I was experiencing some slight hearing loss because of a noisy environment at work. The audiologist looked in my ears and said she was worried that I might have done compacted earwax and asked if I used Q-tips. I sometimes did. She told me to stop and to clean them out by putting olive oil in each one, holding it for a while then letting it run out into tissue paper. I can’t remember how much or for how long, but it definitely did the trick.

I can relate to the picture, very much, even though I don’t use Q-tips any more.

I use drummer’s ear buds now and they’re great because my hearing recovered quite a lot, the tinnitus went away entirely and I can hear what people are saying when I’m wearing them.

Because Donald J Trump is their guy. He might well win.

The world tends to find that having an extraordinarily wealthy parent makes its own luck.

Exactly. Unfortunately “move fast and break things” has some disadvantages when it comes to driving in traffic.

At first I read that as an old printer from a school, and thought that was a very weird thing to want, but then I realised you meant a printer that was old school, and it all suddenly made sense to me!

Well, perhaps it might be possible to catch some tummy bug from someone else, I don’t know, but you inhale the fecal particles when you flush anyway I suppose.

The lid stays down all the time (well, in between use) at our house, with the idea that you minimise the amount of fecal particles floating around your room. I know it doesn’t eliminate it, but I want to flush as much as possible of the poo and not inhale it, so I insist on the lid being closed.

I’m not claiming danger, I just don’t like the thought.

I wouldn’t put toilet paper up my nose - I don’t trust other toilet users to not touch the toilet roll and I don’t trust the room to not have fecal particles from lidless flushing on things. I don’t want tu put someone else’s poo up my nose.

Alright, you win, I’ll never use my phone in portrait ever again, especially not to film my dog in a storm. I’ll make sure I turn that baby right to your preferred orientation and I’ll stop complaining about pointless bars at the side of other people’s portrait content.

If you want, I can go back through my canara roll and delete everything that’s in portrait just in case I’m ever tempted to sell it to a news organisation. I’ll make sure to only ever post landscape content to whatsapp, signal and especially tiktok and instagram, because otherwise some relative, friend or random Internet user might share it in portrait.

You’re right. That’s definitely a better solution than not putting annoying fuzzy bars on portrait content.

And when anyone films in portrait, make sure to punish anyone trying to watch the footage with a similarly criminal portrait orientation, by putting borders round the side of the portrait content to force it to be landscape, thus shrinking the content to roughly a ninth of their screen, unless they switch to the blessed landscape orientation when it will fill a glorious third of the screen. Let no one watch it full size for the creator thereof has sinned against the gods of landscape.

This is the right and proper punishment for content creators who break the landscape law: let no one see this video fullscreen, for they have sinned against landscape. https://ibb.co/x2MQQG2 let the borders of landscape wrath descend and pad, and let fullscreen be disabled for all, for if landscape viewers are denied fullscreen EVERYONE MUST SUFFER.

Oh, or you could just skip the fuzzy bars in portrait mode if you’re feeling more accommodating to phone users.

Yes, and that’s great, it really is, but when the footage you have is portrait, don’t pad it out to force landscape orientation on it irrespective of the orientation of the viewer’s screen, just let portrait content be full size portrait when viewed on a portrait screen. That is the beginning, the middle and the end of my point. It’s all I’m asking for.

But the fuzzy bars on the side make it great?!?

Watching portrait footage that’s been padded out to landscape on a portrait device is even worse!

I’m proposing that the web designer writes a responsive webpage when they are sent a portrait video to include, so that if it’s viewed on a portrait device it fills the width, and when it’s viewed on a landscape device it fills the height. If it’s actually for telly, there’s usually no harm in cropping a bit at the top and bottom and at that point, feel free to put whatever you like down the sides, but there’s no need to throw away the portrait original for the portrait view of the website.

Like I already said, the technology for writing a webpage that looks different depending on the orientation of the device being used to view it is neither complicated nor new. There’s no need to treat every medium the same in 2023.

I never said it’s lower quality. Not once.

No? This you?

we kept everything to a certain standard of quality. Vertical videos are not suitable for anything except a phone.

Totally not lower quality. Definitely not. There’s a full stop and everything. No link whatsoever. My bad.

No one said anything about websites.

Well I think the rest of us are discussing a video on bbc.co.uk, which is a website, and we’re doing it on lemmy.world, which is also a website, and when I complained about people making portrait videos landscape, I suspect most people correctly figured out that I meant on websites, so I really think it’s just you that assumes we’re talking about jeep club.

I am British and I love this.

Why can’t you use it? Because your web designer isn’t designing for the possibility that people use a phone to access the Web, but it’s not 2004 any more and they’re living in the past.

You showed your colours when you assumed that portrait video is of lower quality. It’s only of lower quality if you’ve padded it out and are watching it on a landscape screen!

Technology to detect whether your webpage is being viewed landscape has existed for a long time, and takes very simple calculations indeed or just a splash or two of css to maximise the video size for whatever screen it’s being viewed on. It’s design laziness and wasted bandwidth to put the silly blurry bars or even black bars down the side of the video. But don’t force landscape on everyone. Smart phones aren’t new and they aren’t going away.

I suspect that the majority of people who spend even a tiny bit more than half of their recreational screen time looking at a fixed landscape screen are well over thirty.

Fantastic video, but it winds me up when they add padding to a phone video to make it landscape, as if no one in existence might possibly be viewing their phone-generated content on a phone.

OK, yes, I think you’re right.

Of course, but the far right don’t care about facts, they just care about racism.

You’re right.

Oh, I thought it was the CEO’s online reputation and the fact the people are hearing more and more that their after sales service is shit, eg being charged £17000 for a new motor which is apparently the driver’s fault for driving it in the rain. In Scotland.

https://www.cambridge-news.co.uk/news/motors/couple-charged-17000-tesla-broke-27925815

Apparently the problem has been known for some time:

https://insideevs.com/news/534878/tesla-models-motor-fail-rain/

You say that because you commit crimes of indecency against confectionary and you like to think of yourself as immune to radicalisation. Don’t kid yourself. Come back to all that is right and good before it’s too late for you.