Recent content by PackersOwner1

There's a big difference between the state of the art of technology that tends to progress over time, and the hard limits of the physical world that do not change. If "they" claimed in the '50s or '60s that LMR radio at 400 MHz was an unworkable thing, "they" were simply misinformed, unaware...

Seems that a Pixel 5 without 5G would be a seriously missed marketing opportunity. The so-called "millimeter wave" band will never be more than a gimmick, because of hard limits on propagation and the prohibitive cost of running high speed fiber backhaul to support more than a few scattered...

If a road is rough enough to flatten a pneumatic tire, that's exactly why I'd want a pneumatic tire--to absorb all that shock. Better an occasional flat tire than a bent frame, or worse, a bent unibody. I doubt that an airless tire would be able to come close to pneumatic for soaking up bumps...

Exactly. USB power by itself is not suitable for charging batteries. To properly charge a battery, you must have some sort of charge controller that detects the battery's state of charge, and delivers the correct voltage and current. Some sort of DC-DC converter is used to create the right...

FWIW I had a similar problem with some earlier Android devices that had miniUSB jacks. I solved the problem by finding "power only" cables that had two large wires for power, instead of four smaller wires for data and power. Without the data pair there was no way that my phone could detect a USB...

IME the problem started when phone makers stopped offering replaceable batteries, and when Quick Charge 2.0 came along. I've had two phones succumb to battery bloat, and both had non-replaceable batteries and QC 2.0. Before then I'd think nothing of leaving my phone on the charger whenever I...

If the idea is to speed up your system by using virtual memory, I think that you'll be disappointed. Virtual memory is a way to supplement physical RAM with storage (disk) so a computer can have more apparent address space than it actually has. The consequence of using this method is that...

Thanks for reminding me! I may have disabled VoLTE on one or more of the phones because the cellular repeater at work used to choke on VoLTE calls. I checked with Verizon, and all the phones I bought from them are on the VoLTE list. My only other phone is a Pixel 3 XL that I got direct from...

Well...Verizon's plans to sunset 2G & 3G service in order to reuse those bands for 5G service could be put on hold for either of two reasons: 1.) if the T-Mobile/Sprint merger is blocked (meaning Sprint's midband spectrum remains out of play), and/or 2.) the FCC opens up new midband spectrum...

Anything but Ubuntu! That includes [A-Z]buntu and all other variants, and Debian. There used to be lots of great, easy-to-use Linux distributions before Canonical got its hooks into Linux and began corrupting it with bad habits like sudo. Debian is little more than a monument to the character...

Can you expand on how Huawei devices (I presume that you mean like phones) are incompatible with US carriers? My understanding is that the spying concern (real or imagined) was over the Huawei infrastructure products more than user equipment. Is it because Huawei and ZTE dared to challenge the...

Now that I have no more landline or VoIP phones, I keep all my old smartphones in strategic places around the house, in case I might need to make an emergency call. One downside to living in gun country is that your neighbor is far less likely to go in your house to help. I miss calls all the...