I love mine. It’s pretty unobtrusive but there’s a ton of open-source applications available on the store. Probably the most similar to the original Pebble (besides the new pebbles of course) right down to the MIP display. Tried a pinetime but it’s very limited by comparison and an IPS screen on a smartwatch is a terrible idea.

I’ve gotten more aggressive with blocks lately. Feels like there’s been a lot more arguing and drama on here lately than usual, and I haven’t been on as much because of it. Blocking at least drowns a lot of that out.

Getting a fairphone 6 with /e/OS is one of them, besides a few snags I’m really happy with it.

The other is getting a henry vacuum cleaner. They’re affordable, strong, insanely repairable, look cute, and are made in the UK by unionised workers which is nearly unheard of these days. I probably sound like a shill but it’s nice when the more ethical/local option happens to be one of the better options anyway if you weren’t considering considering those things.

I just got one as well, it uses MicroG to replace Google Play Services. Works really well, there aren’t any apps I use on my fairphone that didn’t work on my old S24 besides contactless payments. I just stick my card in my case or you can use Curve to replace Google Wallet/Pay.

I think a lot of non-techie people only know signal from the Trump admin using it illegally earlier in the year. In a lot of people’s minds because of that they think Signal = insecure because they don’t get the nuances of why using it in that specific context – on personal phones, using a third party app, with a random journalist in the mix – was bad, but that for most people it’s still one of the best options. WhatsApp on the other hand has a lot of marketing around it and if you didn’t know that Meta is Facebook I think some people wouldn’t even realise who the owners are.

Same, I’ve had my chipolo for nearly two full years now and haven’t needed to replace the batteries despite them being in constant use. Especially on my keys which must get rung about once a week actually never mind I just checked the app there and the keys died a few days ago. But still, nearly two years and a quick swap of a button battery to get them going again is probably better than 6 months where the USB port or the battery could easily degrade.

You can use gadgetbridge to run a lot of wearables locally without them connecting to their manufacturer’s servers. They support the CMF Watch Pro 2, nothing on the Pro 3 yet but I believe the way it’s developed is to get owners of a watch to test it out and update the wiki if it works or make a request if it doesn’t. The app doesn’t have the internet permission so nothing leaves your devices. I’ve got a PineTime coming in the post this week but for now I’ve got a £10 Xiaomi band running through Gadgetbridge and it works very well.

I saw it mentioned in this Cory Doctorow article a week or two back about some of his issues with bluesky, but he mentions here that the cost has came down from tens of millions a year down to tens of dollars a month

Hadn’t heard of wafrn until seeing it on f-droid this morning but I might give it a try, a tumblr-like platform would be nice since tumblr seems to have given up on using ActivityPub.

+1 for Navidrome. As simple as pasting the album into the directory and it sorts the rest. I use subtune on my phone to access it and it works great.

Thanks, a good rant is nice to read sometimes. Completely agree on Pixels – even if I got second hand, they seem so unreliable based on having one in the past and knowing a few that have had one. There seems to be so much toxicity coming from that project.

The tech secretary is the biggest idiot in our government right now which is really saying something. He doesn’t have any professional experience with technology, gets his policy ideas from asking chatgpt, accused anyone who opposes the online safety act of being a paedophile, and when a constituent sent him emails about Palestine he had the police raid her home at 4am.

I might try it out then. I’ve heard mixed things on e, something about security patches coming months later than other ROMs, but I see murena claim that they are in line with most android manufacturers, just not as quick as hardened ROMs like graphene. Maybe I’ll see this week about swapping over.

I’m very tempted to get one, at least once there’s a lineage build for it, since it will let me finally degoogle completely. Currently on an S24 and even with ADB it’s still a nightmare with the phone constantly telling me there’s an “issue” with my google account (which doesn’t exist anymore) and google services like gemini reinstalling after updates.

I’ve tried tailscale and cloudflare tunnels in the past and ended up just using PiVPN to set up a WireGuard VPN on my Pi5. Tailscale for some reason was very slow for me, and cloudflare tunnels have a 100mb limit iirc which isn’t ideal for streaming. PiVPN is quite straightforward, it sets everything up for you and all you have to do is forward a UDP port. That was the bit I was most worried about, but, unless I’ve misunderstood something, because a UDP port will just ignore invalid requests to the outside world it will appear closed so it’s not very risky. It then generates a key for each device which you can scan from a QR code onto your VPN client. I have my phone set to auto-connect to the tunnel when I disconnect from my home wifi network and the tunnel is fast enough that I’ve accidentally turned off my phone’s wifi connection before and streamed a TV show through the tunnel over mobile data and not noticed any difference in speed.

That’s good to hear! I’ve ADBed almost all of the Google & Samsung stuff off my phone already so I’m well used to fighting with Aurora to download certain apps by now. Nearly all my apps are from F-droid as well so that will make the transition a lot easier, and I do a lot of self hosting so I’m not relying on any proprietary services that are going to demand play services be installed. Balatro on my steam deck already steals enough of my time, so honestly if my phone won’t let me install it that’s probably for the best.

Going from One UI 6 to One UI 7 on a Samsung has made me very excited to go get a used pixel or fairphone and install a custom ROM instead. Absolutely abysmal update.