I’m looking forward to 10 years from now, when this new novelty called, WRITING YOUR OWN SHIT (and reading it!) comes back into prevalence, and everyone thinks it is such an original idea.

(If we, or the Internet, are all still around then, anyway.)

As much as I like the metric system, temperature in the world is the one place where I prefer Fahrenheit. Having to care about decimal points on a thermostat just seems like trying too hard. “Oh honey, could you turn the thermostat down to 21.1C?”

You know that 100 is hot as balls. You know 0 is cold AF. 0C is 32F. That’s not really that cold, I’m shoveling snow in a t-shirt. 0F is really that cold. It is almost more akin to a percent of comfort scale than a measurement of temperature.

It is an interesting thought experiment though, as anyone using a given measurement scale gets used to it over time. I’ve been doing dual for a while to better intuit fuzzy translations in my head without having to run a formula every time.

Just an opinion of course, and not trying to have some flagrant discussion. I’d gladly switch to Celsius if we ever finally left Freedom Units. Thus far, the only places you see it in the US is in science, medical, and pop companies selling 16.9fl oz (just shy of 500ml) beverages instead of 20, so they can milk their bubble sugar water for all the profits.

Another route one can go that takes a bit of work is Obtainium. Hand-pick the apps you want to show up and feed their GitHub, F-Droid, etc. links to manage them. Since F-Droid has some issues with how they build packages, it can be used sparingly but not avoided then.

Go app by app until your dependence on the Play Store goes away. Then disable or uninstall (probably can only disable on most phones, I’ve seen anyway) the Play Store completely. Slow way to gain independence from crapware. You can then export your Obtainium config to a JSON file to import on future phones/other phones so you don’t have to duplicate the work.

Some bonus points, the non-Play version of one app I use shrinks from 120MB to 30MB when all the Google dependencies are stripped. You also gain back functionality like full filesystem access and other things Google forces apps to remove from the Play Store flavor.

More freedom. Faster apps. Less overhead. Less Google crap. Not a big scary transition.

While this was an inevitable move, it makes me curious if they are hitting a point where Gemini is becoming so integrated in all their software stacks and they’re just insanely paranoid about any precious “AI” code leaking that they just decided to close the gates early.

Probably for the best long-term. Having this weird dependency on the generosity of a corporation was always a liability. Whatever comes next can hopefully avoid it.

Hopefully someone like the EU, to combat ewaste, eventually requires all hardware manufacturers to sell their mobile hardware with bootloader/firmware flashing unlocking requirements. The work then will be for the community to write support for all these various makes and models of device, but the endgame being actual device freedom. Although with the world seemingly leaning hard into Authoritarianism and Fascism, it might not end up being the right time and freedom will remain underground.

A pity too, all phone hardware at its core is generic ARM computers with various devices connected to fairly generic interface busses. They just encrypt bits of code so the sauce to make things work is hidden.

KaiOS is one alternative, it was FirefoxOS. It’s pretty sluggish though. Maybe on more decent hardware with some optimizations it’d have a possibility. A lot of Nokia feature phones run it.

The complexity of getting the closed binary blobs to run modems and other hardware will make it exceedingly difficult to extract the necessary files and configurations to keep third-party OSes afloat. Then there’s the matter of carrier configs, carrier compatibility, expensive carrier certification, and even then, carriers may still just ban the device because they don’t like it.

Options will end up being:

• Tearing apart ROMs for blobs and backport/reverse-engineering patches to make them run on alt OSes.
• Find some hardware based on janky Chinese modems that will have little band support, lackluster performance, and likely banned by most carriers.
• Start a new company with the pull to design a new phone OS and hardware with chip and carrier support.

Not impossible, just exceedingly difficult. These systems are heavily integrated and heavily proprietary.

Funny part is, this move will actually make Google lose more money, as Google will lose hardware/software sales, and software dev over this. More people will end up on iOS in the interim, and out of it will come some new mobile OS that will make Google’s mobile OS irrelevant in 10 years.

Let’s start now, start a company, base a new phone on QNX, have an Android emulation layer for apps until a proper SDK is developed, and just take the wind out of Google sooner than later.

Can you assign a car or speaker audio profile to that Bluetooth device in Bluetooth or sound settings? Some phones have this option.

Their manufacturers think they do own us.

The best answer is to leave Gmail.

Hey, now, that’s the “power” of “AI” at work! /s

Check out OpenHAB. They already have containers available right on their downloads page.

Set the temperature knob to a reasonable level and let it manage itself, instead of causing forced power outage strain, if you intend for it to live a reasonable amount of time.

Some things don’t need home automation.

If America as it is known survives this, massive reforms will have to take place.

Random things like:

• The absolutely useless “impeachment” process will have to be replaced with something closer to Parliamentary “vote of no confidence” - no “trial” to be held by one section of one branch of government. It is nothing more than a sham process. If business boards of directors have figured out how to oust CEOs, the government should have a similar mechanism.
• President can’t have God-mode powers nor sign executive orders anymore. The President’s power should be severely limited. No one person should be a king. Not sure how we managed to do that one thing completely wrong. The position should be nothing more than a communications filter between government branches, nations, states, people, to push policy and steer governance.
• President could be allowed emergency declarations for 15 days, but their action is limited to deploying aid and resources and nothing more. Congress must then convene in 7 of those 15 days to decide how to proceed, in- or out-of-session. They can get off their lazy butts and work for once.
• President should be allowed to be jailed, and no member of government should ever be above the very laws they control.
• Presidential position could also be restructured. Pres and VP are just pres and pres. They both have to agree for any action to be taken. Why having one person with the final decision was ever a good idea when trying to remove kings makes no sense.
• Supreme Court ideally should be disbanded as it was only created to appease the rich, but in lieu of that, it should be completely refreshed. Possibly size expanded to 20 or some arbitrary number that helps break a focused pile of power by a few. All justices removed, replaced with non-partisan justices. If any justice seems to show partisan decision-making, they are audited by (some auditing body) that is probably not the other justices, like how an FAA flight crash incident is audited by a board of retired pilots. Justices will be term-limited. Justices should also be age-limited. Again, borrowing from FAA, if ATC controllers have to retire at 56, we can age-limit every governmental position. This gerontocracy has to stop. Old rarely means wise. Mental fitness should also be a factor, if you’re a Reagan or a Mango or a Feinstein where you don’t even know where you are half the time, you’re out.
• All government positions are term- and/or age-limited, but a staggering rule has to be initiated so there isn’t possibility of a 100% turnover in any given period of years. (Boards already have this concept.)
• Some mechanism should be put in place that makes it more commonplace for states to weigh in when the Federal government is doing something wrong. And one for individual citizens. Voting processes should be standardized and modernized to make every citizen’s vote more powerful.
• To toss the Libertarians a bone, states rights. The power distribution has to be restructured. Things like “state pays Fed x money, so state can receive y money” goes away. The state sends some money to the Federal government and keeps more internally so they can self-manage. The economies of each state would need balance as there are many welfare states that need the money in the Federal government to survive. Regardless, each state’s economy should be structured so that the Federal government is more of an afterthought. Federal government standardizes processes, roads, specifications, etc. so that interstate trade travel and movement is made easier. Basically though, to limit the scope of power the Federal government has. Not to demolish or disband it, just to make it so even if somehow, in the new system, someone tries to play king, they’re but king of very little, and can’t threaten states to bend the knee by trying to cut off their precious money. (Which alone should be made illegal.)
• All the obvious money in elections and money in politics and political donation stuff all has to die, for good. Codified into the constitution. Each candidate is given y amount of timeslots on various media, and z amount of campaigns, funded by taxpayers equally. No other money can be used. (Funded by the taxpayers so it’s all an even ground and some CEO can’t come sail in on his space yacht and run a fancier campaign.)

And at the end of it, governance should be made boring again. One shouldn’t get into the job to be Lauren Boobert the reality TV trash soundbite handjob star. It should be a paper pushing position that keeps the country and its “economy” going.

Probably some other stuff this ramble forgot to add.

It’s weird how business, boards, even HOAs seem to have a better set of checks and balances than the US Federal government.

That’s SOP for government contracts. The US government, and others, have had access in the past. NDA blah blah blah.

RAM speed is going to be negligibly different in daily use, and on-die RAM will compensate for that slightly slower clock on the ARM computer. Intel’s hyperthreading is much less a performance advantage than it used to be. Intel chips suck anymore though, full stop, and generate heat like mofos. I wouldn’t be surprised if this computer uses that generation of Intel chips that randomly dies, gen13 I think?

Worse, that Beelink will be using Intel embedded graphics which is basically the worst on the planet - I’d take Qualcomm Adreno before Intel embedded.

It’s also listed on Amazon as frequently returned. Not worth $869. Could get an Asus (née Intel) NUC that would serve much better, I think there are at least some AMD variants now.

The Beelink might make a dandy headless server if one got lucky though, if GPU isn’t needed for AI/ML or other GPU-based acceleration/calculations.

Beelink also wins points for having actual hard drive and RAM slots as well. Still probably not worth the money versus anything else.

Really can’t wait for some computer companies that aren’t Apple to start pumping out ARM mini PCs and laptops with decent chips.

FWIW, and not trying to be an apologist as I find their pricing insane, they at least seem to be using good SSDs. I’ve found over the last 10 years that SSD life can vary wildly. Just some light-access databases destroyed some consumer-grade SSDs and hybrid drives’ SSD portions. A couple in less than a year.

Have a dev mac that I absolutely constantly murder the SSD on daily over the last 3 or so years. I’m talking gigabytes of data written daily 5 days a week. Available spare sectors is still 100%, and percentage “used” (which granted, is a vendor-specific life metric) is 5%.

That being said, I’ll still be hating on them for soldering the SSD to the motherboard. That is the real crime.

Also, for the ones that support reset after 10 wrong passcodes, enable that shit. SIM PIN too (mostly for various other reasons.)

Intel was technologically cooked when the first AMD Athlon came out, architecturally, and business-wise. They should have kicked true r&d into high-gear and didn’t, really. The Core processors were something, but more of a nudge than something to stay relevant in the 21st century. If Apple can finally crack modems, Qualcomm will be next, although their mil/gov stuff may keep them in business as purely a contractor. Cisco is pretty close too, but they’re too skilled at acquisitions as a method to keep staying relevant.

Have you ever watched all the stupid crapware Google pushes on setup? They force-install 12-20 garbage apps that you then have to go delete. Even then, a user can’t delete Chrome, they can only “disable” it - which Google can reactivate whenever they choose. (Although, one could also argue since they can arbitrarily push apps onto phones, does it matter? Like when they pushed “Android System SafetyCore” without consent.)

Google is malware at this point. Not that Apple is any better. Smartphones have all just become this terrible thing at this point, where you’re just renting a pile of software that you get to use in exchange for the company harvesting everything you do, and they change the terms whenever they want, without your consent.

Don’t feel like you have to race. It took about a year to shift e-mail addresses last time I did it. Keep the old one as a harvesting point until you move over what you want. Then just leave the old one around to use up space on Google’s servers if you really want to softly be a dick. (They eventually close them after some period of inactivity.)

Basic steps for a slightly more thorough method that also preserves old e-mail:

• Do a GDPR/Google data dump of your gmail to mbox file(s).
• Install Mozilla Thunderbird on a computer and use ImportExportTools NG to import the mbox file(s) into Thunderbird so you can access all your old e-mail.
• Delete all e-mail from Gmail.
• Turn off all mail rules on Gmail so everything just comes to the inbox.
• You can forward to your new address if you want to, or, just let email collect in the old account and switch addresses from time to time as you use various services.
• After a time, delete the account if you so choose, or leave it dormant until Google deletes it.