Thanks, here’s hoping! I love it as a phone, but I suspect it might be another app showing the icon - there should be no way for a disabled app to do so…

Anyway, I’ll keep casually digging, maybe start disabling apps one by one to see which one is the culprit or something :)

Factory reset is out of the question - I spent way too much time installing and setting everything up after changing phones to nuke it all (because Google sucks and doesn’t allow backing all the settings and such without root, but that’s a rant for another day).

I did reboot the phone, yes, multiple times - after turning calendar notifications off, disabling the app and so on. No dice, the icon keeps coming back. Oh well, guess I’ll have to get used to it - it’s a distracting eyesore, but the phone is working fine. Maybe it fixes itself after the update to Android 15…

Thanks a bunch for all the suggestions and willingness to help - appreciate it!

That didn’t work unfortunately - my Google calendar is actually completely empty, no tasks, notifications or anything. Cleared app data, even tried force stopping and disabling the app completely (can’t fully uninstall it, since it’s system), but the darn icon is still there. Maybe I just need to learn to live with it, even though it annoys me…

That’s a great find, thanks! The problem is, I don’t actually have any tasks scheduled right now, and the icon never disappears. Disabling calendar notifications completely doesn’t hide it either, I even tried disabling the calendar app completely, and still nothing…

I solved this issue by following multiple tags that interest me. People tend to tag their posts on Mastodon it seems, so discovering posts about, say, wine and cacti is as easy as following #wine #cactus #cacti #redwine #oragewine and so on and so forth - it’s working pretty good for me without an algorithm recommending stuff to me, maybe it’s worth a try?

Oh cool! I’ll need to look into that, thanks! Wonder if there’s a way to convert an existing Windows parition into this somehow, installed software and all, because that would be perfect…

Right, but you have to boot into Windows first to even get the update in the first place…

So, no booting into Windows until this is fixed then? Fine by me. Hell, might actually make me uninstall it completely and free some disk space…

Same here. I was fine with W10, but the recent W11 shenanigans were the last straw, and I decided to give Linux Mint a try. Couldn’t be happier - everything is so much more snappy now. And since I game on consoles only and my crappy PC was never a gaming machine to begin with, I have zero issues - wish I switched sooner!

Which means one more screen to show ads - this is why they do it…

I can see why spez is upset about scrappers and search engines - image a company profiting from people creating lots of data, just hoarding it and using it for free, and not paying those people a cent, preposterous, right? :)

Small print, excessive legalese and outright deceptive language in ads, agreements and such. All the “free” (not really free) trials, “unlimited” (not really unlimited) plans, “best value” (according to the producer and their mum) deals and shit like that.

There really should be a law prohibiting that - if reading through terms and conditions for using a damn website or a toothbrush or whatever requires 4 hours of free time, a magnifyibg glass and degree in law, such t&cs should be illegal. Same for disclaimers and such in ads - any 4pt text displayed for 2 seconds on screen should automatically result in a massive fine.

Yup, most of the internet is now sadly an ad-infested monetized corporate hellhole, and as a bonus it’s now rapidly being filled to the brim with AI slop, because it clearly wasn’t bad enough just yet… :(

It’s always porn, isn’t it? We don’t need to protect children from misinformation, fascism, violence, racism, discrimination or exploitation on the internet, it’s always just porn for some reason…

The anti-AI knee-jerk reactions can be extreme, I agree, but at the same time one of important features of Mastodon is that your feed is nor controlled by an algorithm in any way.

So when a company comes, takes those posts and screws with them to create an algorithm to show them, I understand people getting angry - at least some of them joined to be free of that exact thing…

The wildest part is that he’s surprised that Mastodon peeps would react negatively to their posts being scrapped without consent or even notification and fed into an AI model. Like, are you for real dude? Have you spent more than 4 seconds on Mastodon and noticed their (our?) general attitude towards AI? Come the hell on…

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Eating out of stress or boredom instead of when I’m actually hungry. I am getting better, but still, sometimes work pisses me off so much it’s back to angrily stuffing whatever food I have on hand into my gaping maw…

Oh, “It’s almost entirely blind to almost all consumers”? That’s almost fine then!

A safety can opener that doesn’t create any sharp edges, like this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i_mLxyIXpSY (a LONG video, but quite an interesting one IMHO).

It’s nor even funny how much this thing is better than any other opener I’ve ever used, it’s just so bloody amazing!