For anyone who doesn’t have a device that natively supports this feature, there’s an app on F-Droid called “Privacy Indicators” that provides this for camera and mic access. It uses the built-in Accessibility services to provide this, and needs a couple of other special permissions

You can change the color of the indicator, mine’s red for more visibility.

I installed it from GitHub however, since the F-Droid build was really outdated: https://github.com/NitishGadangi/Privacy-Indicator-App

The car full of hammer and sickles in the background though 😂😂 that’s metaphorical gold

I use OSMand alongside GMaps WV (a webview for Google Maps, wipes all data automatically after closing). Works well enough for me, but in GMaps you can’t rotate the map or provide your location

I use “Automation” (on fdroid) - the UX could do with some improving but it thoroughly covers the basics.

Newer versions of Android make it difficult to automate certain things though, I find root helps to get around that in some cases

Ouch, I remember when this was integration was announced a few years ago.

Glad I stuck with a locally managed library, however this must suck for those who have gotten used to the convenience of having one big music library…

I have to admit I’m not entirely convinced these requests are coming from a compiler…

Is it possible for you to virtualize an non-networked system with your GPU passed through? That seems like the best option IMO. Next best thing would be to set up an airgapped machine just for this, but not everyone has a 2nd machine.

Personally when I was trying out local LLMs I used a virtual machine, mainly due to the known code execution vulnerability related to Tensorflow model data being saved in python’s Pickle format. I believe the recommended save method changed twice since those days though.

With the Firefox stuff I’m assuming you’ve also checked their enterprise config options too (which are admittedly difficult to find and piece together online), so not too sure what else you could do except aside from continuing to block them. Librewolf however provides documentation on how to disable the extra requests sent from their browser in their FAQ, and covers some preferences on the subsequent page linked at the bottom

Nothing concerning for me here personally. However, if you have an issue with Firefox’s ‘QoL’ features dependent on Mozilla infrastructure, you could consider Librewolf instead as an alternative.

As for the reverse lookup requests, those are targeting local multicast addresses on your internal network, except the last one which is for the Fastly CDN service

AFAIK on Windows the physical disk containing the partition needs to be marked offline in Disk Management, and the disk or a partition given exclusively to VirtualBox running as administrator, otherwise access is limited to read-only

I would suggest checking some other sources as well, just in case this has changed over the years. If you do successfully pass the physical partition into VirtualBox read-write, you might need to set up a virtual disk with grub to boot into your physical Linux partition

I’m rooted to…

• backup & restore my apps as I please (as well as scheduled backups to my SD card)
• BMS control to keep my battery in good health
• Automation app for automating stuff (like Tasker)
• revoking typically unrevokable permissions from system and Google apps
• To actually feel like I own my device.

If I wanted a heavily curated (and somewhat locked down) experience, I’d be in the Apple ecosystem - don’t know why Google thinks it’s a great idea to force this ideology onto practically all Android users…

Similar situation with that additional warning for sideloading apps - there’s already two warnings and Play Protect typically uninstalls these apps anyway, without the user’s consent - in one case deleting KDE Connect from users’ devices if installed with F-Droid

Uhh I definitely went off on a tangent, oops.

To answer the direct question - no

I do have some thoughts on moving away from the Pi though - warning, heavy personal bias ahead…

If you’re looking at moving away from the Pi I would just suggest a low power x86 box, like a Nuc or some Intel N100 low-power tiny PC.

There is a caveat though - it looks like the OctoPi project only provides OS builds for the Pi, so if you change systems it looks like you’ll need to install OctoPrint manually, and port over your config somehow.

On ebay you can get second-hand NUCs, 6th gen and up, for practically peanuts. The cheaper quad core celeron nucs (i.e. J3455) are roughly equivalent to the 3rd and 4th gen dual-core i5s (3777u, 3230m etc) performance wise, but have an updated QuickSync encoder and support accelerated 4K video encoding/playback, handy if you want to capture timelapses of your prints or just view them live. They also consume 1/3rd of the power at around 10 watts under the same workload.

ARM support for other vendors can be pretty flaky, sometimes even non existent. While you could pick an Orange Pi, and go with a modern community-supported distro like Armbian, it isn’t a turnkey experience like the Pi. There is much less documentation, and still some very early boards floating around with hardware defects and overheating issues (posing a fire risk in the worst case, the OPi Zero being the most egregious - literally melting the optional enclosure and killing the NIC). Some research before buying will let you know most of what you need to know - check around the forums for any common issues and dealbreakers, as well as the manufacturer’s site to get an idea of available support.

If you want to get an idea of the alternatives you could check out Jeff Geerling’s youtube channel, he covers the Pi and occasionally videos on other alternatives, as well as issues he’s had with them and support. I’ll try and link some below…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KghZIgkKZcs

Check the comments on that one for a quick synopsis, as the video is quite long…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jjzvh-bfV-E

This video pretty much just echoes my current perspective

To combine a bunch of explanations I’ve seen in the comments here:

A bourgeois philanthropist game show producer who dabbles in poverty porn.

That said, I do occasionally burn time watching some of his videos, however some of the content (especially the more recent game show ones which feel a bit like toying with people) rub me the wrong way.

I have no idea if his philanthropy efforts are genuine or not - he’s barely visible in those videos (he has another individual hosting those videos) although I do appreciate the efforts they appear to go to when assisting communities desperately in need, and careful implementation of solutions that are sustainable, and can actually be maintained and fixed with local knowledge.

I’ve seen way too many “gimmicky” charity contributions by other organizations that become worthless as soon as they break because nobody fixes them, as well as other solutions that seemingly make sense from a western cultural lens but aren’t really understood by the local people… worst one being a “merry-go-round” water pump mechanism where senior locals are forced to “play” just to pump water for survival. It was originally intended as a kids toy, but they of course don’t have any attachment to such a foreign device, thus don’t use it.

Ehhh apologies for the mini rant there 😅

The first thing I did after purchasing an MX Master a few years ago was block the update server, after realising it downloads update binaries over plain HTTP and tries to automatically run them on boot 🤡

Very nice mouse tbh, just such a shame the company and their software is toilet water

The Grayjay app includes an entire development environment for plugins.

No idea why the keyboard app is “large”. Could it be for support on obsolete Android devices where they’ve needed to re-implement missing APIs and features entirely themselves (like Firefox/Fennec and the Share menu)?

They could also be using completely different local AI tooling, or a custom trained model that has a higher space footprint compared to other similar apps. As always the true answer lies in the available code…

Edit: Grayjay’s = The Grayjay

This looks like one of those low cost netbooks from the time where “EPad” and “MID” tablets were a thing. There is an edition of Windows CE floating around for these - but WiFi will not work, neither the modem if this has one built in.

No idea about Linux - there is a kernel so you’re technically half way there, but considering most of these had a slow single core ARM CPU and 256MB of RAM on a good day, practical use is limited IMO

ASMedia is the only controller IC manufacturer that can be trusted for these IME. They also have the best Linux support compared to the other options and support pass-through commands. These are commonly found in USB DAS enclosures, and a very small fraction of single disk SATA enclosures

Innostor controllers max out at SATA 2 and lock up when you issue pass-through commands (e.g. to read SMART data). These also return an incorrect serial number. These are commonly found in ultra cheap desktop hard drive docks, and 40pin IDE/44pin IDE/SATA to USB converters

JMicron controllers (not affiliated with the reputable Micron) should be avoided unless you know what you are doing… UASP is flaky, and there are hacky kernel boot time parameters required to get these working on Raspberry Pi boards. Unfortunately these are the most popular ones on the market due to very low cost

Probably not.

However, not all USB to SATA adapters support SMART, so even if there is a bad sector that gets remapped by the HDD on-the-fly (and thus does not show up in the software scan), you may not find out easily

This infographic is really helpful. Stuff like this makes me relieved I use the majority of services in a browser, rather than native apps

Chromium… I’m so getting downvoted with this one.

Why? Anyone is free to use whatever browser floats their boat 🤷‍♂️

Firefox itself is quite sluggish and slow to open on that piece of hardware

Do you get the same issues on an older version of Firefox for that device? If yes, proceed with caution - your device’s internal EMMC might be nearing EOL considering how old Android 6 is

But the problem is they all do not support modern arm64 apps that most Android phones use nowadays. Instead they need this other type called armeabi-v7a

They probably just stopped building for Android 6 devices. The SDK and various third party libraries continue to add new features all the time, and unlike Firefox, the majority of devs do not have the time or resources to manually code-in the missing bits to retain compatibility with old versions of Android. As a side effect, these custom implementations may have bugs or issues that go unnoticed due to the shrinking install base.

One of the more noticeable bits that changed is the Share API, which is why Firefox’s one looks so different vs every other app. There are other things like enhanced battery optimization and the storage API, which have changed a lot since Android 6.

IMO your best option is an older version of FF, or install Lineage (etc) on that device and use another browser

Edit: change “age of device” to “shrinking install base”

Not the case with ARM processors sadly, IMO they’re a bit of a mess from that perspective. Proprietary blobs for hardware, unusual kernel hacks for some devices, and no device tree support so you can’t just boot any image on any device. I think Windows for ARM encouraged some standardization in that regard, but for the most part looking at Android devices it’s still very much the wild west.

This is one of the many reasons why Raspberry Pi ARM boards remain popular for the time being, despite there being so many other cheap alternatives available: they actually keep supporting their old boards & ensure hardware on their boards works from the get-go.

There are also some rare cases where Raspberry Pi rewrite open source implementations of Broadcom’s proprietary blob drivers, in one instance for the built in CSI (optional camera)

That thread could do with one of these: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire_retardant

Hehehe