I mostly seed stuff that’s on the verge of being lost media and my ratio is often insane because there just aren’t other seeds. Ironically for many old/unpopular films the Internet Archive is a lot better than any torrents.

The comment on this internet archive review in particular had me laughing.

Leaving ADB open to unverified apps is more than I was expecting. ADB is reasonably straightforward to use even without actually being an Android developer.

There was never any way they’d integrate it to play protect and still allow play protect to be disabled. I prefer this to being required to use play protect personally, though the services do seem somewhat redundant. Presumably the whole point of doing this is to create an Apple style walled garden (which is of course very profitable). Google likely doesn’t want to fully lock it down and risk legal trouble, they just need to make it difficult enough that the masses don’t bother installing unapproved apps that may not act in Google’s interests.

I still hope the EU takes legal action against this anyway.

That’s kinda the case here with Debian being on the extreme opposite of Ubuntu. I don’t see any benefit of putting up with the stability issues and complexity of other distros when Debian “just works”. And once you debloat Ubuntu you just get Debian.

I have no idea why Canonical moved Ubuntu to rely so heavily on snap, it’s wasteful of limited system resources. Removing it sped up both my Ubuntu machines significantly (especially the one with only 4GB of RAM).

Graphene is only supported on Pixels for now, but by their own FAQ this isn’t the plan forever. With Google blocking third party apps at their own discretion on Android, there will certainly be motivation to officially support more devices.

To add bootloader unlocking probably isn’t going anywhere soon so at least you have the option to run something like graphene on Android devices.

You can still get some Android phones with relatively easily repaired hardware. And for innovative third party hardware your only option is still going to be Android.

I wish there were some way to effectively protest this decision they’ve made, but I can’t think of anything they’d actually care about unless nearly all developers objected.

There’s no alternative that won’t have major limitations. I predict it’ll just be more like going back to the days of jailbreaking to install unsigned apps. Unfortunately AOSP is already pretty much unusable without Google services installed for the vast majority of apps.

I suspect a lot of it comes down to your ISP. Like the original commentor I also frequently can’t pass CloudFlare turnstile when on Wifi, although refreshing the page a few times usually gets me through. Worst case on my phone’s hotspot I can much more consistently pass. It’s super annoying and combined with their recent DNS outage has totally ruined any respect I had for CloudFlare.

Interesting video on the subject: https://youtu.be/SasXJwyKkMI

Indeed that’s the intention, but in practice gerrymandering often leads to the opposite outcome where urban cores are divided up with large rural areas to suppress one side’s votes.

See Utah’s districts for the most obvious example of this. It would be logical to group Salt Lake City in one district, Provo + some suburbs in another, then the rural areas in the remaining districts. But instead the city is divided evenly such that each part of the city is in a different district, with every district dominated by large rural areas.

Even if possible, a $50 old office PC will be more reliable with no risk of the Android OS killing whatever software you end up running on it. And you can use SATA HDDs directly with such a setup. The power consumption is likely a bit higher than running on a phone, but for the ability to run any docker container out there it’s likely a worthwhile tradeoff. Alternatively if you can hunt down an Atomic Pi or similar old atom based SBC you can trade some performance for power savings while still running an OS truly intended for networking.

What options are there for pirating music? I felt Lidarr was not particularly useful due to the lack of indexers. Unless you like mainstream music it’s quite difficult to find many tracks online (and I’m too picky to be okay with YouTube rips).

Considering music streaming isn’t fragmented in the same way video streaming is, it’s still well worth paying for a music streaming service as part of a family plan imo. There’s no other hassle free solution to instantly listen to anything I want and be recommended new tracks based on my listening preferences.

I don’t think there’s any particularly “ethical” option, until now I’ve just used Spotify knowing that they’re losing money anyway. But it turns out they posted their first profitable year last year so who knows what the move is now. Qobuz claims to be ethical and high quality, but I don’t know how good the library is and like with any company they can become evil later.

The total amount of active content on Lemmy is nowhere near the amount on Reddit, for limiting the time you spend in app this is actually quite good. And unlike Reddit there are third party apps available for mobile.

The quality of content on average is significantly higher, but many local niches don’t exist here that do on Reddit. Depending on how you use Reddit this may make it hard to switch - unless your niche is Linux or open source software.

It’s definitely a minority, but easy to fix if you encounter such a site even a single time. There are also some sites which refuse to load on Firefox but work fine if you change the user-agent to Chrome.

Getting above 700 is quite easy but going above 800 without a car loan or mortgage has been pretty difficult for me and my partner. Credit cards alone even with high limits doesn’t look the same to the Bureau’s as a mortgage or auto loan for whatever reason.

The USB type C connector itself is amazing. I’ve never broken the physical connector, the problem is electrical only. The connector is capable of delivering a very high 240W of power, but the device/charger negotiate the power and voltage requirements to find the highest both can support.

But there are actually four parts of the system limiting the negotiated power:

• The maximum power the charger can deliver
• The maximum power the charging device can receive
• The maximum current the cable can deliver
• The signaling protocol used to negotiate the highest supported power across the link

The problem ultimately comes from the negotiation as many devices don’t use USB-PD (the theoretical “standard” for this) to save cost or allow different electrical configurations. This can lead to chargers incorrectly identifying devices as capable of accepting higher voltages than they can. Or devices can incorrectly identify themselves as capable of accepting higher voltage than they actually can.

If you’re using reputable decides from reputable companies using the included charger/cables, this will never be an issue. It’s only problematic when you want one charger for all your USB type C devices, as it now needs to support multiple communication protocols and voltage standards, hoping that no device identifies itself incorrectly.

PC lacks portability and battery life. The many generic ARM Linux game consoles fix both of those problems.

Nah a generic “K36” game system I bought for just under $20 in China. It played everything up to PS1 games flawlessly with a beautiful IPS LCD which was extremely impressive for the price. It even did one full recharge from a dumb charger without issue before I tried using my normal USB-PD capable charger on it, releasing the magic smoke.

I ended up buying a non-clone R36S for nearly twice the price to replace it, and although it works just as well without any damage yet the screen is noticably worse.

Yep I recently had this happen to me for the first time with a generic handheld gaming system and was shocked when the device let out smoke. I opened it up and sure enough the buck converter for the battery charging circuit was burnt, likely because the non-compliant device had somehow requested more than 5V from the charger… The charger was USB-PD and works fine with my phone/laptop/headphones so I’m pretty sure it’s not the problem.

Nah, USB-C is plagued by non-standard electrical configurations, non-standard charging protocols, and non-compliant cables. Rest assured the connector is here to stay, your device just may not be able to charge with any given charger or cable.