I tried a lot of things to keep my phone/screen usage down.l, including a dump phone. One day I got this brilliant idea to shut my phone off. That was way more efficient than any of the tricks I tried. When I need it for something I turn it on. I’ve since removed most fun apps from the thing.

I still have one game that I play, Lemmy, RSS and web browsers. Apart from those it’s mostly a bureaucracy machine with messaging, email, banking, MFA, work stuff, maps, lots of apps for managing tickets (it’s actually ridiculous), life trackers for some board games. Music, audiobooks and podcasts.

The smart phone is a convenient device that makes my life easier. I don’t whis to handicap myself when I can just turn the phone off instead. I also like to leave the phone at home if for instance I’m going to a party at a well known location.

I can’t say, as you say, we only see this from the outside. I obviously have no idea what they can and can’t tell. This seems to be on the nation state level and there’s so much bullshit burecracy to deal with at that level. If this continues to happen that is obviously bad, but it seems like an honest mistake to me. It’s the main reason that got me started in leaving Gmail many years ago.

Anyway, I have of course set up my own domain for email and can redirect it to another provider if need be, but I don’t think it makes sense to run away at the first sign of a company doing a fuckup either. All companies will fuck up eventually and that’s how they learn. It’s when they continue to fuck up, or deliberately does evil that I will leave.

Eh, seems like a nothing burger to me honestly. It’s just normal procedure to lock it down first, then investigate and reopen when you get a request like this.

Whenever we get warnings about our customers accounts sending spam/phising we do a small investigateion, then they are locked before we contact the right manager and eventually someone contact the end user in question and we fix the problem or suspend the user.

It sucks for the user to be out of the loop for a few hours, and sometimes innocents get caught up in it, but it’s really the only way to deal with it.

Are anyone surprised criminals would use Proton? I bet they get a lot of take downs all the time and ignore most of them.

I use the “News” app from Nextcloud (horrible name). I doubt it’s the best, but it’s convenient for syncing

Sudan and Somalia perhaps? Depends on how you define ‘allow’ I guess.

It’s really convenient for finding events in my city. I wish the places I frequent would use RSS, that would be even more convenient for me, but alas.

Totally agree! On the other hand I have this whole universe of albums to learn to appreciate now! I’m also getting away from traditional social media, the 24-hour news cycle, porn etc and I find that just sitting down and listen to music and let my mind wander to be an amazing experience. Would recommend to literally anyone

I work in the hosting business. We have servers and create VMs and have backups. The customer can have as much control of the VM as they chose including locking us out. (They take on the risk as well if course.) We have pretty decent margins on hosting and offer to help out with configuration and such for billable hours and I often feel like what we charge are ridiculous. Yet we have potential customers demanding to see our hidden fees (we have none) and some explanation of how we can be so cheap. Some simply refuse to believe our prices when compared to the giant clouds.

Yes, but some private equity schmuks will get a pay day so it’s fine.

I’ve found a lot of the same as you, listening to albums changed me for the better.

Just recently I bought the Horizon Forbidden West sound track on Qobuz at a sale, paid less than 1 Euro per hour. Its weird, I don’t pay attention to the music while playing the game, but listening to the soundtrack almost take me into that world.

They’re slow and clunky as fuck for starters. Cellular is very spotty.

Do you have a good alternative I can look into? I really, really, really want them to work. The only usable Linux phone I’ve seen is Jolla, but I’d much rather have Mobian or Arch on mobile or some other fully FLOSS alternative

Which phone did you find where these are the only problem you encountered? I don’t care about any of these things and haven’t been finding any usable Linux phones.

I thought so too, but over the years I have migrated so much of my life away from apps in order to see if it’s possible and apart from games I find that with a browser and an email client I don’t really need apps. Still use apps though, they are way more convenient.

Banking is tedious without apps, but works with browser and an MFA-dongle in my country.

I have the PinePhone Pro in a drawer somewhere. It’s just a fun toy, not even remotely usable as a daily driver. But I might have a look at it again and see how many tasks still remains before I could theoretically use Mobian as a daily driver.

Compling the message*

Trump says […] Data says otherwise.

Sums up his whole life, no?

I pay flat power bill so I don’t really know about the electricity costs. I also live a cold place so for most of the year I need to heat my apartment anyway so I don’t really know.

Apart from patching the Ubuntu VMs that run Nextcloud, Jellyfin and my Nginx proxy I haven’t had any upkeep on the services themselves after I got them setup, and even then I have automatic security updates on so I only really need to log in and run a feature update and reboot every few months.

Whenever I buy a new album I download it and put the files in their own folder in Nextcloud and everything syncs in a few minutes. I have set up an external folder in Nextcloud for my music that is readable by Jellyfin so everything just works for now, but I’ve only had this setup for a few months to be fair.

Bandcamp and Qobuz are just apps for me and I download all the music I buy in the apps on my phone and it’s virtually no upkeep for those. The only annoying thing is that I can’t buy music in the Qobuz app, only on the web site. I assume this is because they refuse to pay the Google tax.

You might have to look into a Wireguard/VPN setup as well if you need that for remoting into home hosting, but I can’t really help with that. I got a kinda special deal in regards of hosting.

I use a combination of Bandcamp, Qobuz and Jellyfin atm. It gives me the combination of using their apps or my own self hosted. The chances of everything going down at the same time is pretty slim I figured.

I also have all my purchased music stored in a Nextcloud instance so in a pinch I can play the local flac/mp3 files from my computer.

I have sooo much great weird music I got for free or 50 cents per album.

Well yes, probably. But, if you buy on Bandcamp or sites like it you can download the songs and host and store them yourself so it’s not like you have to start over when they eventually get shit.