unix_joe

I use CalyxOS on my Fairphone since 2022. It is better than the stock OS and allows re-locking the bootloader. It also provides timelier updates than Fairphone OS. It is absolutely fine and has zero issues.

I have one banking app that doesn’t work. Another one that does work. Also, I have paid purchases through the Google Play Store that do not see the subscription. I was going to let them expire anyway. I also have a Google One that doesn’t see the subscription, so none of the advanced editing features in Photos works. I assume all of these would be problematic on GrapheneOS as well.

I would run GrapheneOS if I had a Pixel, or if it supported the Fairphone.

iPhone isn’t a rosy picture either; still down in China despite a last minute price slash to boost sales.

Maybe stop designing tone-deaf products like you are bigger than the market. Nobody is immune to current market and geopolitical conditions.

I got the popup all the time for a few weeks with Firefox and uBlock Origin. As a YouTube Premium subscriber. The paid service. The whole reason they were pushing back on ad blockers to begin with.

Fuck these guys, I let the subscription lapse.

13% is low, but I guess this shows how resistant to change people are. It’s better to establish a new market (or the first to become popular in a young market) than to try and come along with something disruptive in a mature market.

There is an entire industry of shady companies who make tens of millions per by selling dogshit “secure comms” products to barely literate and computer illiterate LtCols and procurement officers in the US Government.

Those officers are close to retirement and by regurgitating big words they do not understand while still in their procurement positions, they can land a job at said company and receive some of those funds once they hit minimum retirement age and wait a year.

Signal is free and disruptive to those business models.

Ergo the misinformation campaign, the FUD, is well funded, by people who have a lot to lose.

It’s already started.

Anti-malaria measures in Africa are funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the same Bill Gates that anti-vaxxers argue are trying to poison us through the COVID vaccines and has ties to Epstein.

They are already warning about weaponized mosquitoes being used as flying syringes in California and genetically modified mosquitoes being unleashed.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/other/flying-syringes-and-conspiracies-the-far-right-battle-for-a-mosquito-control-board/ar-AA1hMuT9

Spotify Premium pays Joe Rogan.

The same kind that lists the Empire State Building in the headline, like it’s the 1930s and that’s still impressive.

Trillian was just a UI that put all your contacts in the same window. You couldn’t talk across protocols, or merge the same user contact across multiple protocols.

Think of Matrix as a unified protocol from which AIM, MSN, ICQ would have all been based. And so if someone is on AIM but you registered on MSN, you can still talk. And at the fundamental level, it looks like IRC. It is the opportunity to re-baseline everything on a standard that is open and supports end to end encryption.

So while bridges would be needed today, the idea is that some time in the future these services would re-baseline on the Matrix protocol, or be displaced for whatever market reason by a startup that chose to baseline on Matrix.

I am going to say the unspoken part out loud: it’s rooted in Hitler’s “Creators, Maintainers, Destroyers” view of race.

The fact that this article exists at all shows how deeply rooted the sentiment is, even if 95% of the people regurgitating it don’t see themselves as racist or know that this is what their society has conditioned them to believe.

Asians only get tech by copying and stealing from the West. So when the “free market” West gets bothered by a little bit of competition and enforces protectionist measures, Asians who aren’t willing to whore out their women to Westerners are supposed to come crawling back and accept sanctions as punishment for trying to be uppity. It’s a shock to the system that China was able to keep innovating independently in a different direction, that can’t easily be attributed to IP theft. It’s not about the 7nm process; it’s about the entire SoC.

There are a lot of dogwhistles and things left unspoken in these articles and TikTok videos (where I saw it first) and I’m sure the “well ackshually nobody ever said that” jackasses are ready to pounce on this comment so it’s probably best to just leave it at this:

Unilateral protectionism has been a fucking disaster for consumers. All we got out of it was increased prices. A maxed out iPhone in 2016 cost $949. A maxed out iPhone in 2023 costs seventeen hundred fucking dollars and Samsung has done the same increase over that period. Less choice meant less competition and the duopoly was able to further entrench in their positions. This phone would be competitive with flagships at half the price. Why is that a bad thing?

https://www.gsmarena.com/huawei_mate_60_pro-12530.php

Laptops: ThinkPad P-series. The repairability that the T-series used to have with slightly beefier specs and better heatsinks. Great for Linux.

Phones: FairPhone 4 (FP5 will likely be announced end of the month so wait for that) - user repairable, supports alternate operating systems, 7 years official OS support from FairPhone.

They also only fight for privacy as a marketing differentiator from Google in the US. Their privacy stance varies from country to country.

If Apple had the same capability to harvest and mine user data as Google, there’s no doubt in my mind they would already be doing so. Their inability to produce a viable cloud service and major security and update issues with iCloud imply it’s a lack of ability and not any pro-user/privacy-oriented sentiment in the company.

The Protonmail client is okay.

Sometimes, it hangs and never shows the Inbox or takes a very long time to show your Inbox (several minutes). You have to clear your app cache when this happens and sign in again. You also don’t get full access to settings. You cannot go in and add a new alias from the mobile app, or change payment options.

Fastmail is okay. My gripe is you can’t use biometric security on Android and when you set custom color schemes on the web client, the app disregards them.

I use both. I used Fastmail since college when they were the big thing and they support and develop FOSS software. I migrated to ProtonMail out of curiosity after more than a decade, but when they turned over the IP address of a fucking CLIMATE ACTIVIST to police, I decided to halt that process and later on I renewed my domain with Fastmail out of convenience (other things that irked me were were the Proton Mail bridge didn’t work on OpenBSD and I couldn’t use it with alpine or K9 mail at the time). I keep ProtonMail for occasional registration/verification email that doesn’t make it to Fastmail but I’m not under any illusion about protection under Swiss law.

I was so entrenched in Fastmail that I stayed with them because the annoyances with ProtonMail service didn’t outweigh the benefits or price increase. If you are starting from scratch, I would probably go ProtonMail.

• Asuna
• Lord of the Test
• 0 A.D.
• Xbill
• SuperTuxKart
• Sonic Robo Blast
• The various Doom mods
• Konquest
• SuperTux
• Endless Sky

This came out when I was still in elementary school. I remember at the time the computer guru people were like, “It’s not a real computer, it doesn’t even have a 3 1/2” floppy drive. How can it be a computer without a floppy disk?" And people bought into that sentiment because Apple of the 90s was a company with no new ideas that was almost dead.

From an LA Times article, “Wait, did I really say “no floppy”? I did. This is probably the biggest gamble. Third-party vendors will no doubt develop a floppy that will attach via one of the iMac’s universal serial bus ports for connecting peripheral devices. (USB is a successor to a range of ports used previously on PCs and Macs.) My guess is that Apple is wrong about home users–most will still want a floppy (or zip drive) and will have to buy an add-on.”

I thought it was kind of neat to not have a floppy because even in those days 1.44MB was pathetically small and there were competing standards for a floppy replacement around 100-120MB range.

I think the biggest influence, besides killing off floppy drive was that this also killed beige PCs. Everybody shit on Apple for their new design but then in a few years they were all putting different colors on their cases and nobody had beige computers anymore.

I never got to use one until almost a decade later, in undergrad, where they were still in use at the kiosks for free internet in the student center. That’s where I finally learned to despise the puck mouse.

The eye strain comes from pwm dimming.

The Wikipedia article has a link that should always work.

Dropbox has the feature that lets me scan PDFs using the phone camera. It also doesn’t need me to self-host.

Google Photos allows quick refinements to a photo and sharing all the pictures with someone’s face in a gallery that they can then see, automatically.

I don’t know any alternative to Snapseed on mobile, and there’s barely anything as simple and polished on the desktop.

Not surprising, given how difficult Apple has made it for people who want to use third party GPUs. I’m actually surprised it was ahead of Linux at all.