Limited variety, hit-or-miss playback, and Youtube hasn’t quite enshittified enough for me to quit.

I would mirror my videos to PeerTube if I were to create content. Alas, I am merely a consumer.

Buy a plot of land with a nice view and construct one of those nifty passive houses. Also get my teeth and knees fixed, put together a nice home lab, and go travelling. Split the surplus between retirement savings and donating to causes I find worthy.

Once every 2 or 3 years back when I was buying the stinky cheap ones. My current Pixel, however, is approaching 5 years strong. No good reason to buy a new one at this point, maybe until the GrapheneOS Motorola comes out since I don’t do anything computationally intensive on my phone.

Perfected a recipe using mostly fresh ingredients to replicate my favorite overpriced frozen microwave meal

Groceries, gaming, looking at various niche hobby sites that I only check on a weekly basis

My collection of hoarded media waits eagerly if this forces me to say goodbye to the internet outside of work obligations

GrapheneOS undisputed #1 for me, but also RestlessOS or LeOS for devices that are only compatible with GSI since those also strip out pings to Google.

privacy.com cards and prepaid Visa/Mastercard I believe let you enter any address of your choice. Of course, privacy.com would still know and some vendors might be a bit more restrictive, especially towards the prepaid cards in recent years.

Isn’t the PO box merely to hide your identity from the seller rather than the post office? Not casting doubt on your approach though, just curious if there was anything more to be aware of since I too am thinking about signing up for a PO box.

I’d go see my closest family and open up the vintage wines we’d been saving for later

Tempered glass and thick case. Specifically one of those cases with interlocking front and back pieces. Makes it look and feel like it was always an integral part of the phone. In fact it is now, after I took out the glue to replace the battery and couldn’t be bothered to put glue back.

Tore out the plastic sheet included with it and stuck a glass protector in its place. Glass doesn’t have to be expensive, I got mine in a 2-pack for just $6. Maybe the more expensive ones have some oleophobic, anti-glare, or anti-scratch, but mine’s held up nicely for over 3 years.

I don’t mind the extra heft at all and would probably have perpetual anxiety if I had to use a phone without a case.

It could have been many moons ago. But about ten years ago, Google rolled out an irresistible deal for schools that included the workspace suite and unlimited storage. The schools took it up passionately and this is how we got students opening up a Google Docs browser tab that consumes 540 MB of RAM just to jot down a note two sentences long, and schools stuck with Google even as they aggressively whittle away at the promised ‘unlimited’ storage.

Realistically, the software doing the phoning home would have to run on the streaming box; the AAA batteries in a remote would be drained within a matter of hours or days if it were to continuously record and send it back. Software phoning home is a concern with off-the-shelf boxes, but on a Linux mini PC, it’s equivalent to plugging in an external mic. Still good practice to do away with it if you don’t need it.

To his credit, Rob’s videos introduced me to cell phone privacy. But his products are all just pre-flashed off-the-shelf devices. The bespoke Brax phone models are merely rebranded mid-tier phones from a generic ODM. None of it is more secure than what GrapheneOS on a Pixel offers and all of the offerings have alternatives that are cheaper or better audited.

Desktop: Librewolf, Chromium as a fallback

Mobile: Vanadium on devices with GOS; adblocking via DNS. Cromite for my secondary phone and degoogled but not GOS tablet.

Just curious, what kind of batteries are powering the remote and if rechargeable, how often does it need charging? Not saying they wouldn’t do such things, still a good preventative measure, but I’d be surprised if it could sustain telemetry with only the power of AAA batteries in a typical remote.

Can confirm it happens even with residential IPs recently, good thing I don’t have static or ‘sticky’ IP so I’m not blocked too long.

You could make it about equivalent to the protections afforded by the typical BIOS password, i.e. the attacker must first disassemble your laptop to reflash the spi chip or pull the hard drive. A grub.cfg like so would do, assuming everything in encrypted partitions:

set prefix=(memdisk)/boot/grub
set superusers="myuser"
password_pbkdf2 myuser grub.pbkdf2.sha512.10000.<your hashed password>
cryptomount -u <UUID of LUKS container>
search.fs_uuid <UUID of the root filesystem under LUKS container> root cryptouuid/<UUID of LUKS container>
configfile ($root)/@rootfs/boot/grub/grub.cfg

Assuming you boot directly to GRUB or locked out the SeaBIOS boot device selector, then GRUB will only ever look for a boot device matching your disk’s UUID; attempting to do anything else aside from entering the LUKS passphrase will prompt for the GRUB password. You’d still have your own recovery path by pressing Esc, entering your GRUB password, and dropping to the GRUB shell. Bonus points for patching the GRUB code so it doesn’t echo the UUID of your disk.

No, it isn’t bulletproof against physical access. But yes, I had the same question you did when starting out with coreboot and this was the solution I came up with.

What I like to call temporal horror vacui. Some things are easy to start, they do require some periodic checking, but are otherwise passive. So I’ll start a 3d print, get water boiling on the stove, or start running an offline backup. Then my mind is bothered that those are such “empty”, “unproductive” tasks, and so reactively fills in the gaps with things I’ve been procrastinating like dishes, meal prep, planning, etc.

Also body doubling. For emails, I have a good friend at work who also massively struggles with them, so every now and then, we make a commitment to each other and for an hour or two, both sweep through our inboxes, with a bit of commiseration along the way.

Anyway, it’s still a struggle that makes me wonder about seeking an ADHD evaluation … next month maybe.

Through my entire stint having to use it in Europe, the closest I could find was a webview for the web client: https://f-droid.org/en/packages/io.kuenzler.whatsappwebtogo/

Sadly, they enforce use of the official client to create an account and resync whenever the web client session expires. Even once got locked out for using the official client downloaded from Aurora Store, apparently I ought to have to downloaded the APK directly from their website, if not from the play store.

Edit: I also think potential legal pressure also contributes to a FOSS client not existing. Last time someone tried making a feature-complete FOSS Instagram client, they stopped after a cease and desist from Meta.

Obligatory, I would have loved to go without anything Meta in the first place, but if you’ve spent any time around non-techy colleagues in Europe, you’ll know how much of an uphill battle it is.