I switched from iOS to Android about three years ago. I saved all the APKs for everything I installed (or updated) on that first phone. When I got a new phone last fall it was pleasantly like getting a new PC. I imported my SMS and contacts from my last backup (taken with an open source took I'd installed from an APK), then installed all the apps I use and imported or manually set any settings I wanted to customize.
Every non-stock app on my phone was installed from an APK directly downloaded from the manufacturer or open source developer's site / Github releases. I've never had a Google Play account and have never used any Android "app store".
The biggest pain was having to manually logon the couple of sites I allow to keep persistent cookies since device owners aren't allowed to just import/export cookies from mobile Chrome.
It has been a very nice experience. I appreciate the feeling of sovereignty and ownership of my device (even though it does have a locked bootloader and I don't actually have root).
I did something similar. Wanted a Pixel with Graphene OS but the screen hurt my eyes. Went with a Motorola with an IPS screen. Uninstalled or disabled all the crap. Never logged into Google. Went with Obtanium and F-Droid for most software. Aurora for a couple of apps that were only on the Play Store. Used NetGuard with a whitelist to lock it all down.
After all that was done, the phone felt like mine in a way that my iPhone doesn't. Was a good feeling. With luck, the Motorola + Graphene partnership will produce phones with screens better than the Pixel and I can keep doing this.
It may be worth checking Motorola's OLED models in person (for example the Razr Fold, Razr Ultra and Signature) so see if their Flicker Prevention mode helps. I don't think any IPS models are likely to be supported in the first wave/generation of supported devices in 2027.
I ended up with a Motorola phone, too (albeit with an AMOLED screen so not the model you have). I got hooked on Motorola phones because of the "chop/chop" flashlight gesture. I don't think I can use a phone without that gesture ever again! >smile<
I'm hopeful, too, re: Motorola + Graphene. I wanted to use Graphene last fall wehn I got the new phone but I was committed to not giving Google any money.
I was 12 years old when I started using BBSs (in 1989). I missed the heyday of 1980s BBSing. I lived in rural Ohio and had a highly-restricted local calling area. I did call some far-flung BBSs outside my locality, running up some (for the time) pretty hefty long distance bills.
1 - When I started I'd call every couple of days. By the time I got into high school (the twilight of local BBSing in my area as dial-up ISPs moved-in) I was calling boards every day. We had a reasonably lively BBS community (for the population) and had real-life meetups, too. Missing a day sometimes meant missing a lot. I know of at least one married couple that met on the boards in their late teens. It was a pretty neat scene.
I used a lot of "Procomm Plus", but "Telix" and "Qmodem" were popular on the PC platform, too.
"Offline reader" software was really, really helpful. This was software that let you download a "packet" of message boards and email, read and reply offline, then upload your responses. (I was of the "Silly Little Mail Reader" religion.)
Once I got Windows 3.1 and could multitask I'd dial-in to a board, download an email "packet", then queue up and file downloads or uploads while I read messages, and maybe even got my reply upload prepared.
2 - The guy who sold me my first (used) modem gave me a couple local board numbers. BBS ads and lists downloaded from boards gave me a few. Word-of-mouth was how I got into the "underground" BBS scene.
3 - Locally there were just small single-line boards. Because some boards straddled two local calling areas they were more popular, but none of them were big. I recall a 40 user board being large. I called some Cleveland, OH-area boards, and there were definitely some bigger multi-line systems there with hundreds of users.
4 - Politics, humor, local issues, computers and tech, gaming, hacking, and "in joke" local board culture stuff are the things I remember. I stayed out of the political stuff, for the most part.
5 - Personal computing software and hardware were the main technical topics on most boards. There was a local board that had a fair amount of amateur radio discussion, too. I don't remember a lot of local BBS programming discussion. There were forums in the big online services (CompuServ, Prodigy, GEnie, etc) where programming was more seriously discussed. On the "underground" side cracking copy protection, hacking, phone phreaking, and virus writing were the more technical discussions (and, of course, there was the trash talking).
Some companies would put up a board to support their own software and, obviously, that dominated the discussion there.
Other than the few boards that supported downloading "packets" of message board data ("QWK packets") you were connected to the remote board the whole time. I got started at 1,200 baud (approx 120 characters / second), and moved up to 9,600 and eventually 28,800 baud at the end. At those speeds you're not downloading much very quickly. You're basically interacting with a TUI-based application as a very slow serial dumb terminal.
Heh - QWK was such a god send for those of us paying long distance charges to access boards. I think I used 'Bluemail' ? 'Bluereader' ? and really liked it.
Downloading files might also be limited by an upload/download ratio restriction, too.
A friend of mine wrote an external program for a particular BBS (what were colloquially known as "door" programs-- software adjunct to the BBS that remote callers could interact with) that allowed you to "bank" your quota time.
Time banks were fairly common. For those with slower modems, it was sometimes the only way you would be able to download an entire program. File downloads were not always resumable back then, depending on the transfer protocols supported by your terminal software and/or the BBS.
It only needs one port, but for most simple networks two ports on the router means less configuration.
The "router on a stick" paradigm using VLANs to a share a single physical port is perfectly valid. You're creating a "now you have two problems" scenario in which you need a VLAN-capable switch and have VLAN configuration to make.
I typically like the ISP router on a dedicated router port to make monitoring the physical link and/or cycling the physical link easier.
Unless your ISP is >1Gbps adding a second port to most devices is as easy as adding a USB NIC.
Technically you can route without isolation, but VLANs are definitely a good idea if you’re using a single port.
There are 2.5 Gbps, 5, and even 10 Gbps USB NICs these days, although 10 Gbps ones are pretty expensive and require really recent USB ports.
I agree I want my local network and my WAN port separate, if for no other reasons than so I can use ssh to get into the router from my LAN with the WAN port disabled.
This sounds like me. I've been described as "high speed hunt and peck". I have slowed down a bit in the last decade or so, but I can still type fast enough for everything I want to do. I've had no reason to pursue anything different because it's not an impediment to my work.
I'd like to how the incidence of repetitive strain injury from typing compares between populations who follow a rigorous technique versus personalized. I've never had the slightest discomfort typing, albeit I'm sure I'm not in the upper echelons of typing quantity per unit of time either.
Try taking 3 1 minute typing tests back to back at your full speed and maybe you'll feel a little something. Any discomforts I had mainly revealed themselves under heavy loads like this. If you never type a lot in a row, it can be easy to miss
I don't use F-Droid, but I've been an Android user for several years on two different devices and I've never associated a Google account with a device. I've installed all my software from APK downloads from the open source project site releases they came from.
It was really nice last year when I moved to a new device. I restored my last SMS, call log, and contact backup with the open source app I use for that, then loaded the rest of the apps I use from their APKs. It was a lot like getting a new PC. Very enjoyable.
You rented the devices with a full up-front payment, but the manufacturer stuck you with the e-waste problem when they decided to be come an absentee landlord.
This needs to be fixed by regulation. If a device requires an online service to function it (a) needs to be clearly advertised as rental and not a purchase, and (b) the device manufacturer must take the devices back and deal with the e-waste if they discontinue the services or release the software stack (including complete and corresponding source code and build environment) to allow third-parties to host it.
This! Absolutely needed regulation. Why is it that such a clearly beneficial and necessary piece of legislation is not making its way through the legislative bodies of the world while age checks somehow magically appeared universally?
I would love to figure out a not-for-profit business model to help people preserve their personal physical and digital records (think Grandma's iPhone w/ 90GB of photos and videos of the family on it as well as the old family albums, video tapes, films, etc).
I suppose there's a component of citizen journalism and historical preservation in my thinking, too. This work isn't just for families, but also serves to document the history of a community, too.
I would jump at the chance to do work in this space full-time. What little I have done, helping friends and with my own family, was fun and rewarding. I've never been able to figure out how to finance it.
The lab described in the article and others like it handle the digitization part, but there's still the the "forever problem" of kicking data down the road onto new storage technologies / services, too. The digitizing is the easier problem. Once the material is digitized I feel like it's in a lot more peril for catastrophic loss.
I think something like "digital cemeteries / memory gardens", financed by endowments that allow them to continue to operate in perpetuity, should be "a thing". I haven't thought deeply about how to make it work, but the "shallow" thinking I've done says it's financially unsustainable.
I lean toward not-for-profit because I'd like to provide the services for as close to free to the clients as possible. I think preserving family memories and records should be accessible to everyone-- not just those with significant financial means.
While I think what libraries do with these labs is laudable, I worry that the self-service aspect raises the bar too high for some people. I think having a service component, at a reasonable price, to do the digitizing and to work to preserve the material in perpetuity would be a great thing.
Find a local community church, public room, or public library and have them allow you to organize a handful of sessions where folks can bring in old devices and come up with a workflow that's efficient. Run it as a donation event where folks can donate money for a new hard drive , or to fund the service for other folks that can't afford it.
You gotta make money somehow. Maybe have an optional durable+accessible storage and portal (just a SaaS and optional harddrive that you ship out or update on occasion... a miniPC that pulls from the SaaS using rsync automatically?).
You might be able to make this work if you sell enough of the SaaS subscriptions (12 bucks a month or 200 a year for perrenial backups -- ship us the device/etc. and we'll get the media into your account. You'd need 1000 customers with a 20% systems cost to do this full time, which seems reasonable).
If you read the first line as “make a handsome profit”, I get it, but if you read it slightly more charitably to mean “this service [permanent backup] costs real money to operate, so you need a way to fund that somehow”, it seems perfectly reasonable to me.
Servers, storage, power, networking, and cooling aren’t free; therefore neither is reliable indefinite storage of family memories in digital form.
It is a way to make money. Provide service in exchange for money. I'm not sure what's wrong with that.
If he could figure out how to do it without ever spending money, that would be amazing and I would fully support it. As it stands, I saw what he was asking, did some math to sort out how he could manage it full time, and made a recommendation.
People are tired of SaaS, I get it, so I suppose you could ship an app to do something similar; wire it to talk to every possible imaging/recording device and then automate the 'download all pictures from this device'. But it still takes time. And potentially money.
If you're in the US, just send it unencrypted over the internet. The NSA will kindly archive it for you and then you can submit a FOIA request whenever you need access to it.
Similar background re: PC building here, working at a shop that built PCs in the late 90s. I remember seeing boards with these new-fangled USB ports, DIMM memory, Pentium II, the first 3D accelerators, etc. It was a fun time. I got in to the industry right at the end of AT-style boards and power supplies and mostly missed having to deal with that stuff (other than in my personal life, where I still had old stuff).
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