The best phone I ever had was a Sony Xperia XZ2 Compact. I would still be using it if it wasn't too slow to run modern versions of android. This is one of those things that just makes me feel so out of touch with the rest of the world. Does everyone else have giant pockets and giant hands? Does everyone use their phone with two hands and carry a bag everywhere? Is it just a trend like small phones were a trend before smartphones? Why do people want these giant phones?

> Why do people want these giant phones?

Most people only use computers at work, solely relying on smartphones for communication, media, shopping, etc.

It makes sense to have a big screen at inconvenience of having to carry it around.

What surprises me is how small the demand for small phones is. I have absolutely no need for a big screen - I have a monitor.

I never ever use my laptop anymore outside of work. I never surf the web, read, order stuff etc from my laptop. It’s basically useless now if I don’t code or use pro apps. So a bigger phone is confortable because some websites suck on smaller screens and using an iPad is too big sometimes

> Does everyone use their phone with two hands

They have to because of stupid pinch-to-zoom. You either have to balance the phone in the palm of your non-dominant hand (literally switch the phone from one hand to the other) while pinching with your dominant hand, or do a sort of goatse thing with your thumbs while holding the phone in both hands.

Screw-to-zoom is a million times better: draw a spiral to the right and you get closer, spiral to the left and you get farther away (agreeing with the "righty-tighty, lefty-loosey" standard.) Easily done with any single finger, or even with the thumb of the hand holding the phone (for people with adequate thumb-wrestling skills.)

Been happy with Sony Xperia 10 series, which is similar width, but taller as tallness really do not annoy me. Also massive battery. Sadly they are going to stop selling those here, so I might just need to go to Samsung next year...

> Does everyone use their phone with two hands

A lot of us do, yes.

> and carry a bag everywhere?

As a guy in 36" waist jeans (yeah I need to lose a few kg)... I can fit an iphone 16 pro max in my pocket pretty comfortably.

> Why do people want these giant phones?

Well, one reason is that I'm getting older and don't find it as easy to read tiny text on tiny screens any more. Another reason is that I sometimes watch streaming services on there.

Also it's shiny and the battery lasts forever.

For more and more people, their phone is their primary (or only) device. On a day to day, I have more face time with my phone than my personal laptop.

I guess people want different things out of small phones. I had a Z flip 3 for a few years because I thought the small pocket size would be nice, but it still doesn't solve the main issue that I can't reach the whole screen with my thumb. (and besides that I have a million other complaints about it, never going to buy a foldable again)

I tried with a Jelly Max but despite what they say it doesn't work on verizon :(. It's the perfect phone for me otherwise.

I'm about 8 hours in and really enjoying it, but I feel like I can see this in my future. For now I have so many puzzles/threads going that even if one doesn't work on a run because of RNG I'm still making progress somewhere else, but I could see that drying up a bit as I solve more things and want to focus on something specific.

The puzzles for resources you mention are by far the worst part for me. I really wish there were a way to say "I get it, I know how to solve simple logic puzzles and do basic arithmetic, just give me the stuff".

Thanks for the suggestion, that was really fun. One I've been really enjoying in the same vein is https://raddle.quest

Thanks for that, I just played todays and it is pretty fun!

This is really cool, thanks for the writeup. Love how thorough you were, one of my first thoughts was whether you could hook it up to a gamecube and it was already done in the blog post :).

One cool advantage of real cartridge compatibility I hadn't really thought about is that lets you not have to think about memory mappers (I'm mostly familiar with NES's dozens of different mappers, not sure if GB carts work the same way) and other custom cartridge hardware since you're just "emulating" up to the cartridge boundary. I guess this means even crazier hardware like the camera/rumble/sewing machine would "just work" with an original cartridge without any special support right?

I guess that doesn't save too much for this though if it supports loading ROMs. For that do you still end up having to emulate all the different mappers in the FPGA?

Thanks! Yeah, support for physical cartridges makes it a complete non-issue.

Mappers are a huge problem with the NES, but a much smaller problem with the Game Boy. There are only a few official ones (6 iirc), and one or two unofficial ones. And unlike the NES, the ROM includes a cartridge header that tells you which mapped chip is used.

For the GBA, there aren’t any mappers (except for one or two GBA video cartridges). There’s some extra hardware (like rumble or gyroscope), but not a whole lot. So yeah, I have to emulate all of those but it’s not much of a problem.

This is really cool, just tried it with a recent hike ( https://cubetrek.com/view/362602 ). Strava has a really basic 3d visualization but it's from a fixed angle which isn't very useful. Being able to move around and the replay mode are really neat. I was confused a little about the flame effect on the route before I realized it was matching my mouse on the other charts.

I second the request to be able to visualize routes without timing, it'd be awesome to take some route I have planned out in caltopo and view it here.

Also it seems like not quite what you're aiming for but I already have a few places I can (and sometimes do) upload these for the sharing/community/diary aspect (strava and peakery) and it would be cool to have some sort of integration where I could visualize activities from there without having to download/upload the GPX. Maybe I really need some kind of GPX multiplexer to upload stuff from my GPS to all the different places it could go :).

Your hike looks cool, thanks for sharing!

Getting the data from Strava is something I really don't wanna touch with a ten foot pole. Talking to other devs, using their API is the stuff of nightmares because they keep changing their ToS very frequently and recently they have become extremely restrictive on what you can do with "their" (actually the user's) activity data.

I never heard of Peakery, need to look into that.

What you can do, however, is to directly link your Garmin, Coros and Polar account to automatically upload data.

That makes sense about strava, they don't seem the friendliest to work with. Good to know about linking garmin, etc. accounts though, I missed that and it would definitely do what I want.

I tried the same thing with Haskell one year with a similar result (fell back to python then gave up). The beginning was nice when the puzzles were easy and I could focus on learning the language, but once the puzzles got tough it was too much trying to struggle with them and the language at the same time.

I find it hard enough without restrictions (especially toward the end) so I'm not doing anything too wild, but I've been trying to solve quickly this time. My goal was to get in the top 100 on one of the days to actually get a point, but I think I missed my window where the problems got too hard for LLMs but were still doable quickly for me. At least I managed a 136 which is much better than I've ever done before.

Maybe next year I'll actually prepare some utility code for parsing grids and 2d vector math and such.

This is a really impressive rendition of our corporate hellscape. It reminds me of games like cart life in that I appreciate what it's doing, but even though the frustration is intended it still makes it really unpleasant to play. I lasted until I needed to figure out how to pay the ISP bill before I threw in the towel.