The first time of bloatware appearing in mobile phones is not something that happened in 2010s or late 2000s. It was 1999, and it was called WAP. I still have Nokia 7110 and 8310, the first WAP CSD- and GPRS-enabled Nokias respectively, in a perfectly working condition. WAP was a huge mistake. A separate XML-based markup language (WML) that was "compiled" into some "compressed" binary representation of the same language (WMLC) by carrier-side gateways. And the client side still had to waste the resources for XML-like parsing, and, given the lack of RAM in cellphones at the time, this meant even less content could be displayed on a single page. And the gateway still had to fetch the original WML page via HTTP. A lot of complexity for something that simple. What should they have done instead? Just adopt Gopher. Yes, it still is alive. Gophermaps are TSV (tab-separated value) files, literally the easiest format for machines to understand with no overhead at all (fields are separated with \t, lines are separated with \r\n). The protocol itself is as straightforward as it can be, much less overhead than HTTP. The client has full freedom of choice of how to display every item type, so WAP-like menus wouldn't be a problem anyway. "Standard" Gopher only has 7-type records for search requests, but I guess some custom types could be invented for form filling, or even Gopher+ format could be implemented. It still would be much smaller mess than what they came up with. Needless to say, when phones became capable of displaying plain (X)HTML (that happened around 2003), WAP faded away pretty quickly. Because no one wanted to maintain parallel versions of their websites that generally couldn't be generated from a single source because of those WAP limitations anymore. Still, modern MAUI-based phones (MediaTek MT626x and MT6276), Mocor-based phones (Unisoc SC6531x, SC770x, UMS9117(L)) support basic WML pages, and remaining RDA-based phones (Coolsand/RDA CT8851, Unisoc SC6533G) even can run compiled WMLScripts. WAP formats support also remains to some extent in the Opera Mini browser and the devices that run it, but that's another huge flop to be told about another time.

I've been a huge proponent of quartz/electronic watches, especially the ones with longwave or BLE sync, but started to tolerate mechs more as long as I can regulate them myself to quartz-grade accuracy (±30 s/mo) and they keep it well. All it takes is appropriate tools and a timegrapher, even a software-based one. Even the Orient from Tristar series I'm wearing right now is pretty accurate after such regulation. Here's my guide how to adjust Orient F6 and F4902 movements: https://hoi.st/docs/own/orient-f6-adjust-guide.txt

Any opinions on Hongdian 1860 aka Black Forest Max? #asknostr #fountainpen

Btw.

Piped

An alternative privacy-friendly YouTube frontend which is efficient by design.

This is how it goes, supposedly: as soon as a channel appears that allows to break free from the mainstream propaganda BS, "anti-mainstream" propaganda BS inevitably appears there too. This seems to be the plague of any social media, centralized or not. Why? "Bot farms" have been a thing for over a decade already. Regardless of how free your speech is on a platform, there always will be some whose speech is "freer" if they say the same as various govt-agencies-backed bots, trolls and "useful idiots" herded into a particular place online to shape dominating "public opinion" there. How to fight this, besides being fully standalone? Guess what: freedom of speech is something more than ability to choose which bot farm to join. Think about it.

And yes, the best privacy-friendly device is a pocket notebook with a good fountain pen attached. I'm serious. Pilot MR is awesome but its feed assembly is friction-fit, so isn't really EDC-able as the knocks can lead to in. Lamy Safari looks too bulky, although I maybe will try it out as well. Kawecos are not really an option where I live. Jinhaos are a lottery. Any other suggestions? #asknostr #fountainpen

By the way, I don't understand why the vendors who no longer exist on mobile phone market (e.g. Ericsson, Siemens) are so greedy and don't release the source codes of their flashing tools and/or their protocol specs, for people to be able to maintain the firmware of their still working hardware from 1990s-2000s themselves. Come on, you have already lost everything on the market, why take the devices to the grave with you? Flashboxes are the greatest scam of three previous decades. But it only became possible due to manufacturers' greed.

OK, all this is good but I really need to talk to someone who's into featurephones topic. #asknostr I'm stuck on several directions of reverse-engineering: 1) MT6261: - decrypting/unpacking MAUI partitions (**besides** ALICE_2) - an open source way to flash any area (don't point me to Ubuntu FlashTool version please, the libflashtool.so is not open source) - META mode (protocol, commands, everything) 2) MT6276: handshake, dumping, META mode (protocol, commands, everything) 3) SC6531 (any revision): diag protocol, direct NVRAM access within packed ROMs 4) SC770x: handshake, dumping, FS structure 5) UMS9117(L): handshake, dumping, FS structure 6) MT6572: flashing (low-level), META mode (protocol, commands, everything) 7) MT6731: flashing (low-level), secureboot bypass, META mode (protocol, commands, everything) Any piece of information on the above topics would be extremely helpful for the development of FOSS featurephone customization and malware removal tools. Also, if anyone has a full flash dump of CAT B26, I'd appreciate it too to be able to repair mine.