the only viable alternative would be to build septic tank
Me realizing I’m ahead of the game because I live in a home with a septic tank. But when you have to pump that tank every 5 years, if you can’t do that yourself, it’s going to be a lot less anonymous than a centralized sewer.
Good starting point would be looking up forum or blog posts from people who have disconnected the modem/TCU on a particular EV model. No self-interested auto manufacturer (all of them) would intentionally provide an option in the user interface to take the telemetry system offline. Take note of any side-effects they report, if it needs to be reconnected for inspections, and if there’s any gotchas between software and hardware revisions.
Especially wrt. modern gas-fuelled cars for the typical driver as EVs prices are artificially jacked up in many Western countries.
Keeping an eye on it since no other company is offering a similar lack of connectivity, but also not going to be surprised if it doesn’t deliver on its promises.
What privacy though? The situation with LinkedIn just like Instagram. Even though they aren’t open for scraping, there’s still no expectation of privacy among the users who post anything.
Everything in Owner and a secondary phone for all proprietary work and communication apps. The secondary phone is powered off or at least disconnected once I leave work. Google stuff and banking through a computer browser whenever possible.
If I were forced to use only one phone, the secondary phone’s contents would be on a secondary profile. This used to be my setup but switching between profiles throughout the day wasn’t my thing.
I like knowing what my computer is doing and that was noticeably less and less the case as I went from Windows 98 to 10 and all the major versions in between. Before learning about Linux, simply going through the options in debloat scripts made me realize how invasive Microsoft was behind the scenes.
I know that he’s not necessarily the best resource, but Rob Braxman’s videos were first to bring mobile privacy concerns to my attention. Also, while his promotion of his custom phone didn’t lead to me buying one of them, it did lead to me learning about custom Android ROMs and eventually buying a Pixel for GrapheneOS.
No, they respect my goals and seem to have accepted that I’m sometimes just unreachable. The only thing they might be annoyed about is my GrapheneOS and Signal proselytism. If anything, it’s more apathy than antagonism. They’ll agree with me on privacy issues but rarely ever give up the conveniences of Apple, Microsoft, Google, etc. in practice.
Enlighten me, I just want a bit of mindless entertainment while doing the dishes
A noble goal in mind and I’m glad that the output of ChatGPT works for you. I’m not against LLMs in principle, but anything freshly spat out by an LLM is for you and you only. If AI was only used as an aid but you understand the codebase, document it and make it clear. Otherwise, you leave the assumption of vibe-coding open.
HP also made laptops with a Blu-Ray drive built right into them. I got one for a few bucks and ended up swapping the BD drive into my old ThinkPad.
I’d look for an alternative. Failing that, I would try every trick to fake that selfie.
The cheap secondary phone is the approach I have gone with for work apps. Powered up only when needed and doesn’t connect to my main home network.
Great for my tablet which is too weak to run IronFox smoothly. One annoyance is that it’ll insist on a refresh if your internet connection is interrupted or changes in any way. The reason for it is not immediately obvious and neither is the option to turn it off (Settings > Homepage > Ask to restart on connection change)
Glove Prints
Problem: Thin gloves like surgical gloves can still leave fingerprints on surfaces.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glove_prints
Mitigation: Wear thick, textured gloves
Finally found an explanation for why my phone’s fingerprint sensor works through thin gloves.
Have a NAS, Jellyfin server, and LLM on my LAN so far. Next step is to make them available outside my home, but I’ve been procrastinating.
The firmware isn’t open source and I only chose it for the employee discount, but the blue Yubico security key has held up well over hundreds of uses and several years jingling around in my keychain.
It’s prevalent among pdfs downloaded from academic publishers (text listing the receiving IP address and/or institution running down the margins). I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s also done with hidden white text or in the metadata.
What kind of CPU is in that laptop? The vast majority of x86 CPUs from the past 10 years include hardware acceleration for AES encryption so that the performance hit is negligible.
Why not a second-hand ThinkPad/Latitude/ProBook? They’re cheap and cheerful and well-supported by most distros.