Lol, you’re something else, candy corn?? That stuff is vile.

The worst I can say about dots is they’re just sugar, albeit glued to paper.

Will you come organize my candy bowl this year? 😆

Yea, just requires a Dropbox account. And unfortunately I can’t get it to authenticate.

I’ll try some more when I have time, it’s a brilliant solution.

Proton sucks.

I had an account, way too many problems. Apps sucked ass.

Wow, great article, thanks for the link.

The moment I read the quote from Signal’s president, I called bullshit. I was there, working at a company that had massive records, probably of about 1/3 of Americans.

We were very much concerned with this data in private hands. We were concerned about this kind of data in anyone’s hands.

Such BS coming from Signal is part of why I no longer use or reccomend the app. I simply can’t trust them when they make such blatantly bullshit statements.

Like their reasononing for dropping SMS support because the “engineering costs”. There’s nothing your app does for SMS, other than to hand the message to the SMS system (technically, it reads and writes to the single SMS database on Android, which was a change implemented in about 2015), using a published API.

I’m starting to suspect the motives after reading such lies.

It also depends on your layering, or lack of. It’s the complexity issue you ran into.

Great post by the way.

Requires Dropbox.

Would be great if it could let you sync stuff yourself, like with Syncthing or Resilio.

I refuse to use Cloud storages.

Still this is one of the best solutions I’ve seen.

Well, fuck yea, of course it would have to, as it’s part of the history!

(Just watched the Pentaverate, and the bar scene comes to mind, where everyone is cussing their brains out).

Archive.is is your friend

The fork is much better anyway.

It moves the sync options into each sync folder/job. Lots more flexible. Now my photos sync on any network and any charge state, while less important things (downloads, etc) only sync when on WiFi and charging.

Only updates it should need are for weird changes Google decides to make to Android.

Hell, at this point if someone forked the fork, and charged a small fee for the Relay Server hosting, I’d happily pay.

Yea, for appliance components like compressors, thinner materials has practically no impact on performance (but probably saves a little money on manufacturing, and probably reduces life span).

For the condenser and evaporator, it could make a difference, but those have been largely optimized probably since the 60’s - they’re not complex things. Even there, a thinner wall on the tubing isn’t really going to make a major improvement, since it’s fin density that really matters.

It’s controls that break 98%+ of the time. A refrigeration circuit is pretty simple, so long as you don’t poke a hole in the system, generally it will continue to work.

Of all the systems I’ve worked on, I’ve rarely replaced even a compressor (it does happen). Condensers and evaporators practically never wear out - almost all that I’ve replaced have failed from being hit by something, or being cleaned with an unfriendly chemical (some newer ones are really fragile, and even conventional ones don’t like dog urine on them constantly). A family friend has been an HVAC guy since I was little (he taught me), and this squares with his experience.

Controls are #1, seals are second (especially on automotive systems, since they get shaken around constantly and deal with much greater temp swings).

“New” stuff (starting in the 80’s) has shit electronic controls - they’re manufactured as cheaply as possible (unlike say electronic controls for a car engine or safety systems, which have to meet regulatory requirements). Old school controls are so simple there’s little to go wrong.

The “new” DC/inverter compressors are probably the biggest improvement in recent years, since they can run at varying loads instead of just off/on - this should make them noticeably more energy efficient.

Early Android (circa 2009) didn’t have locked bootloaders.

Google wanted people to experiment, which was basically free research for them. Pixel’s today are unlocked when purchased from Google.

Even my earliest Verizon phones weren’t bootloader locked - they didn’t start doing that for a few years (my last Verizon phone in 2012 wasn’t bootloader locked). And Verizon is arguably the worst vendor when it comes to bootloader locked phones.

I give DivestOS a mention - it’s a Lineage fork with some security changes (such as sandboxing MicroG if you decide to install it).

As others have said, the Pixel line is the easiest if you want to have full control over the phone.

There are others, but it will take more effort to get there (I say this after flashing and rooting all my phones since 2010).

Take a look at lineageos.org/devices to see what devices they support, it’s a good approximation of which phones can be boot loader unlocked.

After lots of looking around, I decided to finally jump to Pixel, and I’m running DivestOS (a fork of Lineage with a little bit more tweaked, like sandboxing MicroG).

Once you decide to go down this road, I’d suggest downloading the factory rom image for your phone, and practice flashing it, before trying with a custom rom, just so you have some experience with a known-good image. Plus, sometimes you have to flash back to stock - I just did one the other day because I screwed up the custom rom flash.

You can enable Funnel, which doesn’t require others to have the TS client.

That just sounds painfully inefficient (though we’ve been doing stuff like this for decades).

Arm isn’t as efficient at higher cpu states as x86, and running a VM you’re definitely going to up the cpu usage.

Still interesting to watch. And every use-case is unique. For the typical short-run process this is for, it’ll probably be fine.

Well, it is.

It’s a lot more work to use not-Google stuff on Android. Which I try very hard to do.

Now trying to get a family member to install and run anything not from the Play store is like pulling teeth.

It’s the convenience angle.

I have very experienced IT friends who continue to use privacy invasive crap, knowingly because they like the convenience.

So is termux a containerized Linux? (I haven’t looked into it yet, just on my list). I had assumed it was a VM, guess I was incorrect.

Hey, your upfront, honest, no-excuses post goes a long way, in my opinion.

Shit happens. We’ve all screwed things up - letting everyone know immediately what’s going on means we won’t guess when our shortcut doesn’t work, etc.

Also thanks for the effort you put into this. It’s really helpful.