The pinebook’s privacy switches (for WiFi/BT, camera, and microphone) operate at the firmware level, the operating system has no control over them

https://wiki.pine64.org/wiki/Pinebook_Pro#Privacy_Switches

The keyboard operates on firmware independent of the operating system. It detects if one of the F10, F11 or F12 keys is pressed in combination with the Pine key for 3 seconds. Doing so disables power to the appropriate peripheral, thereby disabling it. This has the same effect as cutting off the power to each peripheral with a physical switch. This implementation is very secure, since the firmware that determines whether a peripheral gets power is not part of the Pinebook Pro’s operating system. So the power state value for each peripheral cannot be overridden or accessed from the operating system. The power state setting for each peripheral is stored across reboots inside the keyboard’s firmware flash memory.

A couple of favorites that are different from what others already said:

• I strongly dislike autorotate on my phone so I always keep it off, however it makes perfect sense in apps like YouTube/Twitch. So I have one task that turns it on when opening one of those apps, and off again when closing them
• When I’ve got Bluetooth headphones, I can choose to have incoming texts read out to me. Very nice when walking/running outside and not needing to pull my phone out
• Similarly, I’ve got a task that will (optionally) read out the name of the song that’s playing to Bluetooth

Buzzkill is very nice. I’m in a group chat that gets huge bursts of activity (like a hundred messages) and then goes dormant for a bit, so I set buzzkill to only give me at most 1 notification every 30 minutes, and keep the rest of them silent. That way I can still keep up with it without my phone blowing up

Not xkcd in this case

https://www.commitstrip.com/en/2016/08/25/a-very-comprehensive-and-precise-spec/

Ack librefm completely slipped my mind

AFAIK they’re two separate projects for the same/similar goal. I know ListenBrainz has a recommendation system, but it might still be in it’s early days

There’s ListenBrainz, the open MusicBrainz version of last.fm

Blokada 5 has been very nice to me, no root, and doesn’t use much battery (android tells me 4% after a full day). Only downside is that it counts as a VPN connection, so if you want to connect to another VPN you have to turn it off temporarily.

Otherwise definitely Firefox with ublock origin

Haven’t tried it personally, but this might work: https://github.com/zelikos/davincibox

Basically, instead of creating a fedora distrobox and installing davinci resolve in there, this is a pre built image that has all the dependencies and such ready to go.

I have no idea, but that would be pretty cool

The PDF multitool I’ve been using is Stirling-pdf, which has support for adding/removing passwords

Funny enough, I also learned about this tool from a previous edition of this newsletter haha