Kevin

Wait, why wouldn’t you 3D print (or order) the official mainboard enclosure and use it as a cheap home server? You could at least sell it or pass it along to someone else who would.

I use k9mail with a work gmail account and it works great, has imap push and everything (no need for Google services).

It depends what country you’re in. The US doesn’t and Canada does (not sure about elsewhere).

At the same time, I run Graphene with no Google services or apps and it’s fantastic. The only thing vs a rom with microg, is you need to be able to depend on unified push or background listening for push notifications. Imo this is actually more de-googled than connecting to Google services with an open source client (which still results in your phone having a constant connection to Google). Graphene also provides options to connect to proxies or alternative services for things like location services, DNS, internet connectivity checks (which can also just be turned off), etc.

Speaking of upgradability, I wonder if an egpu could be connected to that usbc port.

I ran ps2 Linux as my “desktop” for 6 months or so back in the day. It wasn’t capable of much compared to a general purpose computer at the time. Videos only played at almost full speed if you ran em in fbdev from a vterm with nothing else running. There was so little ram that using kde1 would run you into slow motion computing because of all the swapping. Window maker was ok, but running much of anything inside it would eat through that 32 megs of ram pretty quickly (I spent most of my time in vterms).

That’s a really good point, basically throw their weight around a bit eh?

100%, my bank thankfully doesn’t tick that box, but if it did I wouldn’t think twice about dropping the app. Freedom is more important.

If they want a lot of play store banking apps + other things that opt into play protect to work they’ll need to add the signature verification requirement.

It’s definitely not perfect, like I can grab a nap and not have it notice sometimes so I assume there are a bunch of heuristics at play that create a “best guess”.

That said, how rested I feel does typically line up with the number of hours it shows (regardless of how long I’ve actually spent in bed), and it has a short description about the quality of sleep like “restorative” or “not enough rem” that further lines up with how I feel.

Exactly. Gadgetbridge reverse engineered the protocol so it can configure all the same settings the Garmin app can, notifications get forwarded to the watch, the watch sends its sensor data, gps tracks, etc and Gadgetbridge knows what to do with the data so it’s displayed in graphs and lists, etc.

And yeah, if you get a watch without wifi or don’t connect one with it to a network, then all data i/o is going to be exclusively bluetooth with Gadgetbridge, which specifically avoids the network permission (so there’s zero chance of anything leaking to a server somewhere.) That’s why it communicates with a weather app fur that data instead if pulling it in itself.

It also works with more than just smart watches; like I can use it to configure the buttons, noise cancelling state, etc on my bluetooth headphones.

Mine does (a fenix 7). I think any model that has a heart rate sensor would probably work based on the wiki page. There are certain models that offload sleep tracking to the official app, and I don’t think those support sleep tracking in gadgetbridge yet (last I checked this was the case), but the ones that handle it on the watch like mine fully support that too (and you can view stats and a graph in gadgetbridge).

Speaking of the wiki page: https://gadgetbridge.org/basics/topics/garmin/ - there’s a lot to parse since so many models apply, but my fenix 7 has had full support aside from live cloud maps in the weather app, and I’ve been issue-free since last October aside from a couple things they quickly fixed for me after I opened them.

There are 2 main gotchyas:

1. despite the weather sync not requiring the official app (gadgetbridge can sync with breezy weather), the watch stops trying to refresh it if it’s been ~3 months since rotating the api key. In the advanced settings you can have gadgetbridge create a new api key for you, but that may break the ability to use the official app (I don’t so I went with that).

2. gadgetbridge can’t update the firmware or maps, however you can update directly on the watch via wifi, or you can use the PC app (which works great in a libvirt windows vm).

Gadgetbridge supports a good chunk of their watches. Completely offline and you can configure watch settings through it.

I bought a Dell with Ubuntu preloaded in 2019. I think it should still be possible (It’s their “developer edition” models).

I was pretty lucky in university as most of my profs were either using cross platform stuff or Linux exclusive software. I had a single class that wanted me using windows stuff and I just dropped that one.

Awesome that you’re getting back into it, it’s definitely the best it’s ever been (and you’re right that Steam cracked the code). It sounds like you probably know what you’re doing if you’re running Linux VMs and stuff, but feel free to shoot me a PM if you run into any questions or issues I might be able to point you in the right direction for.

I’ve been running Linux exclusively since 2001 or so. It was rough around the edges back then, but it was useful enough for what I needed.

You had to choose a good distro on that note; redhat, mandrake, etc broke on me so many times, and I was only able to fully switch after finding slackware, which was rock solid.

Earlier today I googled how to toggle full screen in dosbox-x and the AI-generated answer said to use alt+enter. Tried it and it didn’t work, so I look in the documentation and it turns out that they changed it to F12+f a while ago (probably to avoid interfering with actual dos input).

This is definitely already a problem.

Libertarianism is a traditionally left wing philosophy that started in the 1800s. They’re also typically pretty big on human rights and equality.

The more modern America-centric “tea party” libertarians fit what you’re saying, but they didn’t create the term.