

Try Fairphone. Ethically fantastic company, and they offer their phones with either Android or Murena /e/OS


Try Fairphone. Ethically fantastic company, and they offer their phones with either Android or Murena /e/OS


>Downloads Niagara to minimalise my phone, reduce distractions
>Buys Pro, re-enables icons
Am I a heathen


Well it’s a good thing those two URIs can be easily blocked. Besides you can get the app from their Github page (sadly no F-droid repo as closed-source), and pay for Pro (if wanted) via Stripe instead of Google Play. I also had issues migrating Niagara off of Google once I’d connected the two, but an email correspondence with the lead dev Max Rumpf got the issue pleasantly and quickly resolved.


It’s likely the only reason for the privilege is to collect coords to send to the weather API. At least it’s optional, and there are alternative ways to see weather reports, just not on the home screen.
I tried accessing Google Photos via my phone to handle a couple of things I had active on that account from before. Little fuck refused to let me open the app unless it had unconditional access to all my media.


+1 for Niagara, plus even though you don’t have to, pro features can be purchased outside of Google Play.


I’m using an adblocker and get in just fine, may be random or it may be the js blockers I’ve implemented. Here’s my list of lists in case:
Note for any NordVPN users, their URIs are blocked by HaGeZi. Same list temporarily had Tidal’s URIs blocked as well but it seems to have been fixed.


Steam is turning into a sour grape for me - I complied with their restrictive and ancient method of age verification for UK accounts but I kind of want to migrate off them (they also charge high fees for devs, make it ridiculously difficult for new devs to exist, can singlehandedly destroy a studio and are very much monopolising the PC games industry so there’s also ethics) - in favour of GOG. At least with them you own your games, and can (shock horror) even choose whether or not to update and patch that way to glitch out of the map, or duplicate those orbs for currency, or anything else that doesnt comply with the specific way you’re allowed to play with the world they built.
Damn, sorry, I should file this away into my ‘rants’ folder


Xbox has had this for quite a while now (although I haven’t checked if that’s UK exclusive)


If you run your own AI and watch how long it takes, how much it runs up the resources for a few seconds, then you might get an idea of what it’s like hosting at least three copies of a multi-terabyte LLM, in memory, with much shorter response and a much bigger knowledge base (Gemini by Google), taking millions of prompts per minute. Then think of every company that’s hosting major public AI services.
Then remember that the only things good that come out of AI are natural language inference for voice commands and slightly improved developer processes.
Hosting it is just a reminder of the rapid environmental, ecological and cultural destruction that is the AI bubble.
In summary: Perhaps, if the hoster wants it for streamlining their dev process. Otherwise it can be replaced with a far more efficient standard algorithmic program, which is what we had before.
It seems to be a 2016 CBBC reference involving a puppet called Hacker


Hell, I wish more games just had humanity. It might be due to me being antiwar, but when playing MMOs (whose MO is pretty much always ‘kill each other’ PVP) I wish folk were not so quick to kill, especially not when the kill isn’t imperative. Face it, some of the best ever moments in gaming are when folk have the option to kill each other and dont. A shred of humanism.
Universal signs in COD existed to plead for mercy, such as switching to a knife and looking away. In Black Ops II there’s a rave room in a map and several players spent a minute bobbing their characters around until someone else came and mowed the other team down. One time in Battlefield I spent the majority of a game (no mic mind you) chilling on a roof with half a dozen players from two teams. I came to multiplayer FPS games for the combat, stayed for the randoms I met.


So the US is acting like a leatherjacket beating on Iran, of the school’s punching bag family ‘Middle East’, telling an intervening Samaritan Pope to “stay out of it”


Kudos, that’s not an easy template to make lyrics for


Well, from what I can find it doesn’t seem that much of an attack vector –


– My phone does not have 2G compatibility, this probably only tracks location if you’ve switched on location services and I’d wager most people use IM calls and texts rather than cellular. If the phone is old enough to have 2G or 3G, perhaps there’s a threat. If you live in the US it’s ironically probably smart to leave it on – state forces are a bigger threat than malicious conglomerates atm


Even so, I can’t do this if I want to keep some services or games – I’m currently liberal with my app downloads and around a dozen refuse to work unless they’ve been installed or updated to the absolute latest release with the Play Store version - Aurora versions don’t work. There’s the argument that if it doesn’t work, it’s not valuable enough to keep, but I play games quite a bit.


They flagged Rustdesk a while back, which is a probably harmless open-source remote access software. Because of this I learned that Google not only has Play Protect in Google Play settings, but a second, separate setting in Security called Advanced Protection, that prompted me to remove Rustdesk, and a second time after it re-enabled itself. It reminds me of the days I ran Windows and the antivirus would kill vital programs or script files for some games.

Well this is awful. My policy is if it can’t agree to my terms, it is rejected. If a company is kicking up a fuss because I want to ensure my primary address isn’t forever compromised by spam, and doesn’t work with aliases or duckduckgo privacy relays, then said company doesn’t get my attention or business. Whatever the service you’re trying to obtain from them, I can almost guarantee there’s a more amicable alternative.


Bruh 65" is only good if you’re like 6m away - almost no homes are like that. <=42" is the only normal size for a normal home, and sacrificing no quality. I get preferences, but that size has nothing to do with practicality
In some respects I’m glad the US gets invasive updates before the UK, it means I get a longer warning, and this realm isn’t always protected by EU regulations. I haven’t used Photos for a while but I still need to warn others. One saving factor: even though the article never says it, this feature seems to be for backed-up media only, and not for on-device media.