Shizuku + Canta on f-droid are great for accomplishing this as well, you just start wireless debugging and tick the apps you want to uninstall.

I deleted mine in January, after all the tech CEOs went to kiss the ring at the US inauguration. I don’t trust them at all to delete anything but at least they aren’t getting more data from me.

I’ve had my account since 2012 when I got a Nexus 4 so a lot of my life was tied up in it. It’s not something you can just up and decide to do one day and I’d been working my way to deletion since last summer and just went faster with the process in January. If you self-host things it makes it easier because there’s a lot of good replacements for their services e.g. nextcloud if you need an office suite, immich to replace Google photos. So I’ve got thirteen years of my life backed up to a raspberry pi sitting under my TV instead of being mined on a google server to train an LLM.

The only issue I’ve had is my phone keeps complaining that I’m not signed in with a google account, and there’s a few email addresses I hadn’t updated from gmail to my new accounts. But it’s been surprisingly plain sailing without having an account, and at least one of those issues will be sorted by moving to a phone with custom ROM support.

+1 for Navidrome. As simple as pasting the album into the directory and it sorts the rest. I use subtune on my phone to access it and it works great.

Two kids smeered their shit on the bathroom walls then climbed on the roof. There was some much more serious stuff but that was the funnier one I guess.

It was in the countryside as well, so we’d get a farm animal wandering about the grounds about once a year which was always exciting.

The tech secretary is the biggest idiot in our government right now which is really saying something. He doesn’t have any professional experience with technology, gets his policy ideas from asking chatgpt, accused anyone who opposes the online safety act of being a paedophile, and when a constituent sent him emails about Palestine he had the police raid her home at 4am.

Been doing some server maintenance the past few days because I’ve been neglecting them and everything has broken at once, so I may as well infodump on that.

The Raspberry Pi’s fan got clogged up with dust and started screaming but with a new fan it is so silent now. It was averaging 57°C for the couple of days with no fan while I waited for the spare part to arrive, 52°C when the broken fan was still in use, and now down to a nice 47°C with a fresh one. My VPN on the pi stopped working as well, but it was easily fixed with PiVPN, and the arr stack on my mini PC stopped working entirely – it seemed to be a networking issue with the containers under gluetun. But now everything’s up and running again and with a bit more storage space from clearing off old docker volumes. Then I’ve got a pinetime watch coming this week to give me something to tinker with until the new Pebble starts shipping.

I’ve tried tailscale and cloudflare tunnels in the past and ended up just using PiVPN to set up a WireGuard VPN on my Pi5. Tailscale for some reason was very slow for me, and cloudflare tunnels have a 100mb limit iirc which isn’t ideal for streaming. PiVPN is quite straightforward, it sets everything up for you and all you have to do is forward a UDP port. That was the bit I was most worried about, but, unless I’ve misunderstood something, because a UDP port will just ignore invalid requests to the outside world it will appear closed so it’s not very risky. It then generates a key for each device which you can scan from a QR code onto your VPN client. I have my phone set to auto-connect to the tunnel when I disconnect from my home wifi network and the tunnel is fast enough that I’ve accidentally turned off my phone’s wifi connection before and streamed a TV show through the tunnel over mobile data and not noticed any difference in speed.

They seem pretty good for not trapping too much heat, but we have quite cool summers here so what I would consider an unbearably hot day is probably different to most people. I could comfortably sleep in it under 24°C, anything above that and I can’t sleep no matter what type of blanket I have anyway. There are cooling ones made of cotton that might work if you’re in a hotter climate but they cost a fair bit more.

I love mine. Being able to play Baldur’s Gate 3 on a handheld feels insane, never mind playing it multiplayer with a bunch of mods and it still running fairly smoothly. They’ve really improved the rendering for BG3 since the final patch came out. Emudeck has been great for reliving some childhood nostalgia as well.

Saying that, 90% of the time I’m using it as a balatro machine.

No. Even in the summer during a heatwave I was sleeping with a 15 tog duvet because I need the weight, until I got a weighted blanket which is much more comfortable. I can fall asleep on the couch without a blanket though which is weird, just not in bed.

That’s good to hear! I’ve ADBed almost all of the Google & Samsung stuff off my phone already so I’m well used to fighting with Aurora to download certain apps by now. Nearly all my apps are from F-droid as well so that will make the transition a lot easier, and I do a lot of self hosting so I’m not relying on any proprietary services that are going to demand play services be installed. Balatro on my steam deck already steals enough of my time, so honestly if my phone won’t let me install it that’s probably for the best.

Going from One UI 6 to One UI 7 on a Samsung has made me very excited to go get a used pixel or fairphone and install a custom ROM instead. Absolutely abysmal update.

I think it would be great if at the next protests the crowds were filled with these nonsense t-shirts and signs to waste the police’s time. It is completely legal to protest a proscription order so I don’t think they have any legitimate grounds to arrest anyone. And if they do, they look very silly.

I have an S24, Gemini can be safely removed using Canta but is sometimes reinstalled when Samsung push out updates which is annoying. You can disable the play store without causing a boot loop but as far as I can tell there’s no way around play services since it can’t be disabled. I’m just making do with this phone for now and plan to get something I can install a custom ROM on later but it really sucks.

I’ve correctly predicted the result of every US & UK election (plus the brexit referendum) since 2016, based mostly on vibes