Mailbox.org

Mailbox Standard compared to ProtonMail Plus:

• Cheaper (€30/yr vs ~€50/yr; if you don’t need custom domains, €1/mo)
• More aliases (25 on mailbox, 50 on own domain. Proton has 10 TOTAL - why custom domain aliases are counted against Proton ones does not make sense to me.)
• Support for any number of custom domains AFAICT (Proton Plus supports only one)
• Trial account is not allowed to send emails, so fewer issues with services blacklisting proton.me and protonmail.com for spam (hasn’t happened to me, but I have heard of some cases)
• Can use a regular email client (security tradeoff for E2EE messages - but there already were plenty of discussions on whether E2EE has benefits, especially sending mail to other services)

AFAIK as close as you can get is PinePhone or Librem5. But both have pretty poor battery life, an IPS display (technically could be OLED at the expense of even more battery consumption), and pretty jank camera (drivers for good cameras are proprietary, and a lot of modern smartphones rely on postprocessing for quality too).

Don’t get me wrong, PinePhone made fantastic progress in 6 years, but your experience may vary (some people use it as a daily smartphone, some as a dumb phone, others are just turned off immediately)

I thought SAP was shit until I worked with Microsoft Dynamics NAV, an ERP from alternate 1990s hell dimension. It has a built-in IDE that uses its own language called C/AL (syntactically similar to Pascal). The only source control is developers’ ability to lock files they are working on. And the code editor is worse than notepad. Seriously, it does not allow to select or paste multiple lines, and in general, acts as if each line is it’s own textbox. Forget about syntax highlighting or anything else other than black text on white background.

And, AFAIK, if your company needs to customize it, you are required to hire a “Microsoft-certified” NAV developer.

LCDs from older devices (DVD players, cheap picture frames, even off-brand tablets, as long as LCD has a ribbon connector) can be salvaged and used with any other device using a ~$15-20 LCD driver.

Some old digital cameras can be used as a webcam via USB.

Very old keyboards might have DIP chips that could be reused (if the rest of the keyboard is damaged and you’re into building your own keyboards that is)

I am curious if there have been studies on how much the slowness/delayed response of the device improves the attention span. (Since the distraction urge cannot be instantly satisfied)

Anecdotally, I find it very easy to get distracted when clicking on app takes fewer than a few seconds to start. When I test-drove the PinePhone, I felt I was much less distracted because bringing up the browser takes good 5-10 seconds, so I would only do that with a specific goal in mind.

Any details on the technology? “Beaming phone signals” doesn’t tell anyone much. Would this require a proprietary antenna (thus new, flagship-only models after a few years, like iPhone 15 with its emergency satellite calls) for whatever protocol Starlink uses (unless there is some unified ground-to-satellite protocol by now)?

Satellite phones aren’t new, but are expensive for obvious reasons.

Second-hand experience from many years ago when Starlink first rolled out: my friend has a cabin in the Appalachians, outside any cell service, so Starlink sounds great for that. However, Starlink site says there is “no coverage” for that area. Yes, somehow, no coverage for a satellite service. The nearest area with coverage was a town with already-decent 4G. And most large US cities had coverage too. So our inside “conspiracy theory” was that Starlink resells 5G/4G modems for hipsters.

Have no idea if the situation changed since then.

TBH I don’t even understand why Android Auto needs to exist in the first place.

The same (or even better) functionality can be achieved by using a standard video output (DisplayPort, HDMI) from the device to the in-car screen, while the touches on the in-car screen can be translated into USB mouse position and clicks on the device (unless there is a better touch protocol).

I know there are regulations about live video on in-car screens, but 1. That does not stop people from watching videos on their phones while driving and 2. Somehow that does not apply to maps?

Tried it on an older Pixel with GrapheneOS.

Can’t zoom, can’t switch to wide-angle lens. Camera does not balance brightness by the focus point. Otherwise pictures look pretty much the same.

I suppose this was made for specific devices in mind?

FYI, there are Gemini search engines:

Kennedy

Totally Legit Gemini Search

Slightly morbid academic one.

My computer science professor (who is from Eastern Europe) was explaining an algorithm that he and another professor (from South America) developed. The algorithm processes a graph by first creating a “frame” around it. Since English was not the first language for either of them, the first word they thought of was karkas (каркас, frame in Russian). English word “carcass” sounds pretty much the same, right? but only later, after the work was submitted, they realized they were creating a dead body around the graph.

Proxies started getting blocked (by some auth-account methods) last year, but libreddit/redlib dev was able to outsmart them multiple times. Now it seems like reddit is blocking IPs (and/or IP ranges). Running redlib from a residential IP still works, but I would not expect it to work from a VPS.

Tried it out a while ago, and found that I prefer GNOME’s UX and configurable shortcuts better, and that two side-by-side applications on my laptop is the most “tiles” I would realistically want.

I tried out postmarketOS + phosh on a PinePhone about a year ago. For my own needs, it worked fairly well, except (ironically) receiving calls. It was like driving an old car, everything was slightly jank, but worked, and could be tinkered with - see the entire review. I have to give credit that there has been impressive progress in mobile Linux since PinePhone’s release in 2019, and a lot of it was developed by unpaid hobbyists.

I don’t watch a lot of youtube, but DuckDuckGo browser (on Android and Windows, at least) has a Duck Player that removes all of the cruft around videos and is private afaik.

Other than with language models, this has already happened: Take a look at apps such as Merlin Bird ID (identifies birds fairly well by sound and somewhat okay visually), WhoBird (identifies birds by sound, ) Seek (visually identifies plants, fungi, insects, and animals). All of them work offline. IMO these are much better uses of ML than spammer-friendly text generation.

Biktor and Lynxis will be working on OpenIMSd, which aims to bring VoLTE (4G voice calls) to Qualcomm based phones (like the PinePhone)

This is fantastic news, and I wish them all the best. Reliable VoLTE/WoWiFi calls was my main (but obviously major) issue with the PinePhone.

Another FYI: Ubuntu Touch does not support VoLTE at all, thus it might be more difficult to use it in some networks and countries (for example, USA shut down 3G some years ago)

However, I was pleasantly surprised by the responsive UI, the browser, and Cinny (the Matrix Client)

Fossify Messages and QKSMS/QUIK (unmaintained but has worked well for years)

I was interested in these “light” phones for a bit, but they seem a bit gimmicky and expensive. I understand not having a browser on purpose, but for communication, none of them (AFAIK) support Matrix or even XMPP (even some old feature phones had a Java Jabber client). Punkt MP02 supports Signal though.

Android phone with custom ROM (Lineage, /e/, Graphene, DivestOS…) is a possibility, and would be usable until hardware is incompatible with the phone/wifi networks.

If you have a patience of a saint, PinePhone and Librem5 are Linux phones, both in fairly early stages.