Al.

To demonstrate the AI text features, here is the paragraph above about it, corrected and in businnes and polite styles.

However, what I find truly fascinating is the AI text editing. You can write something, and it will correct the grammar and spelling (I have not used it here) and also change the writing style from casual to business. Some of this is amusing, while some of it is surprisingly useful. I do not believe that either the text or image editing features are entirely new, but having them integrated into the keyboard or camera app with a single button is quite impressive. Some of these features rely on the cloud, so it will be interesting to see how much I can do when I am in a field for a music festival.

Nevertheless, what I find genuinely intriguing is the AI text editing capability. It can correct grammar and spelling errors (which I have not utilized here) and modify the writing style from informal to formal. While some of this is entertaining, some of it is surprisingly beneficial. I do not believe that either the text or image editing features are entirely novel, but their integration into the keyboard or camera app with a single button is quite impressive. Since some of these features rely on cloud access, it will be interesting to see how much I can accomplish while attending a music festival in a remote location.

Nevertheless, what I find genuinely intriguing is the AI text editing feature. It possesses the ability to rectify grammatical errors and correct spellings (a feature I have refrained from utilizing in this instance). Additionally, it can transform the writing style from casual to business-like. While certain aspects of this feature may elicit amusement, others prove to be surprisingly useful. Although I do not believe that either the text or image editing capabilities are entirely novel, their seamless integration into the keyboard or camera application with a single button is indeed impressive. It is worth noting that some of these features rely on cloud-based processing, which raises the question of their accessibility in situations where internet connectivity may be limited, such as during a music festival in a remote location.

So is the phone good?  If you look up anything about the Ultra 24 what you will find is oodles of press release stuff touting "AI" integration.  Sure enough there's a few bells and whistles in interesting places.  The one most people focus on is the photo editing.  You can do auto slowdown on videos after they've been filmed in normal time, you can do rotations and fill in the edges with generative guesses.  You can also do things like reframe and move people around.  How often you'll use any of these is questionable but it is there.  There are other interesting things as well such as motion photos which capture a little before you actually press the shutter so you can go back and select a different framing if you miss the photo.   

However, what I really find interesting is the AI text editing.  You can write something and it will fix the grammar and spelling (lol I haven't used it here) and also change the style of what is written from casual to business.. some of this is funny.. some of it is surprisingly useful.   I don't think either the text or image editing stuff is new at all but having it integrated on the keyboard a button away, or in the camera app a button away are all pretty impressive.   Some of it relies on the cloud so it'll be interesting how much I can do when I am in a field for a music festival.

Samsung bloatware wise... Facebook came preinstalled but was possible to remove.  There are many of their own variants of all the base apps, clock, calculator, calendar, etc to replace the Google equivalents and they're better and worse in a variety of regards and some of that is not necessarily Samsung's fault.  For example if you want to set a timer on the Samsung clock (which provides a nice floating timer feature) you've to use their dog shit bad assistant app, Bixby.   If you try to set a timer with google assistant it will only use the google clock app and if that is not installed it will set it on a google web page (that will be unloaded after you leave that page and lose the timer).   What I would like is for the google assistant to set a Samsung timer but this combo isn't allowed.   The aforementioned "AI" bits are only available if you use Samsung's Keyboard which is ever so slightly worse at predictions than G-Board.   Basically the absolute best integration experience is to always use the Samsung variant... except there are situations like the Keyboard and Assistant they're just far enough behind Google to be noticeable.

Overall the camera is certainly better than my previous phone, the "AI" stuff is more useful than I expected, but overall it is a surprisingly small upgrade from the phone that cost half the price and was 3 years old.  Yes it is faster, I guess, but that's barely noticeable.  Maybe if I did gaming on it it would be more obvious and maybe there are some tough multi-tasking situations I might have ran into in the past this will be better at (the One plus are notorious at killing processes far too early) but ultimately there are not a lot of places that phones can go right now.  I got my parents Samsung A34's for Christmas and they're perfectly fine as phones.  Having the latest and greatest (for a month or two at least) is nice, I will absolutely use the better camera but that seems to be main reason to basically spend twice as much and that additional value to functionality doesn't make a whole lot of sense.
 

That kinda already exists with Meta Quests.  The 3 does it significantly better than the 2.  
 

I am fairly sure no one will be wearing one in public other than the people making this sort of "content".   There was a whole slew of "people vision-proing while driving Cybertrucks" videos that came out and got the general Internet fuming at people being dumb but it turned out that almost all of them were made by the same content farm who did it deliberately for hate clicks.  They're developer devices that aren't meant to be worn outside.  The real interest will be if they make a good consumer device but for now they don't appear to care about gaming.

I've often bitched about overpriced phones in the past.  The idea of walking around with a 1000+ euro worth of smashable, stealable tech just seemed ludicrous to me. An unspoken multiplier to my concerns was I used to be in far more positions were smashing and stealing could occur... i.e. out late drinking in town.  I've owned a smart phone for a little under ten years now.  First off, it is shocking how little that number is for something so integrated into life.  I was a late adopter but realistically it's unlikely to be a whole lot more for most people and the earlier ones were frankly trash.

In that time I have had zero stolen and I broke my screen one time when drunkenly fumbling with the torch and my keys outside my old apartment caused it to plummet screen first directly on the loose stone drive in front, basically the worst case scenario.  If we stretch the window out to all phones I have ever owned, 26 years of ownership, I broke one additional phone (again being a drunk) and lost one for an extended period of time (and then found it again).   Given I don't party like I used to I am relatively happy I can trust myself with something tastier. 

My smart phone ownership history makes for interesting (not really) reading:
Moto G €160 2014
OnePlus 3 €399 2016
OnePlus 5t €560 2017
OnePlus 8t €650 2020

Things to note are I've been almost exclusively OnePlus in my journey and I only went Moto G at the time because I couldn't get the invite to buy a OnePlus 1 back in the day.  I can't recall my exact reasoning to get a OnePlus 3 when I did but it seems like it was likely rushed as that wasn't an optimal time to do that (I was doing a lot of travelling in 2016 so that was probably why).  I upgraded soon after because my partner was still on an aging Moto G and quite often it is the state of her hand me down that is driving my upgrade decision and not what I am currently using.  The other thing is the creeping cost of phones.   I usually don't buy these fresh out the gate and wait a year or so for a deal of some sort, even then I was up at past the original iPhone cost that I had bitched about so much by 2020.

So what did I actually buy in 2024 because this is all the obvious setup for that reveal?

The big daddy.   The Ultra 24 is the top of the range and most expensive non folding Android phone at the time of writing and I pre-ordered it! 

I've been using Samsung for my tablets for a while ( I am on my third) and I moved from hating and fighting their take on Android to accepting it.  Oneplus had been doing some weird things in software recently, due to their combining with Oppo, which I had started to dislike a lot.  I also wanted to get a better health tracker than the very basic Amazfit watch I had for the last 6 years and Samsung Watches looked exactly like what I wanted to have, except a lot of the more advanced features only work with a Samsung Phone.   I was also interested in retiring my Sony Camera, which I'd continued to lug to festivals and holidays but used less and less in favour of my existing phone camera.   Videos showing off Samsung phones that could take pictures of the moon (even though subsequently being found out for faking it) made me very interested in their top of the line Ultra models.

I'd eyed up the previous iteration, the Ultra 23, and none of the deals on it really came close to what was available when it launched.   When the Ultra 24 was announced I was ready to commit when it went on pre-order.  Pre-ordering got me double storage (I got the 512gb model for the 256gb price,) 10% off, 250 euro trade in for my OnePlus 5t, 100 off some earbuds and a (yet to be delivered) Galaxy Watch 6.   All in all it was 1170 euro for a Phone, Watch, headphones and case.

So was it worth it?
That's juicy no matter what way you slice it but it sorted the watch upgrade, got new earbuds for my partner, got me my better phone camera and my partners 5t was getting on in years and being able to trade it in as part of this a good recoup of value.  She got my 8t.

The most immediate apparent thing was there wasn't much difference between the Ultra 24 and the 8t.  In fact the 8t actually beats it on a few things.  The Samsung hasn't AptX HD Bluetooth.  It has a slower charging standard.  It's heavier.   The screen looked very similar out of the box, but this was because the Samsung hadn't the 1440p mode enabled by default.  This made things a little bit sharper.. but not much.  It isn't all that noticeably faster for day to day stuff.  Honestly I could probably have happily lived with the older phone for a couple more years, as my partner had been managing with my near 7 year old previous phone.

So what does it do that my older phone couldn't?   This is long enough already so I'll write up a part 2 another day.   
 

I'd say a chunk of that is post pandemic rises and another chunk is probably tax as it is something that the Government have not really seen much pushback on raising booze prices.  They introduced minimum pricing here that meant things like cheap beer/wine had to cost at least $X amount based on alcohol content.  Most of the super cheap stuff dropped their alcohol content to keep the cheap price so probably means people just add some vodka to their beers and completely nullifies the intent / makes things worse.  That particular law seems less to help people and more to help the Vintners who have a fairly large lobby group here and felt cheap supermarket booze was cutting into their profits.  Wages in general have risen too so it is all probably relevant.  

It was 7.80 for Heino swill in the 3 Arena.

Aquaman 2

The last of the Snyderverse DC movies before James Gunn reboots everything in his Guardians of the Galaxy style, and it's as mediocre an ending as the whole thing deserves. I honestly can't remember the first movie or even the two I reviewed above, and I doubt I'll remember this one soon.

It's easiest to say what's good because everything else is bad. The design of the aquatic vehicles is good. That's about it. They have these cool robotic octopus-style ships that are a bit 1950s sci-fi, and they're almost worth watching it for. If overblown SFX retained any wow factor, the bits with these in it would have saved the movie.

However, overblown SFX is just so old hat, it just passes through my jaded skull unnoticed. Give out about James Cameron's Avatar all you want, but he knew you film water in water. Here, they filmed dry and added water effects after, resulting in a hilarious animated beard on Dolph Lundgren (who is unintelligible in the movie). Everything has the Avatar-style neon but just added like a Tron-esque overlay, so it is visually headache-inducing.

I won't bother writing much about dialogue, plot, or characters, as the writers didn't seem to bother either. The same baddie from the last movie is back, and he's causing global warming to kill the Earth in a way that feels like Captain Planet is owed royalties. Something or other about rescuing Aquaman's brother (apparently from the first movie) happens and they join forces in stopping the baddie.

Nicole Kidman and Amber Heard show up for a few minutes after the producers caved to cutting their parts to the bare minimum after an online harassment campaign because this is the hellworld we live in.

The result is an unbalanced story that I'm not sure why I'm writing about because you're not going to watch it (find the octo ships on YouTube).

This is how the DC Cinematic Universe ends. Not with a bang but a damp squid (sic). 

2/5

Im sure some shitty club is charging 9 as well as the tourist traps but I think real pubs a pint of Guinness is just under 7. I drink poncy craft beer and its 7.50 for that in Whelans the odd time I'm there for a gig. I'll be in the 3Arena (formerly The Point/O2) later and it'll probably be 8 bucks for Heino swill.   Wine in a restaurant is frequently approaching 40 for the "cheap" bottle but maybe I go to fancier restaurants than I used to.  I probably earn near 4 times what I did when you wrote this topic and drink 4 times less booze so it doesn't really bother me too much.

So I was priming some expectations on the back of various people calling this "delightful" which is why I had the "what if this was good" posts above?  I know I'm a cynical old fart but I do occasionally like nice things so I thought maybe this wasn't yet another modern bubble-gum movie to chew once and have the flavour immediately dissipate but I'm afraid it is.  As Chimpy said it was fine for one watch, if you keep your brain off, but I wouldn't watch it again. 

First off I never really considered the first movie a musical. It was more a fun story that just happened to have songs in it.   We both groaned loudly within seconds there was singing in this one.  Combined with the "Greatest Show" style presentation it really felt they'd amped this up specifically because of Greatest Show (kids fucking love Greatest Show.. I have no idea why). 

As expected there are plenty of REMEMBER WHEN moments in this.. including immediately delving into the nostalgia pocket with tinkles of Pure Imagination right from the get go.  There is really little restraint here.  Nothing is subtle.  Wonka loses a coin in a drain and you can just hear every annoying person in the theatre nudging the person beside them going "THAT'S THE COIN CHARLIE FOUND!".  I could hear it and we watched it at home.. 

Eventually they've to build some sort of semi original stuff to justify existing and what they do just feels so odd and uncompelling.  Olivia Coleman's character has yellow teeth.. you know.. because they constantly zoom in on her horrible teeth every time she's on screen.  This should be a one and done joke but they keep going for it (maybe it is gross out to appeal to kids again.).  Wonka builds a shop and its great but then there is a whole poisoning thing that makes no sense (how would it even be done?) and they burn it down.. its a super weird story beat.  Why let him have this win and destroy it in such an extreme and apparently final way.  Of course everyone who was "poisoned" understands what happened at the end and all is forgiven.  Also just pure nonsensically when Olivia Coleman is getting arrested herself and partner scoff poison sweets to turn stupid colours... why? Stupid looking people make funny laugh for kiddies.   

Finally I couldn't really see Timothy Charlieandthechocolatefactory as Wonka.  He's too nice and clean and as a character it doesn't really make sense for him to be shown in this odd combination of being apparently magic and having virtually unlimited resources (except when they're suddenly needing to be replenished by the plot) and also not really in control of his destiny and being undermined by incredibly unskilled characters.  

All of this is why it is not compelling.. it is a loosely and illogically strung together combination of nostalgia and bits of story with added notes from some focus grouping saying "kids would love if this happened".  

3/5 .

Fair play for having the dedication.  Sitting down and playing through ONE game is just something alien to me now.  I was thinking maybe the Steam Deck would stop my gaming ADHD but if anything it means I am MORE likely to flip between a variety of games just to see how they feel on it.  I probably should have got the version with barely any storage to prevent my mind wandering.

I'm watching Season 4 at the moment. They're certainly stretching the original 60s/70s characters being active in the 00s quite far. At least one is just one dimensionally annoying at this point.  They've also no noticeable plans to replace them for when we hit the next decade from what I can tell. They've also hit the problem of where to go from Mars Base.  The plot this season is mostly around asteroid capture and it is too fantastical to be interesting.  The Moon and Mars stuff was anchored in NASA plans to do that that never happened. This starts to feel stretched and there's little actual new space engineering so far because they've just trivialised space travel and not got anything to fill that part of the show.  I'll keep watching anyway.  

Literally a house guest tested positive 3 days after spending 2 days with us.  She'd no symptoms when here so again we seem to be dodging some very close calls.

I've been playing it for over a year with near 100 hours in it.  It has fantastic world building (walk around in first person in the cities), story is good and interesting and well acted, just walking into a forest and hunting could be its own game but sweet jesus it never ends!

Oh yeh you can put it to sleep mid game. Wake it hours later and the game is there playing. That alone is a huge difference.  Most of my complaints about fiddleness in relation to everything else is trying not to leave stuff on 24/7 and once you put things to sleep getting them all up and aligned and started again is a chore.

I mean I rarely leave the house either.  I've three rooms in the house.  One is my office which has my real games PC. The other is a kitchen / sitting room with the big TV and a small PC with a Radeon APU.  The final room is the bedroom with my old, but still equivalent to most people's main, telly.  

I generally hate spending recreation time in the office. It is isolating and a bit drab in there. I've a little convertible couch because I thought it was the office chair that was putting me off. It could just be the association with work.

The smaller PC is OK for 2D indie things and older 3D games and mostly is fine streaming heavier games to the big telly but it's just fiddly enough to be a barrier to lazily flicking things on.  I have a GPU for it picked out but I know it'll introduce heating issues I don't want to deal with.

Again I don't like sitting in there on my own and my partner likes to head to bed early so I often finding myself in the bedroom during "gaming time".  Previously my bedroom approach was streaming to my tablet but again just fiddly enough to put me off.

The Steam Deck can do more natively than my small PC and can be hooked up to either telly easily for either native play or a more streamlined streaming from my gaming PC experience or just used as a handheld for the least fiddly of options which I am going for easily 70% of the time. 

I like that it is breaking down those bits of resistance where I might be more inclined to browse social media junk or watch an inane YouTube video just because I didn't want to have to do the dance of turning on a variety of devices and controllers and making sure they're behaving correctly today.  It helps that on the device itself those distractions aren't a swipe away. It's a small but subtle thing that sounds mad but it's telling the amount of stuff we've screaming at us for our limited time that the quickest option often wins.

On 1/7/2014 at 3:54 PM, Al. said:

BTW I deliberately put this back in this thread which seems the most sensible.. though it might also have life in the PC hardware/gaming thread. The console thread seems no longer valid because all these Steam machines appear to be is a very loose brand for your average premade gaming machine (ala Alienware) which brings with it no guarantee of value for money.

So what the hell defines a steam machine?

Can be hooked up to a regular TV (aka all semi modern PCs)
Wireless controller (and mouse + keyboard?) support for couch playing.
Steam Os (linux varient.. still find it hard to believe most won't end up running dual boot with windows even if unofficially).
DirectX 11 capable card (not even sure if this is confirmed but seems to be the standard).
Form factor (maybe?)
Quiet (maybe?)

What a console killer gaming pc needs to be (and all signs show Steam machines won't have):
Consistent hardware. Allows for better use and programming.. less problems associated with pc gaming for everyone.
Cheap. If you can build it for significantly less yourself why bother? If you don't want the hassle of doing that they need to be competitive to equivalent consoles.
plugnplay no fiddling. Up to the OS but the OS is linux so... yeah. Without being funny a huge chunk of games will require Wine emulation to run and that brings another set of problems.

I've said before that I really don't understand who they are going for here. I can only see rich lazy people who haven't already bought themselves an Alienware being the target market with what they've announced. A minimum spec of going to match new gen consoles and a maximum price of their launch prices was needed and while we might have the first the second is actually the minimum price (and that machine has a big + beside the price which makes me think the spec listed is not even what you'd get for that).

The Steam Deck is basically the previously touted "Steam Machine" / "Steam Box".   It is trivial to get it running on a telly with a USB to HDMI dongle (or any number of docks).

Interesting to see what I demanded a Steam Machine be and the final situation.

Consistent Hardware:  More or less.  Sure there is already a new Steam Deck since the original launch with marginally better hardware but for now things are consistent enough that Valve can do a "Works on Steam Deck" verification badge that people can be relatively happy means they'll get a good experience out of.  There are also third party DBs with more info on work arounds for games that don't meet Valves requirements.
One of the things that has changed since 9 years ago is that the graphics performance that can be gotten out of APUs (combo CPU/GPU chips) is just so much better than it was before.  There's also a lot of fancy upscaling stuff that gets much cleaner looking graphics out of lower resolutions.  Every image I had of a Steam Machine in the past needed a beefy GPU.  This is how they solved this.

Cheap:  Well you are not getting a hand held for cheaper though the higher end Steam Decks are spicy.  Ultimately there are versions that cost less than a next gen console so I think they managed to win here.

Plug n Play:  Well it took them near 9 years working on it but they made Linux work for gaming.. Kudos! Yes you can still waste time fiddling.  Including updating drivers etc but console games are almost as bad so yup they've got parity there at least.

By making it a handheld they really had a good answer to the "Why?".  Having the ability to natively play games out anywhere is huge.  It would probably be a lot bigger if I travelled more or commuted but it is great to not have to rely upon "mobile games" for when I am out.   It's still not "GAMER PC" powerful and even though it can natively run Red Dead Redemption 2 I was streaming it via the Steam Deck from my big PC for the better quality graphics when I had it hooked to the TV.   Interestingly the streaming experience was a LOT better than when I used either an Android tablet or PC to do the same streaming on the same network. 

Anyway all in all those crazy sons of bitches did it when we all thought they couldn't.  I expect these will gain popularity as time goes on and hell it even made me want to take my windows 11 HTPC and convert it to run a fork of the Steam OS given my experience with the Steam Deck.  Effectively building what we all imagined the "Steam Machine" would be.

Valve evidently heard my cries of "more gaming in bed" above and made the Gabe Gear or as they insist on calling it the Steam Deck.   I hmmed and hawed and had one in my cart when they went on sale in November but I held strong to be rewarded with a brand new model to spend moolah on.  I grabbed myself a shiny OLED model and it's far less hassle than streaming to my tablet.  I'm amazed what it can play. Red Dead Redemption 2 plays without hassle.  Sure the screen is a lot smaller than my previous tablet setup which means I have been tending towards 2d indie style games but honestly that's what I really love.  It's a nice piece of hardware that allows gaming in comfy seats/beds. Sure what else would you be doing there.

The joke is it's always Christmas Vacation 

We'd all look very silly if this turned out good wouldn't we?

Christmas Vacation

I'm very slowly using this to play through Last of Us 2 but the 30fps gameplay is getting to me.  I've invested in another year of PS Plus though I can't recall playing any of the games that were released on it. I've a vague thought I might get a PS5 slim at some future date and donate the PS4.  Horizon 2, Spiderman 2, God of War Ragnarok etc are games I might want to play and yes they'll eventually come to PC but a 4K compatible PC is still a fairly hefty, noisy beast.

When we got a new TV and put the old in the bedroom I finally decided to do as I said above and try a Kodi based distro. Specifically Libreelec.

It works very well at providing Kodi on a RPI4 with very little hassle. It can do 4k HDR playback, Dolby Atmos etc. CEC support means it can all be controlled via a remote control.  It's not providing a full desktop experience but I don't need that for the bedroom.  Apparently it's possible to add game streaming to it which I might try. 

It augments the native smart apps of the telly rather than replaces them and I use them for YouTube, Spotify, Netflex etc rather than try make those things work on the RPI4.  This is just for those who "evaluation" materials I have (which are on the rise since the increase in prices from the streamers).

I love how this thread title is so out of date (don't dare rename Twitter "X" in it).

Musk is completely unhinged. Just blithering on about "Woke" and bumping right wing loons constantly. His latest stuff was somehow agreeing to some anti-Jewish conspiracy which has caused lots of advertisers to leave. He's since gone to Israel to post with Netanyahu as some sort of Father Ted "look not a racist" bit.  Yet journalists, government services etc all still use Twitter out of sheer momentum.

I've even stopped using the Toutless account to sneak a peak at the gig listing stuff that still only goes there because I inevitably find a bunch of people I vaguely know still using it and I get angry.  

I honestly like Mastodon and post a lot of random thoughts and things that happen there. I don't know why people find it too much effort.  The fedi approach possibly means people get different experiences but I like mastodon.ie a lot.  It's biggest failing from my perspective is it is too nice. I feel bad even cursing on it.  

Bluesky I pretty much use as I used Twitter for unfiltered, angrier kinda posts but there's just no good discovery algorithm there. I've likely made a lot more effort than most to try make it work. If you just join and post once a month you're going into the void.  Only the loudest most consistent posters are ever seen.  They've tried to counter this with a "Quiet Posters' feed but it is still only really showing stuff from a day or two.  It might become something but right now I reckon it's dead (I've 5 unused invites if anyone wants one).