The irony of having to buy a Google phone to get rid of Google services will never cease to amaze me. :/

Life of Brian

It’s an interesting discussion to witness in these posts: convenience vs privacy and control.

The convenience and integration you get with commercial products like IOS or Android comes at a price. Everything that matters to you on a daily basis bundled together in one convenient package means that all things which define you as a person are conveniently interconnected for corporations to sell out your data for everyone who wants it.

GPS: your current whereabouts at any moment in time and a complete history of where you have been in the past

Payment functions: what you are buying and where you have bought it

Communication (Messengers, Phone): Who you communicate with and what you are talking about

Photos and Videos: Real life evidence from all the stuff mentioned above.

Web Browsing: Interests and Needs which will be used against you in a totalitarian surveillance state, at a glance

If you in 2025 still think this convenience is there to please you as a consumer I have bad news for you.

Convenience and interconnection of services look nice and useful but at the same time they’re a privacy nightmare that makes Orwell’s 1984 look like a bedtime story for children.

What this all comes down to: Strictly airgapping the boundaries between the different services is the only way to have a modicum of privacy. Photos do not belong in a cloud controlled by someone you don’t know and should be taken from a separate device. Navigation belongs on a separate device with no internet connection, payment should not be done with a personal identifier at all (if avoidable) etc. Living your life this way might seem terribly inconvenient, but as someone who was alive at a time where all this convenience didn’t exist I can tell you it has its advantages too. You’ll rediscover what really matters.

Yeah I tried that with a local makerspace and it didn’t work out for me, sadly. I wanted a sense of community, contact with likeminded people to do stuff together. They just offered lots of machinery to be used in solitude. It went like this: “So, you wanna 3d print something? Sure, just go to person X, they will show you how to operate the thing. You don’t know how all of this works? We have some resources on our discord to get you started.” Okayyyy

TL;DR 640x480

This should be illegal. We had webcams like this 20 years ago. But Nintendo customers seem to enjoy outdated hardware. It’s a tradition at this point

I’m not happy with Honor and I will not buy another one. So much bloat, crap that connects to chinese servers and can’t be uninstalled or even disabled.

I don’t like how people are trying to stir up dissent and drama around this. The message posted is short and on point, it includes all the important bits. There really isn’t much more to add.

As a (Plasma based) Kubuntu user I was wondering as well. Looks like they tried to emulate the gnome look and feel in the picture. In Kubuntu the default taskbar is at the bottom and the floating application bar doesn’t exist

The hurdle is that Europe tends to adopt things that are successful in the US, because it is convenient. Even most services and startups based in Europe are more or less copies of US products, with some notable exceptions of highly specialised applications. This unfortunate trend started in the 1970s, when the largest industrial players in Europe thought semiconductors were just a fad and consequently lost their competitive edge. It was seen as less risky to invest in commercially proven concepts than to actually innovate. This continues to bite us in the ass to this day.

VLC always had a ton of applications, network device playback, TV, streaming server, files, physical media, music player, effects, recording, AV format conversion, subtitles, plugins and so on.

Potato chips and chocolate. It was difficult but necessary to have them both at the same time

Some NT net utilities even had BSD info in their binaries.

Sooo, does the crocodile face to the left or to the right?

This happened just this morning. Probably not the dumbest thing ever, and I blame Snap for putting things where they don’t belong: I deleted stuff from the /run/user/1000/doc directory. Turns out the files there are in fact hard links to files which actually reside somewhere else. Well, they were, until I deleted them forever.

Background: Firefox (as an Ubuntu snap package) downloads files in some kind of sandbox mode and references stuff there for some obscure reason. That was my weekly reminder to get rid of snap packages because snap sucks in a myriad of ways.

because both letters and emoji together form a word, like b+🌧️ = brain

Just one more collider, bro. Please, bro

I was watching Al Jazeera to see what they had to say and they called the Hamas terror attack “the Hamas military operation”. I have no sympathies for them to say it kindly. Actually the can fuck right off. Deliberately butchering civilians, many among them children is not a military operation. It’s a terror attack.

It’s more of a calendar thing I’m afraid.