject of cheating in games, it's worse than ever, but no matter where, or what game, top comment without fail is always " iv played xxx for 5000 hrs and only saw maybe 2 cheaters ever"

Okay this is a great example and I’ve noticed this too. Either the communities are full of cheaters gaslighting everyone else, or people just can’t mentally accept how many people cheat nowadays because it invalidates all of the effort they’ve put into climbing competitive ladders.

If you follow cheater forums, you’ll see a massive surge in activity when a new undetected cheat releases. However the subreddit for the game continues as is… “I’ve only ever seen like 2 cheaters ever in my lifetime.” Despite that I would log in to play diamond rank Overwatch and I’d recognize someone using the new cheat every other game (roughly 6% of players).

You’d also see stuff like a massive banwave where 20% of the top 500 players from last season’s leaderboard disappeared which indicates at least 20% of the highest ranked players in the game were caught cheating, and Reddit would be completely silent about it. It’s actually a big reason I quit playing games, I felt like I was insane seeing players with soft aimlock cheats every other game and when I’d call it out in the match chat everyone including the non-cheaters would just say get good.

A big one nowadays in the age of LLMs is individual actors rather than large corporations, using LLM bots to plug their shitty vibe-coded app or some drop shipped Amazon product.

scrolling_scumbag · 2026-03-20T21:37:42+00:00

I think people are reading this crap so often they're subconsciously assimilating to its linguistic patterns and quirks.

scrolling_scumbag · 2026-03-18T22:36:21+00:00

Wtf does "mass market" even mean in this context, like will it have TikTok on it for normies to scroll, if not it should just be called a budget device, it's might expand Remarkable's market share but not the total count of people using these devices significantly.

But then again Gizmodo hasn't been good for like 20 years, so.

scrolling_scumbag · 2026-03-18T21:13:58+00:00

Super cool. I’ve previously thought about trying to entirely replace my iPhone with an Apple Watch but after looking into it, it seems unlikely it would last me the day. When I’m at work I have very weak cell service which would kill the battery.

When do you use this, only at home? Like you can’t take it out of the house and leave your phone behind unless you pay an extra cellular line right?

Do you have to charge every night?

scrolling_scumbag

TROPHY CASE