dual_sport_dork 🐧🗡️

Progenitor of the Weird Knife Wednesday feature column. Is “column” the right word? Anyway, apparently I also coined the Very Specific Object nomenclature now sporadically used in the 3D printing community. Yeah, that was me. This must be how Cory Doctorow feels all the time these days.

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 20th, 2023

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  • What? I don’t have to “imagine” anything. I literally owned one, for two years. Nothing was “sacrificed” on the Priv. It was in all aspects a completely modern phone, even managing to include a headphone jack and memory card slot, a curved edge display, wireless charging, and a 3400 mAh battery. And don’t try to come at me about battery capacity, either. Just to name an example, its contemporary in the Galaxy S7 had a 3000 mAh battery, was the flagship phone of its time, and sold bucketloads of units.

    Your argument is bullshit. Slider phones aren’t made because manufacturers don’t want to make them – be that for low projected sales reasons or whatever else – not because there is any physical reason they can’t.


  • The Priv wasn’t. Read the entire post. The Priv from Blackberry/TCL had a slider keyboard and altogether was 9.5mm thick. My current Moto G Power 5G is 8.5. An iPhone 16 is 8.25. This is not an appreciable difference.

    Obviously there’s not any technical reason anyone couldn’t make a modern slider as thin as current slates, it’s just that with the discontinuation of the Priv nobody does. And that’s not even getting into fixed keyboard designs.




  • I don’t get why people go around acting like these phones did not physically exist in the past in significant numbers, and both the “expense” and thickness problems were not, in fact, problems.

    My old Galaxy S Relay 4G was not appreciably any thicker than my current phone is with its case on it. And the Blackberry Priv I had after that was still exactly as thin as current modern phones.



  • My most fondly remembered phone is easily the Galaxy S Relay 4G I had for ages:

    In its time, this motherfucker was pimp. It was essentially a Galaxy S5, but with a slightly smaller footprint and a sliding five row QWERTY keyboard – with arrow keys and dedicated number row. It was the bossest thing ever for remoting into systems via SSH or RDP to administer servers at work and so forth. It supported NFC, MHL video out, USB on the go (which was not necessarily a given at the time), and I wedged one of those wireless charging stickers into it under its battery cover. Of course it had a memory card slot, a headphone jack, and a swappable battery.










  • I can do you one better: My GPD laptop has a charging indicator on the center type-C port indicating that this is where the power supply goes, but it can actually be charged from either port regardless of the icon. Both ports are USB 3.0 or 3.2 or whatever the current fast standard is this week, but only the center one supports video out via an external GPU enclosure. So if you want to use it docked with an eGPU, it’s actually required to not plug the power supply into the port that says you should plug the power supply into it.

    So not only is the marking meaningless, it’s arguably worse than meaningless because in one of the headline hardware setups for the machine it is actually 100% incorrect to do what the marking is telling you to do. Wrap your head around that one…