Holy archive! Thanks for the link.

https://logseq.com/

I used to buy almost everything on Amazon - electronics, books, kitchen/office/cleaning supplies, etc. Back then I was a Prime subscriber so I did not pay for the delivery. As for the delivery, it was blazing fast and the item was always in a mint condition. In case of any issues I was able to sort it out within a day or two. And the price was better than the other online or brick and mortar stores.

However, at some point the quality of the products went downhill. Support became unhelpful and the prices got higher than the competition. One time I had some issues with the order. It never got delivered and the process to get my money back was way too long and too complex. Eventually I have contacted my bank and reported the fraud. Eventually I got my money back. Turned out that such issues were not an anomaly and a lot of people reported shady sellers.

Since then I have unsubscribed from Prime and every time I found something I wanted to buy I’ve checked the seller and if there was a website I bought directly from them.

For past few years I didn’t buy a thing on Amazon.

As for the alternatives, I don’t have a single one. I have several websites I usually buy from but in general I always do some research and buy the product from the seller that has the best price and is trusted enough.

Let’s play a game. I’ll start. It will end up in the google graveyard within a year. What’s your bet?

Oh, cry me a river. For decades corporations were abusing their position. I admit, in recent years it got out of control. But what’s stopping you from running your own server? You want your data to be private? Run it on your own rig. Scared of your ISP spying on you? Use VPN. I know it got worse than it used to be like 20 years ago but this is how life works. Things change, learn to adapt.

Well, sometimes I get away with some petty wrongdoings just because I stutter. And I’ve learned it to use it for my advantage. Just to be clear, I’m not abusing this “power”, it’s mostly “organic”.

I have this mildly interesting story. When I moved to Australia I’ve shipped whole bunch of things by sea to cut the cost. It took months to arrive but when I finally got here I had to pick up my stuff from a storage location. The best part is that because I’m a white guy the person who was designed to handle the forklift (also white) was more than helpful (despite my accent and some grammar issues). But once the delivery guys arrived (mostly middle east) he turned into racist asshole. And the “best” part was that I was part of his racial slurs, mostly because I wasn’t using proper grammar…

Nothing fancy and it will take more than a week. I have a lot of python scripts to automate things on my home server. I want to rewrite those scripts in rust mostly for learning purposes.

I agree that there should be a way for whistle blowers to anonymously leak details of wrongdoings of the governments and/or corporations if it servers public interest. And I agree that modern surveillance techniques are way more advanced than few decades ago. However, so called whistle blowing is still against the law and the person who does it should be aware that it will cause a legal response.

My problem with anonymity is that it’s being abused by “shady” people. It could be a dark web drug dealing website or some hard-core child trafficking rings. Unfortunately we live in a world where real things happen behind the scene and no whistle blower is going to change that. Here’s an example (Secret Key Cryptography by Frank Robin)

Circa 1975, IBM proposed the cipher now called DES, the Data Encryption Standard . It became a worldwide standard for secret key encryption. As IBM originally designed it, DES had a 64-bit key. The National Security Agency (NSA) required that the key be reduced from 64 bits to 56 bits, with the other 8 bits used as a checksum. This made no sense. If a checksum were really needed, then the key could be increased from 64 to 72 bits. It was widely believed that the real reason the NSA made this demand was that it knew how to crack messages using a 56-bit key, but not messages using a 64-bit key. This proved to be true.

The problem with privacy is that people confuse it with anonymity. I agree that privacy is the basic human right and we need to fight to preserve it. But when something is used for illigal activites there should be a way to trace the offender. Still the tracing part should be legal and transparent.

I think the closest to you requirements will be Grocy. You can define list of products you use, current stock, rules to add product to the shopping list based on amount, what to do when you move product between storage locations (e.g. move from freezer to fridge), etc. There’s also a mobile app. Having said that I stopped using it after couple months. Few reasons: mobile app had no offline mode, mobile app was not compatible with the latest app server version, I had many issues setting up current stock (many times I had to manually adjust the amounts after using consume/purchase option). Overall I like the idea but it didn’t work for me.

For stuff like this I use cockpit. There’s no mobile app but the web ui is good enough to use it on mobile.

I’ve been using GrapheneOS for over a year. I cannot complain about it, it works as advertised and it does it the best way possible. However, here’s the list of things I find annoying/missing. Keep in mind, this is a subjective list.

• some (quite a lot of for me) apps require Google Play Framework (or whatever the name is) to work properly
• Aurora store tends to be unavailable randomly, which makes installation/updates difficult sometimes
• some features are wonky, e.g. GrapheneOS has no issues with disabling wifi when leaving my home but I was never able to enable wifi when I’m back home.
• default apps work ok-ish but it’s far from good old iOS/Android experience
• Android Auto experience was a shitshow for me

Don’t want to be a devil’s advocate but can you provide something more than “I’m offended”? Let’s say issue ticket(s), status page links, other people complaining, etc?

Oh no, anyway…

Linux distros are barely just getting their feet wet in the tablet/mobile world. I would say “barely just getting their toe wet” :)

Getting back to the point. I loved the way iPad was integrated with the stylus (Apple Pencil). My use case for a tablet back then was to write/draw stuff I did “remotely” and export all my, let’s call it drawings, to mac and work on that. Today’s example. I was planning a garden layout. It took me way too much time to get the stylus working the way I expected and when it did I had more issues trying to export the drawings to a usable format* I would be better off with a good old pen and paper.

• I’m not a pro Linux user so there’s a good chance I missed something

KDE works ok on touch devices but if you’re going to switch, try plasma mobile.

It is usable but I’ve been using iPad for years before trying Linux on a tablet and it’s way behind iPadOS in terms of ux and ease of use. The latest plasma mobile makes it more tablety but it still feels like a desktop with touch support. Having said that, I’m pretty happy with plasma mobile and can’t wait for further improvements.

I wrote it several times and I will write it again. Linux on a tablet is at best average. However, after recent release of KDE 6, plasma mobile got really good. In tablet mode it feels almost like a real thing. I’ve been using it for some time now and I like the experience.

I read an article about Fermi paradox (I cannot find the link) that stated the humans are one of the first intelligent beings in the universe. That’s why we haven’t encountered any green men so far. We just might came too soon to the party.