• 2 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: September 21st, 2023

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  • Lineage and a fork, DivestOS are very close to Graphene, and run on far more devices.

    The search for perfection is the enemy of good.

    I’ve run Lineage for years on some spare devices. Battery life is so much better without Google Services.

    My most recent device (Pixel 5 with DivestOS) is averaging 1.1% battery consumption per hour over the last day. That included an hour of navigation, using Google maps with microG services.

    One old device runs longer with DivestOS than it ever did with stock, and the battery has lost 40% capacity. That’s how bad Google Services eat battery.

    Plus Lineage permits you to use a number of old devices, unlike Graphene. It’s good, it gives you far more control than Google.

    My final thought on Graphene - it needs to be taken over and lead by some professionals. Those folks act like stereotypical geeks of 30 years ago, arrogant, condescending (I worked with their type 30 years ago, and was a little like them then). They also denigrate anything less than what they deem “perfect”. The very definition of hubris.

    Their attitude is “if you have a problem you must’ve done something wrong, why did you do something wrong”. Having that experience with them has put me off Graphene permanently.

    Edit: I can re-lock the bootloader with Divest, so the condescending Graphene folks are just plain wrong about being the only OS that can do this. I don’t lock it, because my threat model doesn’t require it. The odds of my phone being grabbed by someone with state-actor-level skills being after me is non-existent, and there are easier ways to get the same data from me.


  • First, don’t buy new phones. You’re paying a massive premium to be first. Especially since you’re going to flash a rom, which has a little risk anyway (I’ve bricked phones by flashing, though not for years).

    I just upgraded from a 2017 flagship to a Pixel 5 (only because my cell company decided to stop it working on their network, when I can throw a different Sim in and it works fine). I was able to buy 3 Pixel 5’s for less than you paid for your new phone. Which means I have a daily driver, a hot spare, and a test device for a little over $400.

    If my daily breaks, I pickup my spare and swap the SIM, since I keep both phones synced with Syncthing. I don’t even have to login to anything because that’s all done. (I had 4 functional devices of my 2017 phone, they had become so cheap).

    So pick a 1-2 year old model that you like the features, and pay far less for it.

    Before (finally) coming to the pixel, I would look at the Lineage device list, then check those phones out at gsmarena.com and phonearena.com to see which I’d prefer, because Lineage has the broadest device support that I’ve seen.

    Today I run DivestOS, a fork of Lineage with some changes to a few things. I forget now exactly what I preferred (I’d have to pull up my comparison spreadsheet), but average battery consumption is a staggering 0.5% per hour, with microg services installed and a couple apps using it. Consumption average increases to about 4% per hour when I’m doing a lot of intensive stuff - copying files over the network, using nav, watching a video, etc.









  • Meh, no one should be on Facebook.

    Too many people say nothing when it’s mentioned, so tacit approval is assumed.

    I’ve blocked sites like Twitter and FB, etc, on all my devices and networks. My friends and family still send me links, after I’ve repeatedly told them my devices can’t go to those websites (I’ve never once in my life been on either one).

    So I think it’s appropriate to point out using FB is as problematic as Reddit (worse actually. It needs to be continually said.

    FB had the Cambridge Analytica scandal that exposed how bad it is, and people still use it 🤦🏼‍♂️. They had tracking pixels for years, and whole I’ve never even visited the FB website, those bastards have a profile on me.

    So no, fuck FB.







  • And here’s the problem with Wikipedia - while technically darker roasted coffee doesn’t have more caffeine by volume than lighter roasts…technically the way coffee is brewed properly is by weight, and darker grounds are often used for things like espresso, which requires a much finer grind. So the same volume of dark grounds will technically have more coffee grounds than a lighter roast used for drip or pour-over.

    Lots of detail is obfuscated when things are summarized. Sometimes those details matter.

    Also, it seems a lot if this doesn’t address the facetious or hyperbolic angle of these statements (though several do).

    Again, sometimes this change in level (or direction) of focus fundamentally changes what something means.


  • Ubiquiti?

    You can’t give me that garbage. I despise it, after setting up a single access point (plus also watching friends deal with it at client sites).

    Besides the discovery issues and slow performance when trying to manage it, I had a random open network on it after setup. This network didn’t appear anywhere in the control panel. I could turn off the access point and the network disappeared.

    It didn’t show up in the guest network config (which was turned off anyway). It had the same name as the WPA-protected network, it was just open - no security at all.

    I had to reset the access point to get rid of this weird random open network.

    What kind of garbage product does that?

    Now let’s look at cloud keys. One has a hard drive in it. Just one drive, 3.5", which besides storing data also stores the OS. What? Why is the OS not on some firmware or at least an M2, since the drive is really for storing surveillance data (did I mention it’s a single drive?), what a joke. Why would I bother with such an expensive device that has zero fault tolerance, when I could simply buy a cheaper real machine, run multiple drives, and host the software there?

    I lack the vocabulary to describe how bad Unifi is.