i use a feature phone / dumbphone that has an sd card slot. load up the sd card with music, and the player is super simple and works great for me. bluetooth earbuds work too, but the rechargable battery of mine died after owning them just a few months longer than the warranty lasted, so i’m back to using wired earbuds (with a usb-c to 3.5mm adapter, do NOT buy the cheap shit from temu, get one that actually sounds decent).

the phone was like $50, and a prepaid sim card inside it makes it so i can use it as cheap backup texting/calling device too when i want to disconnect from all the bullshit the smartphone comes with for a while (still trying to get fully rid of smartphones but it’s very hard these days)

I’ve just recently set up a blog usign Zola (https://www.getzola.org/) because i am looking for something where i’ll actually keep making posts. not quite ready to share it yet, but if it keeps going well i might.

The reason i chose Zola is because it’s easy to write new posts. it’s also simple to setup and very lightweight. a single exectuable (set up a systemd service to start it when the homelab server boots), forward web traffic to it, choose some theme you like and make simple markdown files as posts.

The simple markdown files as posts was the main criteria for me - a small header with title, date and categories, and after that just… pretty much plain text write your post, as a markdown file on the server it’s running on. No special login, no “publish” button, no fancypants UI with all kinds of fields to fill out and formatting options… just write. Zola detects itself it the filesystem changed and automatically reflects your changes on the site.

i’ve had good success doing small edits with libreoffice (design? draw? idk what its called).

i’d rather see the DOGE discord server

for me the most critical ones are replacements for discord and microsoft teams. for discord the critical piece is the login - people don’t want to make accounts on each server, so until we have proper federation with a good user experience people won’t actually move off it.

for teams i’m sure theres projects in development, i just don’t know them or their status - all i know is that i want a project to combine several specialized FOSS services (jitsi is great, and there’s lots of other collaboration tools for email/calendar/chat) into one nice unified frontend that is actually reasonably easy to self-host and maintain.

android yes, but the entire google play ecosystem is not, and some things are very hard to do without being inside that ecosystem.

I’m using my fairphone without any google account (so no play store), and it works, but there are some obstacles. Luckily my bank still offers a good website and even uses some international standard for 2 factor auth, so i can do my ebanking without the app - which, like most companies, is only offered in the play store.

for public transport, i downloaded the app from apkpure (in hindsight, the aurora store would likely be the better option) and it works fine for buying tickets. this is just my lazyness, i could buy tickets on the website (but it sucks) or at ticket machines, but the app is super convenient.

for various other services i just refuse to install apps. parking payments, my insurance company, work (luckily i have a bunch of freedom at work, using linux on my work laptop too)… is all stuff that would be convenient but it’s all just available in play store. it looks like aurora is a good option, but 1. i don’t know how long until google kills it and 2. i want to completely stop being dependent on adtech anyway.

easiest thing for me was to just… uninstall the app and use it in a browser.

the experience is so terrible, i don’t spend much time on it anymore. seriously, go to reddit.com and see what it looks like with no account and no extensions.

instagram is even worse, once in a while i try to open a funny post someone sends me in the browser, and … it usually works for the first post (after clicking away a bunch of popups) but if i open a second one i get completely blocked. thanks meta 👌

i mean… it is massively better, but yes it still sucks. but what do you move friends and family to? last i looked into element it was not an option for several reasons, and i don’t think anyone would switch to basically noname apps like simplex or similar, even if they might be decent solutions. i really want the last few contacts i have on whatsapp to move, but i’m not gonna push hard to get them to use signal just to get it enshittified in the near future. also a few switched to telegram, which while not facebook, is not really better mainly because it doesn’t even e2ee by default.

i think it depends on the image you get - for archlinux you can simply cat (or dd) the file onto a usb stick and it works perfectly fine, bootable. but i think i have seen an image at some point where it didn’t work, but i don’t recall what it was.

cat works perfectly fine too 👌

i like cmus, but it is commandline-only.

In my view, by far the biggest reason to switch is that Telegram doesn’t end-to-end encrypt chats by default.

Yes you can start encrypted chats specifically, but i’ll bet 99% of chats on telegram aren’t encrypted - meaning whoever has access to the telegram servers can read all the messages.

Signal claims to end-to-end encrypt all chats by default, and if you want to be 100% sure you can in theory read the source code and compile the app yourself. this means signal cannot read any of your messages, even if police asks them to or servers get seized. That’s a massive advantage in privacy.

who’s doing the gunning? we dont have that many combat robots yet, and i still have hope that communication is open enough and most people aren’t too brainwashed to realize firing on your own countrypeople is bad.

but we better do sonething before these change.

light. used to struggle hard to wake up even with several loud alarms, but a bright light turning on before my alarm made it so much easier. especially nice is a smart bulb that brightens slowly.

I know stuff is missing from it and it doesn’t have reviews, but when i’m on my own i just check organic maps first, if i find something that looks decent i just try it.

when traveling with others i often have to turn to tripadvisor or google maps to make sure to find something they like, not everyone is as happy to just try as me.

if it’s free, you’re the product.

signal seems really good right now, with open source clients, but they already show that they’d like to keep the ecosystem locked down by not allowing 3rd party clients. at some point they will need a way to pay for their datacenters, and even if they claim the foundation or whatever is doing well, i can see the pestering for donations getting much worse in the future.

that said, threema is far from optimal too, im still waiting for matrix servers to become solid options. last time i wanted to set up synapse, the only captcha they supported was fucking Google captcha :|

i’d suggest starting by finding out what package in your distro actually decides where audio goes - mostly it is pulseaudio (older) or pipewire (newer).

depending on the details of how your distro and the dongle work, it could either be a simple “pactl set-default-sink <headset-name>”, or a more complicated set of udev rules or pipewire/wireplumber scripts.

note that distros using pipewire still often support a lot of pactl commands, so it may be worth looking at the simple option even when not using pulseaudio.

my phone won’t even do “force stop” anymore… fairphone 5 running whatever os fairphone ships, and all force stop does is put the app in the background or whatever, if it has an issue the issue will still be there when opening it again.

i’m thinking long term - sure, right now google knowing everything about me isn’t dangerous. but if a massive political slide to the right happens in countries that host services, suddenly all the saved data from many years ago can be used against me. and don’t fall for the “end to end encrypted” bullshit either - all these services can flip a switch and have your encryption keys instantly. (or, if its an open source app that ACTUALLY keeps keys on the device only, which is extremely rare, it’s one update away from happening, and you better read the whole diff every update and compile the app yourself.)

that’s why i choose to self host everything. yes there’s a risk of being hacked, or installing something malicious because i don’t read every diff on every update. but i feel more confortable with it being my own responsibility, and my services are also all on seperate virtual machines to hopefully isolate any breaches.

I’m using Trilium notes. it’s simple enough and does what i need. Used to use Obsidian but wanted something open source, and with Trilium you can self-host the sync server for free (even comes with a handy web-ui).

Note that it is much simpler than obsidian, but for me it’s plenty. It was easy to import my obsidian vault into it, and it allows exporting as .md files which work fine back in obsidian too.

Recently the dev said he’s putting it into maintenance mode, so no new features will come to Trilium. There’s a community around Trilium Next that wants to keep expanding it, but personally i hope Trilium stays as it is and is maintained for a long time.