I had researched dumb phones recently only to learn that the two most important functions of a smartphone (for me) is the GPS and having a decent camera, and these things are either crippled or missing entirely from dumb phones. It's simply easier to dumb down your existing smartphone, especially if you have an Android phone.
In my case, I have a 2017 Pixel 2 XL running LineageOS, with a text only home screen launcher (OLauncher). I only have SMS, phone/contacts, camera, open street maps, KOReader, Music, Podcasts, Notes, and Calculator. That's it. Everything else has been purged or disabled, including the web browser, via ADB.
I don't really use it all unless I'm driving. I wrote about my setup here: https://chuck.is/phone
I'm in a similar boat. GPS, Camera, but also Telegram and a basic browser for reference.
Dumbing down a smart phone doesn't fix the size and delicateness of the device either. I essentially want a tiny durable smartphone, ie size of an iPhone 3g.
My biggest thing is I hate how important this device is while also being unwieldy and easy to break. The only entertainment I use on my phone is twitter and even then I find it easy to stop scrolling.
I want the abilities of a smart phone, but something I can keep on me without worrying about it, like wearing a watch or how I can throw around my wallet.
I had thought that smartwatches didn't have cameras, but it looks like some do, at least. I can't imagine they're very good, since iPhones have a hard enough time fitting good cameras.
While true that an iPhone is still needed somewhere in the process, Apple now lets you set up an Apple Watch for family members that don't have an iPhone.
Literally tried to upgrade my Pixel 2 XL to Lineage and it failed repeatedly. Reddit says, no joke, it's the cable that's the problem. Sigh. Same computer didn't have issues flashing old Galaxy and Nexus phones.
Bought a dumb phone but found it lacking for your exact reasons -- no GPS, crappy camera, and texting using the number pad was tedious as all hell.
Gave up, got a Pixel 7, might think about flashing it.
> Reddit says, no joke, it's the cable that's the problem.
Not surprising. My experience across a few different Android devices over the years is just about all USB-related functionality is a flaky mess, and that includes things like ADB and installing new ROMs. How it's flaky varies from device to device which makes it extra fun.
Not knowing anything about Pixel 2's USB functionality, but I have encountered cases where new cables have solved the problem I was encountering. One time was when I've tried to transfer files from my phone to the desktop and the speeds were ludicrously slow, like ~2Mbps where normally it would be 80-100 Mbps. The cable was rather old at that point and I bit the bullet and bought a new one and at that point I've realised that cables can worn out eventually.
Can confirm with Android phones and vr headsets that ADB access can definitely be affected by choice of cable. Talk about face palm, but it is what it us
> Literally tried to upgrade my Pixel 2 XL to Lineage and it failed repeatedly. Reddit says, no joke, it's the cable that's the problem.
I recently started having issues with the data functionality of the port. I can't get ADB to run at all, it will only charge. The power button also doesn't work so I've had to set it to shut off the screen by holding down the "Recents" button.
> Bought a dumb phone but found it lacking for your exact reasons
I like the idea of dumb phones, but I don't want to have to buy separate things like a digital camera, GPS, mp3 player, etc. Seems like it's just adding more complexity.
That OLauncher home screen just made me take a deep breath, very very nice! Truly 'calm tech' [0]
My anxiety with ditching Android to LineageOS is the loss of all the software-defined image quality in the Camera app.
What has been your experience using your phone camera with Lineage? As in is it good enough to also capture some family moments or do you use it just as functional camera to take pictures of something you need to remember?
I had Signal installed for a while, but ultimately removed it because it's mostly friends sending stupid memes, breaking whatever I was concentrating on seemingly at random. I do have it running on my laptop.
I'm aware and I have. It's been helpful, but I tend to get into the habit of checking and messaging friends at random when I feel I feel slightly bored. Secondly, they'll often send me links and Youtube videos that I can't open. I'll likely reinstall it again in specific situations, like when I'm traveling abroad. Thirdly, the battery life on my phone lasts a few days without Signal running in the background. I've had the setup I have for about two months and it's working for me, at least right now.
I'm going to grab one of the Jolla devices and give it a test drive next month. I think there's decent alternative out there where you can still maintain your privacy without having to step all the way down to a "dumb phone".
I've planned on running the Pixel 2 XL into the ground. I was originally running GrapheneOS but switched to LineageOS after support was dropped. I did look into CalyxOS but I believe support for the Pixel 2 was dropped around the same time that it was dropped by GrapheneOS - likely coinciding when Google stopped releasing security updates.
> It's simply easier to dumb down your existing smartphone, especially if you have an Android phone.
That claim is a bit nuanced, IMO. Before I finally chose to move to iPhones, I tried my best to remove distractions from my Android phone, and I failed. iOS is less customisable, but comes with a configuration/ecosystem baseline that's far easier to tolerate, and insofar as it is flexible, the changes are far less painful than bringing an Android to that level.
What did you find difficult in removing distractions on Android?
I got a Pixel 5 few years ago (seemingly the smallest form factor Android device), didn't install any apps, removed a bunch of stock apps I didn't need, and turned off notifications for everything beside incoming calls/messages. After that, I just trained myself to avoid using search/the browser unless necessary and to do something else when the itch arises to check the phone for something.
I'm sorry, but I don't understand your first sentence. You researched dumbphones and discovered they're not smartphones? I'm struggling to understand what you thought you were going to find.
I had spent time researching dumb phones and thinking about what my needs are with a mobile device (ie GPS and decent camera). What I learned was that a "dumbphone" isn't really an option. Maybe we're getting into semantics here, but can a dumbphone have both GPS and decent camera and still be considered a dumb?
> People should stop running to mommy to get their data deleted and just not share it in the first place.
Agreed that people should not just hand over personal data, however humans make mistakes and may later that it was a decision that they only now realize was not in their best interest. People open accounts/share personal data when they have to for work/business and then no longer work for that company, or they think they have to, or they have been coerced/tricked via dark patterns.
I've been deleting accounts and requesting my personal data be purged from accounts I created 5 to 10+ years ago - before I was aware of good digital hygiene and that these accounts have information that can later become a liability (whether it's personal/financial data that's been hacked, or the company sells my data to 3rd parties/marketers, or the company is bought out by another company with different privacy polices).
Over the past couple of months I've been in the process of deleting some dormant accounts. I've had the most issues specifically with airlines. It's been a bit of a challenge interacting with the company's customer support and/or digging through their privacy policies to find an email address to contact.
I stumbled across this website a couple of times but opted not to use it, because it felt odd plugging in some personal info into a website I'd never heard of - much like those services that claim to remove you from people-search websites. However, I only now realize that this website/service actually generates an email on my behalf that includes the appropriate company email address and relevant messaging.
I really wish websites like these weren't necessary at all. I should be able to delete an account (along with personal and financial details) just as easily as I create one.
My credit card company offers a similar service for free, they'd monitor my information online and then submit an opt-out request on my behalf.
I don't use the service, but it's because of how opt-out requests work, I'd have to give an online website information about me that they may not have in order to delete the info they have, it sounds counterproductive and assumes they won't see the other info, or publish it a different way.
I've been doing the same after the LastPass incident (I haven't used it in a couple of years, but for old accounts I didn't do a good job of updating passwords).
I agree it's surprising how many companies don't allow account deletion online; it's also surprising how many privacy policies link to dead URLs or email addresses (that literally bounce) if they even mention a "request to delete" at all. Plus many others that use the stupid bots for customer support or a form with a dropdown that doesn't include anything about privacy / account, just product support.
But totally don't use any of these websites, they are very likely collecting and disseminating your data themselves.
> it's also surprising how many privacy policies link to dead URLs or email addresses
Agreed, many privacy policies I've come across are crap and seem like it was copy/pasted from elsewhere. I just recently tried to delete an account last week, and the email address in their privacy policy was literally "support@[company]1234.test".
I haven’t found a text browser that is able to properly render the nesting of HN comments, they all appear at the same level. I haven’t looked recently though maybe it works on some text browser now.
I hate almost everything about air travel, but to me one "perk" is the fact I'm unplugged from the internet for a few hours. I am really not looking forward to the time when the person sitting next to me is on a phone call and chatting extra loud because they're on a plane.
I had my entire music collection stored on Google Play Music for a time, at one point being my only backup. When I tried to export my music collection, I discovered that not only were the file names and folder structures completely messed up, but I would sometimes get lower bitrate version of the songs or songs with "clean" lyrics - which I know for a fact wasn't what I had originally uploaded.
I refuse to use music streaming services these days - sometimes resorting to less than legal means, but for the most part I purchase drm free music from Bandcamp.
Hey, I can agree with that! I still keep an MP3/FLAC collection I've been building since 2005-ish (when I was a teen). A lot of music has come and gone, but one thing that hasn't changed is that I still use foobar2000[1] on my personal computer to access my collection. Last year, I bought a Raspberry Pi 4 with 4GB of RAM for cheap + an old SSD I had laying around, installed OpenMediaVault[2] on it, connected it to my router via Ethernet, and now I'm able to access my music from all of my home devices. I use RhythmBox on my Linux machines, and I'm pretty sure there's a way to interop with Plex.
I don't have the RPi connected to the internet though. I just load my phone with MP3s like the old days, and open up NewPipe[3] when I want to listen to something I don't have stored.
FYI to anyone else currently using Plex but annoyed with its inability to stream music nicely, there's a separate app called PlexAmp (android and iOS) which works much better.
Backblaze B2 makes sense for large libraries over a few TB, but for 2TB... even Google One with 2TB of storage for Google Drive outcompetes them on pricing. For $99/yr of 2TB of storage, you end up saving $140 per year over Backblaze B2 and rclone is an amazing third-party client, or if you prefer regular snapshot backups then you can use restic.
Since always. For clarity, they are using the commercial offering from backblaze, not backblaze's personal/home use product.
B2 is similar to s3, and B2 charges for api calls + egress. Ingress is free, and they have a generous free daily api calling limit that covers some of the core api
I had a different experience, on export my files were all in the original encoding. The value of Google Play Music was that you could upload files. I have also never had any files replaced.
I have enjoyed self hosted solutions since YouTube Music broke the smart Playlist and integration for uploaded files with steaming files.
When GPM launched, there was definitely no deduplication in place. Even if two users uploaded the same file, there would be two copies — more if you count replication and RS-encoding. It was so because... somebody ordered so.
Perhaps things changed later, but I'm skeptical, because the "somebodies" never change. Also, as recently as a couple of years ago, I noticed broken metadata/cover art in my library that I actually wish YTM would fix for me. I suspect it's more likely that the original bits were/are still in there somewhere and some UI made it harder to get to them. With YTM, accessing your own MP3s is a bit convoluted. I'll give it a shot later tonight, to see if I can download some music that I know to have specific metadata and bitrates.
I know for a fact that YTM still has poor metadata support, the only way to fix it is to reupload the entire file. That's a huge reason why I moved to a self hosted solution. I know there were multiple cases where the metadata was wrong and two separate versions of a song were tagged as the same track. But I never lost any data. I would recommend doing a takeout and exporting all the songs if possible.
I have to imagine Google HAS to dedup on the server side, otherwise even a 100,000 song cap would be too much data to host for free. Google doesn't play ads on uploaded tracks. Google stores not-transcoded music files and has since "Google Music". When GPM first came out, it was a storage locker and felt more like direct competition to Grooveshark than iTunes.
Record companies seem to have a very tight not just on the songs, but also the metadata surrounding them. No service really offers the "radio mode" or suggested tracks for local playback, from what I found. I'd happily give a company playback metadata if in return I got that feature back. I wonder if Pandora has patents for certain parts of music recommendation algorithms. Spotify and YTM can rely heavily on user-generated music connections, but maybe that is why it can't work for local/uploaded files.
> I have to imagine Google HAS to dedup on the server side
It's been a decade since I helped with GPM storage, but one thing I can say is that Google won't dedup anything without the OK from lawyers on _both_ sides, with all the consequences that ensue. Somebody could turn this and similar launches into a TV show, but it wouldn't be as funny as Silicon Valley. On the contrary...
Ditto. I kept >200GB of music on GPM and had no issues with codecs or bitrates getting changed when I had to move away from it (much less being replaced with clean versions).
It definitely butchered my metadata, however. I've spent a couple years now slowly fixing everything.
(I still miss the Play Music iOS app's offline playback, it was miles ahead of anything else)
Honestly, I don't know how to get that much bandwidth, that much space for the same price as a seedbox. I suspect reliability of data is not as good as a proper VPS.
Windows is adware. A couple weeks ago I recently wrote a rant about the reasons I no longer use Windows on any of my machines [1], but I recently installed Windows 10 on bare metal because I have a work project coming up that likely requires me to use Windows. One of the first new obnoxious things I noticed was that search box in the taskbar had a bright and colorful gift icon inside it. Clicking on that icon brings up links to holiday-themed advertisements like "Top 10 Tech Gifts This Holiday Season". Mind you, I provided zero information to Microsoft and had yet to even open a web browser. I also made certain my internet was disconnected prior to the installation setup to avoid being strong armed into creating a Microsoft account, and disabled as much telemetry as they allow beforehand. This was not a dev or beta release, this was the latest version of the Windows 10 ISO from Microsoft's website. It's not just sad, but it gives me a gross feeling.
This happened to me during a Google Takeout export when I was degoogling in late 2019. I recall going through some photos from the earlier 2010's and some random pictures of other people were popping up. About a month or so later I received an email from Google letting me know that some of my files may have been accidentally in other people's exports. Since then, I stopped using apps like Google Photos and cloud storage in general. If I do, my files will be encrypted before I upload them.
I love Neocities. Over the summer I transitioned my personal website from Wordpress to a static HTML/CSS site. I used Neocities to relearn HTML and learn CSS, as well as figure out how I was going to implement the CSS so that my site that looked okay-ish on desktop and mobile. https://chuck.is
In my case, I have a 2017 Pixel 2 XL running LineageOS, with a text only home screen launcher (OLauncher). I only have SMS, phone/contacts, camera, open street maps, KOReader, Music, Podcasts, Notes, and Calculator. That's it. Everything else has been purged or disabled, including the web browser, via ADB.
I don't really use it all unless I'm driving. I wrote about my setup here: https://chuck.is/phone