Beeper Mini managed to reverse engineer iMessage so you can send and receive iMessages on an Android device without a Mac server in the middle to forward the messages. It works pretty damn well according to The Verge - "messages sent from Beeper Mini on my Pixel 8 appear as blue bubbles on the iPhones of my friends and family members. Group chats I'm on automatically switched over to iMessage as soon as someone fired off a meme. Reactions, threads, photos, and videos (without the messy text message compression) all came through. The best thing I can say about Beeper Mini is that almost no one noticed I was using it: blue bubbles just started appearing — no lost messages to speak of". Sounds almost too good to be true, but it's real and you can grab it now from the Google Play Store for US$1.99/m.
Once again Telstra has been fined by ACMA for fucking up people's bills. This time it's a $3m penalty plus over $20m in refunds to thousands of customers after "charging them for inactive internet services over an 11-year period". Telstra claims "the billing issues were caused by the company failing to follow a series of steps in its ADSL internet service deactivation process". Commenting on the fine, ACMA said "Telstra has a history of incorrectly billing customers and it's just not good enough" and that "Telstra is a major player in the Australian telco sector and it needs to continue to prioritise its billing compliance and get its systems in order". You keep saying that, but nothing changes! It's almost as if Telstra doesn't give a shit and will pay these speeding fines as it's cheaper than fixing their rotten billing systems.
Bryce Wray highlights a sad fact that Firefox's usage is close to falling under 2% in US government web browser analytics. This would trigger a downward spiral for Firefox support not just in the US government (which has a rule of only officially supporting browsers above 2% usage), but more widely in the web development community. Why bother to support a browser with less than 2% usage when 84% of your users are on Chrome or Safari and the other 10% are derivatives of either Chrome or Safari anyways? Sad to see Firefox atrophy like this. I assume the bulk of usage is from smartphones/tablets where Chrome and Safari are the defaults. It's tough to compete with the default.
Thin film magnetic recording head at wafer level, 40x magnification. Joe de Lellis, Eastman Kodak, Inc., San Diego Laboratories (1995 Nikon Photomicrography Competition)
📻 Phaser - Superdrag
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