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Cake day: July 4th, 2023

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  • At the same time, I run Graphene with no Google services or apps and it’s fantastic. The only thing vs a rom with microg, is you need to be able to depend on unified push or background listening for push notifications. Imo this is actually more de-googled than connecting to Google services with an open source client (which still results in your phone having a constant connection to Google). Graphene also provides options to connect to proxies or alternative services for things like location services, DNS, internet connectivity checks (which can also just be turned off), etc.



  • You could rent a VPS in a neutral country and use ssh to create a SOCKS proxy to it, then use foxyproxy to add the proxy to firefox/librewolf/whatever and either allowlist certain sites you don’t want your country knowing about or denylist websites you don’t care if your country knows about (especially higher bandwidth sites that aren’t controversial like YouTube).

    At that point you’d have plenty of “real” traffic from the unproxied websites and any traffic the rest of your OS is using, and when you access the proxied sites you want to hide it’ll look like you’re using ssh and/or scp.

    You could also create a proxy server with a tor connection on the server and use ssh port forwarding to access it locally. The Mullvad browser + foxyproxy would probably be your best bet for using that since it’s basically tor browser without tor.

    EDIT: Additionally, if you wanted to proxy an application that doesn’t support SOCKS internally, you can configure proxychains with the proxy and then launch proxychains applicationname.



  • There’s a lot to like about the pine time, and it’s really cool that you can adjust things and recompile. The reason it ultimately didn’t work for me was because the vibration motor isn’t strong enough for me to notice if I’m actively doing something. Your mileage may vary, but it’s worth keeping in mind.

    The original pebble and garmin watches have all been great in that respect.





  • It’s definitely not perfect, like I can grab a nap and not have it notice sometimes so I assume there are a bunch of heuristics at play that create a “best guess”.

    That said, how rested I feel does typically line up with the number of hours it shows (regardless of how long I’ve actually spent in bed), and it has a short description about the quality of sleep like “restorative” or “not enough rem” that further lines up with how I feel.


  • Exactly. Gadgetbridge reverse engineered the protocol so it can configure all the same settings the Garmin app can, notifications get forwarded to the watch, the watch sends its sensor data, gps tracks, etc and Gadgetbridge knows what to do with the data so it’s displayed in graphs and lists, etc.

    And yeah, if you get a watch without wifi or don’t connect one with it to a network, then all data i/o is going to be exclusively bluetooth with Gadgetbridge, which specifically avoids the network permission (so there’s zero chance of anything leaking to a server somewhere.) That’s why it communicates with a weather app fur that data instead if pulling it in itself.

    It also works with more than just smart watches; like I can use it to configure the buttons, noise cancelling state, etc on my bluetooth headphones.


  • Mine does (a fenix 7). I think any model that has a heart rate sensor would probably work based on the wiki page. There are certain models that offload sleep tracking to the official app, and I don’t think those support sleep tracking in gadgetbridge yet (last I checked this was the case), but the ones that handle it on the watch like mine fully support that too (and you can view stats and a graph in gadgetbridge).

    Speaking of the wiki page: https://gadgetbridge.org/basics/topics/garmin/ - there’s a lot to parse since so many models apply, but my fenix 7 has had full support aside from live cloud maps in the weather app, and I’ve been issue-free since last October aside from a couple things they quickly fixed for me after I opened them.

    There are 2 main gotchyas:

    1. despite the weather sync not requiring the official app (gadgetbridge can sync with breezy weather), the watch stops trying to refresh it if it’s been ~3 months since rotating the api key. In the advanced settings you can have gadgetbridge create a new api key for you, but that may break the ability to use the official app (I don’t so I went with that).

    2. gadgetbridge can’t update the firmware or maps, however you can update directly on the watch via wifi, or you can use the PC app (which works great in a libvirt windows vm).






  • To add to this, if the phantom clicks are indeed primarily happening while typing or otherwise moving your hands near the touchpad, you should check to see if tap to click is enabled. The unintentional clicks that feature produces drives me crazy and I have no idea why it’s always on by default when a physical click or button is always available.


  • I’ve been using gimp’s 3.x branch since 2016 or so (after getting a hidpi display) and gimp itself since the early 2000s, both for personal stuff and for work. I’m typically editing existing photos and images to clean them up, apply effects, make new clean images from pieces of existing ones, etc, and for my uses it’s great. Also, having been using it for so long, I actually really prefer the ux to Photoshop (especially since they added an option to use it in single window mode).

    I’ve seen videos showing some of the features it’s missing for certain types of things though, and while there are hacky scripted ways to emulate them, you might find it lacking if you’re expecting those particular features.

    I’d recommend looking up tutorials on YouTube for things you frequently do and see how much work it is and what the final product looks like. You could up the playback speed to save time since you won’t be following along with gimp yourself.


  • You can also use weechat as a bouncer, and it works even better with its own clients which can sync chat history rather than receiving it in a dump. The android client is fantastic in that respect.

    The plugin ecosystem is also great. I have a plugin that pushes notifications for PMs and mentions to my gotify server, alerting me on my phone without having to drain its batteries staying connected.