Thanks for sharing. As a frequent cyclist who loves cheese and doesn’t drink soda or eat many sweats, I feel like this will be an interesting read.

The food has been impregnated with microplastics as well. This machine runs on sugar, but someone put oil in the tank. :-/

I used a Palm Zire 31 and Later a Dell Axim 51v (Windows Mobile) in high school. People thought I was weird, but it kept me organized. I miss how simple and functional those programs were. This was largely pre-enshittification. No built in keyboard on either, but physical buttons alone are a strength.

I’m running Nextcloud and PaperlessNXG on my servers. Over the last few months I tested out my remote management. Now that I’m back home, I’ve been making a few adjustments based on my learnings. Firstly, Wireguard is slower than a turtle, while Tailscale has been a little bit faster. I’m guessing this is due to my upload speed and switching to fiber may fix this.

I’d also like to add TubeArchivist back in since there’s some great videos that I don’t trust Google to preserve given the direction things are going.

The folks on the “privacy” Lemmy gave me some good tips on app replacements and after making a big spreadsheet with all my apps, their licenses, etc., I cut down my remaining proprietary apps by at least 50% and I only have a few proprietary essentials that still depend on Google Play. I’ve been meaning to do this for a long time and I almost have a path towards completely removing all Google, Amazon, and Microsoft products from my life.

Next, I’d like to set up Wander to eventually get rid of Garmin/Strava but I haven’t been able to figure it out and I’m still locked in to some degree because of my hardware (Garmin watch). The Ring doorbell has to be the next thing to go, but I’m exhausted and haven’t had the motivation to start a new project until the dust settles from the last one.

I heard great things about the Pebble from someone who had one.

Personally, I had a few different smart watches and learned a bit about what I want over the years:

• Mi Bands (Xiomi Devices) that had otherworldly battery life (like a month and a half in some cases) but had trash sensors and were junk without the unofficial apps that made them great
• Some Android Wear/ WearOS smart watches
• a cheap ass POS Temu-equivilant no-name junk watch
• Multiple Garmin devices (touchscreen Venue and button controlled Fenix)

This made me realize a few things:

• I don’t want or need a super-smart watch
• battery life and capable sensors are way more important than stupid flashy shit
• the display tech I want indoors in my office is not the same display I want on a wear-everywhere watch (TFT looks stellar under bright sun)
• buttons beat a touchscreen each and every day of the week and make the watch a convenience rather than a finnicky gadget

To be fair, this is MY use case and yours may differ, but when it comes down to it, I’m sure that I’m not in the market for a wearOS or Apple Watch. I love the button operated TFT screen Garmin watch I’ve been using for a few years and if I don’t replace it with another Garmin watch, it’ll be something like Pine Time, Pebble, or something that works with gadgetbridge.

I also felt like the author of the article ignorantly weaponized the name to make something completely mundane sound like a bad thing. They totally stomped right into the corporate moustrap while doing so. Why not call all app stores something like “corporate single source installation” or “[Microsoft/google/apple] assisted installation”? Maybe someone will write an article on the dangers of that.

Also, I don’t give a shit about TikTok. I just don’t like the fact that everything is capitalized on to make the world a shittier place so someone can collect a few extra gold coins.

I’ve never had a reason to hope for a localized undersea earthquake before…

I’m a fan of Wander, and have followed these posts with great interest, but haven’t been able to successfully install it get myself. I’ll give it another try in late Feb early Mar.

Traffic isn’t too bad where I’m at, but I find myself missing satelite images and streetview, both for exploring and locating garage entrances or anything else. Having said that, and thanks to my buddies here on Lemmy, I successfully eliminated over half of my proprietary phone apps and shoved all the remaining proprietary stuff in a single folder so I would only access it after trying the FOSS alternatives. Anything that has a web portal instead of an app is going next, and that includes Google Maps.

Organic maps is great, OSMand is great if more detail is needed.

I never understood the desire to search in conversational language via AI. It’s gone to far for my taste. I just want to be able to scour a huge volume of info for my exact search terms, maybe with a few synonyms or misspellings included. Google and AI keep trying to assume they know what I’m looking for, but they’re always wrong (intentionally wrong based on their own motives).

The reason the dataset interests me is that search has gotten so bad that I can’t get any non-corporate information from search engines anymore, just more pig swill, chumbucket ads, and misinformation slop. Anything I search for would probably give better results if I just searched old reddit, Wikipedia, and a few other datasets locally in a simple way. Not sure what software is best to use for something like that, but I’d like to collect a few mostly pre-AI datasets now to get the ball rolling before you can’t find those online anymore either.

Apparently Boox has been a stomping all over the GPL licensing terms. You can find a lot of info on it, but here is a non-reddit link: https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=277431

Is there anywhere I can find a complete scrape of Reddit threads and comments from before the 3rd party app apocalypse? There was a lot of useful info shared on there, but I don’t want anything to do with what that site has become. I’m happy just to CTRL+F a big dataset. It’ll probably still work better than either Reddit or Google does nowadays. Without media I imagine I could fit it somewhere.

Also, Spez is a greedy little pig boy.

If someone was to acquire a few hundred gigs of books and feed them to something like paperless-ngx, would it work as a sort of google of books? Are there any software projects better suited for doing thisand understand synonyms and perhaps some context? I guess AI search but guided for the intermediate user.

Google is so bad lately. Basically every result is official sponsored corporate biased BS. It would be nice to be able to instantly query a bunch of ebooks.

Kinky people are still going to be kinky even if they can’t post about it on Reddit. Here’s to hoping lemmyNSFW gets some of those “niche subs”. ;-)

Will do. Cleaning up the sourcing of my food for both health and political reasons is a goal of mine for 2025. If I can grow it, trade it, or get it from a farmer locally, the supermarkets can take the loss.

My local grocery store from the Safeway family of stores has Bluetooth beacons that crashed my old phone. Now I turn my phone off as I have to assume these are to track where I am in the store and for how long so they can further target their ads.

Actually downloading their app is 100% a no from me. I’m moving to local stores wherever possible because I can afford it, and to be honest, the grocers raised their prices so much, only certain items are more expensive bought local.

I’ve been looking into the local veggie co-op. You pay for the season and you can pick up a box of veggies once a week, all locally sourced. I’d go to the farmers market, but I’m worried it’ll just be a bunch of people selling marked up veggies they got from the grocery store.

Do they have employees on H1B? If so, that may be why they haven’t jumped ship for less-Nazified pastures. Not excusing anyone, just striving to understand.

Imagine we made this into the privacy key that, by default, launches your distro’s privacy settings.

How’s that for subverting MS’s intent?

Give Nextcloud AIO a shot. I installed bare metal the first time, but AIO has decreased my maintenance burden to next to nothing. Before that, it felt like every update would break my system. I’m a year or two into my transition from Linux nerd to self-hoster. I still fail at things on occasion, but I have learned a lot. I hope it goes as well or even better for you.