🤔

Aging helps. I’m not sure how or why, but these days, I couldnl’t care less about what strangers think of me.

I am consistently disappointed to see the top posts say to not buy a car whenever news like this comes out.

Your post at least provides an alternative.

I use OsmAnd almost exclusively, but mostly as a navigation aid and not for finding places. I like to know where I’m going before I leave so I can plan the route and timing my departure. If there is a place or address that is not in OSM, there are various address to coordinate searches that I’ll add as a favorite.

I am mapping cities as often as I can with StreetComplete, but most of my quests are about sidewalks rather than places. One day, I would like to learn more advanced skills so I can map a neighborhood or business.

Jeff? Is that you, son? I told you that it was nonnegotiable, now get off the internets, I’m expecting an important telephone call and don’t want you tying up the lines.

While there are a lot of good technical suggestions here, I’ve found that a conversation goes a long way. In my experience, when talking with loved ones, explain your emotions. Not “I hate this” or “the governments are listening!”, but those core emotions. “Having a device in my room that is always monitoring me makes me feel anxious and I don’t feel comfortable in a place where I should feel safe.” Make sure that the dialog is calm and remains about your feelings until you know that you’re being heard. If you aren’t, try other phrases or examples.

Once you’ve established your feelings, address their concerns and feelings (active listening). It sounds stupid at first, but it works. “I hear that you are frustrated when I don’t come down for dinner immediately.” Finally, propose some solutions that meet everybody’s needs and that the parties can select one to try out for a week and evaluate it’s effectiveness, trying new things until a mutually beneficial solution is found.

Good luck. Please post the outcome!

I’m not as enraged by this as most, but I think the true test will be to see if this feature is disabled by default in future releases. If they actually do listen to their users, that’s better than any of the other big players.

I read a bit about the new “feature” and it seems to me that they’re trying out a way to allow ad companies to know if their advertisement was effective in a way that also preserves the privacy of the user. I can respect that. I did shut it off, but am also less concerned because I have multiple advertisement removal tools, so this feature is irrelevant.

The fact that it’s enabled by default isn’t comforting, but who would actually turn this on if it were buried in about:config? In order to prove its effectiveness to promote a privacy respecting but advertisement friendly mechanism, this is what they felt that they had to do.

Of course, I could easily be all wrong about this and time will tell.

I don’t know if this applies directly, but in my early days of hosting a server for fun, I installed a telnet server because my phone didn’t have SSH at the time. I forgot to close it when i was done and someone got in and installed a password sniffer. This was a Slackware box, IIRC. My only indication that there was a problem was that the “.” & “…” directories didn’t appear from an “ls -Alf”. I pulled the network cable and booted to a boot image and discovered that many key system utilities were replaced with imposters that would mask that there was an intruder. The '“ps”, “ls” and other utils were symlinked to the “…” dir in /usr/local/lib.

I didn’t trust anything on that server and nuked it. Now, anything that’s internet facing is built from ansible and the config is stored in a repo and the repo is backed up on a drive that’s physically disconnected except when backing up. I’ve messed up the initrd from time to time and it’s usuall easier for me to reimage than try to fix it.

Thank you for a thoughtful post with citations and quotes. After reading the whole page by Mozilla, it seems like they’re taking steps to show advertisers how they can get what they want while preserving people’s privacy. I can live with that. They’re trying to build a win-win scenario.

I’ll still block ads. I’ll still reject cookies, but I feel like it’s a reasonable feature THAT I CAN SHUT OFF. I’m still in control of my browser! Great!

Look at the strangler pattern in microswrvice architecture. Applying this to your scenario, set up a front end to YouTube, cache the results locally (probably host in a place that allows it). Also host videos from other platforms like peertube. Once you have a lot of users, slowly prioritize “free” videos over YT content.

It’s not likely to happen, but it’s the pattern that FB uses to present news. First they showed a link to the story and you’d click through, then they required more of the story, then when all were hooked, they demanded the whole story to be displayed, effectively stealing all the users and the ability to advertise.

I know of a guy who had good intentions. He just wanted to make Germany great again. I can’t remember his name right now, but IIRC, it didn’t end up being good for a whole lot of people.

I had one from Sony a long time ago. It even had a cable you could attach between two of 'em (600 CDs!) so that it could seamlessly start playing another track while loading the next song. I dropped it during a move and the next time I opened the door, it spit gears at me. I had intended to fix it some day, but started watching Hoarders and decided it wasn’t worth it.

Hi! I’m not having any problems with linux. I just thought you’d like to know.

There. Now there’s a message in the support forums about a person not having problems!

Can you elaborate on the scenario this is solving for? Isn’t software RAID a performance hit?

You’re 100% correct on the tactile difference in the buttons. I didn’t think of that. A similar complaint is every feature is a “button” on the infotainment screen. I saw this on a Dodge. My current car has no touchscreen and I have driven it long enough to just know where all the buttons are without looking. In my opinion, distracted driving should include these types of things that take your attention off of the road.

Push button transmission? It’s been done before.

Of course back then distracted driving was digging through the box of 8 track cassettes.

Upvote for.disabling firmware. It’s a sad state when the average printer consumer needs to know how to disable firmware updates and even needs sysadmin skills to know how to block a host from the internet.

Thanks for the reminder! I just replaced the gallery. I still have Simple Draw, it appears that there’s no replacement, but I’m not tied to it. What do others use for a drawing/photo editing app?

Well, that’s unfortunate. I’ve seen this happen way too many times.

I don’t know what your criteria is other than privacy. This guy’s post looks interesting.

I have a similar story as your first point. It boils down to tucking away money with each financial gain. I put in enough to my 401k to get the full match, then with each raise, increase the amount invested by the raise. I’d already learned to spend within my limits and had no credit card debt, so each raise was “new money”. Years later, after adjusting our financials to pay for daycare, when the daycare expenses dropped (infants are most expensive, costs drop down as they age), we started putting into a college savings and some for school expenses. We had saved up enough to pay for private school, which was less than daycare. Now that private school is done, college is paid for, we’re paying down the mortgages. We locked in at 3% years ago. The house will be paid off when the kid graduates HS and we turn 55 and are eligible for the employer’s retirement program, including health care. We plan to travel in those years where we’re young enough to be healthy and old enough to have some money tucked away.

Oh, we also did the same for cars. When the car was paid off, we’d put the same money into a separate bank account and when it was tome to look for a new car, we had almost enough to pay for it outright.

Of course all of this can only happen when you have the skill to spend with your means.