With RAM prices what they are the push for snaps may already be this… On memory constrained systems snaps already have a huge performance penalty.

We have legal precedent that the police cannot use GPS trackers. A similar case was opened for the APLs in traditional speed cameras, but they were determined to be constitutional since you have no expectation of privacy on a public road and a camera can’t be used to track you like GPS. The networked APLs accomplish the same result as GPS trackers just without technically using a GPS tracker.

I imagine all cases prosecuted for destruction of networked Flock and Axios cameras are going to struggle to get through a jury. It’s a clear privacy violation and everyone knows it.

They’re going to need to drastically change how the platform looks if they want to succeed. In typical Chinese app fashion the UI is incredibly bloated and overwhelming, not what a Western audience wants at all. They also won’t be able to match YouTube’s CPM so creators won’t bother switching either.

I don’t use Fairphone, but I am a bit of a mobile network nerd. I’m on US Mobile which is a unique MVNO that allows you to move between any 2 of the 3 US networks as you please. You have to have signal to initiate a network change and sometimes it takes a day, but for premium mobile service they’re great. I mostly just stay on ATT and T-Mobile, but depending on the rural area you visit Verizon and T-Mobile is also a reasonable combination. My point in the comment above is to not discount T-Mobile, their network capacity in cities and suburbs is miles ahead of Verizon and ATT (I’m ignoring UWB since it requires you to be outside and line of sight to a tower, it’s not practical for the vast majority of cell phone usage which occurs in a building).

The Fairphone is the only modern phone I know of that has limited bands, so you’ll need to use a T-Mobile based MVNO. The best deal on the T-Mobile network is Mint Mobile, providing 1yr of unlimited service for $180 if you port in a number. They’re directly owned by T-Mobile and I used them for several years quite happily before switching to US mobile. Google Fi also occasionally runs promos bringing their plans into the $15/mo range. The only reason I’m not still on them is the requirement to port in a number to get that $15/mo price for a year. I tend to change network every single year to always get the best deal.

The absolute best phone plan deal recently is the Total Wireless $20/mo 5g BYO plan. Uniquely the price is guaranteed for 5yr and it includes unlimited priority data + 10GB international roaming every month. But it’s on Verizon’s network.

Fairphone or not T-Mobile isn’t anything like what it used to be. If you’re in a major city or suburb it’s worth taking a serious look at T-Mobile. I’m on US mobile which is a MVNO that allows you to freely switch between all 3 networks with two simultaneously active at any given time. 90% of the time T-Mobile has far better and faster coverage than either of Verizon or ATT. It used to be that Verizon was by far the best, but their network capacity hasn’t kept pace with T-Mobile’s growth, even if your Verizon plan has priority data (as mine does). This difference shows most when network capacity is limited.

T-Mobile’s rural coverage isn’t as great as either of Verizon’s or ATT’s, but it’s absolutely good enough for every road trip I’ve done. And when visiting family in rural northern Wisconsin only T-Mobile and ATT have reasonable coverage in their area. You can use a Mint Mobile trial SIM to see for yourself.

I think Verizon knows this too, all of the cheapest MVNOs have been switching to use Verizon’s network in recent years. The ISP mobile networks you can often get a year of for free also nearly all run on Verizon now. If you’re paying for your service, the Total Wireless $20/mo BYO plan with unlimited priority data and 10GB/mo of international data is the best deal out there by far. Verizon certainly wouldn’t be providing MVNOs with the lowest cut rate pricing if they thought they had the best network.

++Projectivy, it’s top tier software. It’s so clean by default, has lots of customization options, and no ads whatsoever. It’s so good that I worry Google will try to take away the option to use a third party homescreen on Android TV.

4" screen and 16MB flash is a joke. Ebooks are small, but not that small. Considering how many used, end of life Kindles there are out there stuck on old easily jailbroken firmware, I don’t see why anyone would ever choose this as an alternative. The software for jailbroken Kindles is incredibly mature and at the point of “just works”. E-ink technology hasn’t progressed much in the past ten years, so you really don’t miss out on anything by buying a $30 used one.

Edit: just realized it has micro SD support. So my storage concerns are invalid. It’s still incredibly clunky looking though, a 1cm thick device with only a 4" screen sure is something. My eyes probably couldn’t handle it even with the largest font.

There’s plenty of long form AI content lately too. Wikipedia articles make for great YouTube videos, and there’s no shortage of them. I’ve run into several channels lately where it took me about 30 seconds to realize something was off, and checking the channel’s history you can usually tell by finding older videos which actually have a person in them who is clearly very different than the narrator in the newer videos, or by just not having any older videos at all.

Apparently their dual extruder implementation works far better than any other on the market which is a huge deal for printing supports that don’t stick. Several of my friends have them and all love the print quality (it’s far better than anything I’ve gotten out of my printers). The pricing is admittedly great too.

I don’t have any issues with my i3 so won’t be getting one anytime soon, but I absolutely see why people new to 3D printing will go straight to Bambu. It sucks that they actively chose to be bad for the open source community they built their company on top of.

Projectivy is incredible. I took a while to try it because I didn’t have any real problems with Google’s launcher besides the ads, but the jellyfin and smarttube integration make it so much better than I realized.

If this is really as straightforward as it sounds then I’d consider this the best case scenario. Google could have gone full Apple style lockdown or even just have implemented this flow on a per app basis, but needing to wait 24hr one time to enable unverified app installation isn’t a bad idea from a security perspective. It prevents a bad actor with temporary access from being able to do much while not getting in the way of us power users after the initial 24hr period.

My bigger problem is how Google is leveraging their monopoly to implement this single-handedly and only for themselves. If they had instead gone through AOSP this perhaps could have been implemented in a better way to allow other parties than just Google to be the verifier, and that 24hr waiting period could be applied to any verifier that is not the phone’s default. I’d argue this would be an equally reasonable security measure considering how many scams are out there preying on those who aren’t technologically savvy, yet would maintain transparency.

Lyft been doing this since last year too. In Chicago our group of 5 was told to have our two men seated in the back row because the driver wasn’t comfortable with men. We were confused but the driver knew the ride was requested by a woman in our group and therefore assumed the whole group for the Lyft XL would be women I guess?

I can’t say I’ve had a great time with audio in either personally, though it’s indeed much easier to fix audio problems in Linux. But just yesterday pipewire must have hung or crashed preventing all browser based video playback entirely, which due to the symptoms not appearing audio related was quite annoying to debug. I still have no idea what caused it in order to avoid it happening again in the future.

All my friends who have one rave about the reliability. I can’t get one on principle. They’re all at the mercy of Bambu’s closed source firmware which means you’re always only one automatic update away from a required subscription.

These attacks are more around the encryption and all require a fully malicious server. It sounds like Bitwarden is taking these seriously and personally I’d still strongly prefer it to any closed source solution where there could be many more unknown but undiscovered security concerns.

Using a local solution is always most secure, but imo you should first ask yourself if you trust your own security practices and whether you have sufficient hardware redundancy to be actually better. I managed to lose the private key to some Bitcoin about a decade ago due to trying to be clever with encryption and local redundant copies.

Further, with the prevalence of 2FA even if their server was somehow fully compromised as long as you use a different authenticator app than Bitwarden you’re not at major risk anyways. With how poorly the average person manages their password security this hurdle alone is likely enough to stop all but attacks targeted specifically at you as an individual.

On Android Newpipe has the best UI in my opinion.

Snaps bundle dependencies and sandbox applications. The dependencies aspect is what matters more to me, but apparently there’s also security benefits if you were to try to install a malicious program.

You can remove snapd, doing so also removes a number of built in apps. But at that point you may start questioning why you’re not just using Debian stable and add the stuff you want. Both of these options pretty much defeat the point of what Ubuntu was.

18hr of battery with the display off is a killer, and even if you could get an m.2 modem working in it m.2 modems tend to be far less efficient than the ones integrated to cell phone hardware. At least if my experience with Quectel and Sierra m.2 modems is representative of other brands.

I get what Canonical was going for with snaps but wow did they ever ruin Ubuntu’s reputation. It used to be the clear choice for anyone who wanted a generic Linux where you don’t have to configure everything yourself. Sure some people didn’t like Unity but the core distro still worked well and was stable. With snaps, package management has become more complex than other distros while decreasing performance if memory limited (and who isn’t nowadays). The number of times I’ve had something not work in the “stable” snap package is far too many, and it’s pretty much always fixed by installing the same package with apt.

I get the reasoning for sandboxing applications, but they needed to wait until it was more stable to make the default. At this rate I doubt we’re ever going to get a truly mainstream desktop Linux distro rivaling macos and Windows…