Florisboard with no swipe, no word predictions, no autocorrection, no nonsense.
WPM? Fast enough. It takes more time to proofread, edit and attach files than to actually type, anyway, so I don’t care about words per minute. Never have.
Or many service providers competing on price, quality of service and features, not competing on exclusivity like they do now.
Like grocery stores. Imagine if only one chain has the exclusive rights to sell potatoes and another one has rights to pasta. They can ask whatever price they want, because what you gonna do? Go to another store to get your 'taters cheaper? Hah, you’ll cry and you’ll pay what we ask! (BTW, growing your own potatos and sharing them with your neighbor infringes on our rights and is illegal. We’ll sue you to oblivion if we catch you doing it.)
Do you have the Tailscale’s “Magic DNS” enabled? I had problems with Tailscale on Android, too, and disabling their DNS solved it.
For a publicly traded company the people who buy their products are not the customers for whom to create value.
Shareholders are the real customers.
People who buy the products become a resource to extract value from.
This seems to be one of the rare times these days that google actually does a pretty good job getting you the result you seek for without clutter and ads.
Also, use bangs to search on a specific site. If I want to search for an article on Wikipedia, I just type in “w <my search term>”. d for DuckDuckGo, g for Google, b for Bing etc. I default to Brave primarily and DuckDuckGo secondarily.
Excellent hardware
More like excellent industrial design, good chip design and good software support*. The hardware itself is nothing special; having a badly engineered aspect has been the “standard feature” for many Apple devices (butterfly keyboard, soldered SSD-s, phone chassis prone to bending are some examples that come to mind).
For comparison, I had a Huawei P7 phone (back when Huawei was still in good graces everywhere) that was thinner, and had better screen than the contemporary iPhone while also having a strong, beautifully machined aluminium chassis. It proved a very durable and dependable tool, and cost ⅓ of the price of an iPhone. The weak point was update support—it was shipped with Android 4.4.2, updated to 4.4.4, and that was that. Android 5 was supposedly released, but never arrived via OTA and when I updated manually after spending some time searching for the new firmware, it proved to be buggy and half-baked.
*Caveat: when I tried to download KDE Connect for an older iPhone, I couldn’t because the OS is no longer supported and Apple store doesn’t offer older versions of the apps. On Android I can still dig up an old version from Github or some other source and install what I need—I was still able to install Kodi on my old 4.4.4 phone to use as a DLNA music streamer. On an old Apple device, you’re shit outta luck.
I seriously doubt China would send special agents to kidnap some random netizen from EU. And if they did, that would be a diplomatic incident—lots of explaining to be done and paperwork to be filled. And if they tried to extradite a netizen for saying that Xi Jinping looks like Winnie the Pooh, well, good luck, the courts would laugh at them.
On the other hand, China has no jurisdiction over me and will deny to the five eyes countries any data it collects, or the fact that it collects anything at all. Worst they can do is deny me entry to the country because I say Free Tibet! and Xi Jinping looks like Winnie the Pooh! but I don’t plan travelling to China anytime soon so whatever.
But the western countries spying on what I do with my phone can put me on a no-fly list, terrorist watchlist or even arrest me when I say eg that direct action and sabotage against climate-destroying industries is justified and necessary if the powers-that-be make peaceful change of course impossible—as they are doing right now.
I’ve had good luck of finding very good concert recordings—many are recordings from the mixing desk tape outs as 24/94 .FLAC-s with excellent sound quality—from Internet Archive. The search system is tedious, though, and you probably won’t find “big acts” there. But if your tastes include modern jazz, folk and indie rock, it can be a treasure trove.
As for the SD cards, I’ve never over the 10+ years of using smartphones have had data lost on an SD card (and I’ve used some cheap and sketchy SD cards). The one exception is a Samsung SD card that after being retired from the phone, reformatted and sitting in a drawer for a year refused to being recognized on my PC when I checked my old cards to see what’s what and who’s where.
I’d rather trash my replaceable SD card with writes from the camera, downloads, streaming cache etc than the non-replaceable eMMC memory. It’s cheaper and less environmentally damaging to replace a failed 30€ SD card than to replace the whole phone (or the motherboard) because of the failed eMMC.
These days I use high-endurance SD cards that are designed to be used in eg dash cams, action cameras etc under constant writes and should be really safe for storage in a phone. And all my photos/videos are synced to my NAS via Syncthing in realtime, anyway (over Tailscale VPN or Syncthing relays).
Maybe if it’s just a jolly roger with “*ARRR” under it. Those in the know will understand, for others it’s just a silly pop culture reference. And has plausible deniability (“What? I just really like Pirates of the Caribbean and Sea of Thieves!”).
In a capitalist POV, redundancy is just unneeded cost for things that are “not needed”.
In an engineering POV redundancy is insurance to make sure things work as needed even when part of the system fails.
For example, Apollo flight computers were triple redundant, and the outputs from all three were compared before being fed into engines. If two outputs would be 0.98, but one was 0.12, it’s most likely that the third one is wrong and should be discarded. This makes it very likely that correct control intput is given to the engines all times and the whole thing would not crash and burn because of a random bit flip.
LG OLED TV-s are where it’s at. Superb picture quality and prices have come down considerably.
As for sound, Denon 3600/3700/3800 AVR–everything else is either overpriced or crap (or both). The 3000 series has good power amp section and Audyssey MultEQ XT32 which actually does something below 100 Hz where room correction is most needed (see https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/difference-between-audyssey-multeq-vs-multeq-xt-vs-multeq-xt32.14786/#post-460377). For speakers I quite like ELAC Debut Reference speakers and SUB3030 subwoofer–price-performance ratio is really good.
That’s for the normal consumer level stuff. Of course, if you have the time and will, you can do what I have done and go down the rabbit hole of DIY speakers and subs to end up with something that blows the socks off of actual THX cinemas–highly recommended ;)
Just to add a thought: big film studios screw over the VFX artists all the time. There are stories of a movie winning “Best Visual Effects” award and the VFX house that actually did all the hard work going bankrupt because they didn’t get paid enough by the big studio to make ends meet. IIRC, Life of Pi was one such occasion. Isn’t that piracy, too: owner class stealing labor from working class.
One could possibly argue that piracy is the inevitable product—nay, an honoured practice—of capitalism because it all boils down to exploiting someone’s labor for your own benefit without fair compensation for the laborer. Big corporations exploit 3rd world countries to get their resources for as cheap as possible; pirates exploit movie, film and game studios to get their entertainment for as cheap as possible. Circle of life; business as usual🙃
Navidrome is a self-hosted music streaming service and Tailscale is an easy to use VPN to remotely access your home (or work) network and services on them without exposing anything on the public internet.
Never really stopped, what with being a low income resident in eastern parts of EU.
But a big reason in addition to cost and many services or content simply not being available in my country is all the technical loops you have to jump through to get the best experience—I remember the time when to get full HD streaming you had to either use a specific set-top box or certain Intel CPU-s integrated graphics in a specific browser. If you didn’t, you’d be limited to 480p. The same still goes for 4k and Atmos today.
Speaking of Atmos, ironically being a DIY audio enthusiast has pretty much locked me out of that. No way to decode Atmos on a PC, you have to use an AVR. But my speakers use (along with other uncommon components) digital crossovers that take digital inputs and multichannel digital outputs are verboten on AVR-s because MPAA and licensing terms (I believe only the 30000€+ Trinnov and Storm Audio pre-pros have them). Not to mention that even 3000€+ AVR-s have DAC performance no better than my 50€ Asus sound card. In the end, it’s just not worth the cost and hassle of setup.
For me, convenience of streaming is also a non-argument; with Jellyfin, Navidrome and Tailscale I can access my whole library from any point on Earth that has internet access. And streaming quality is only limited by the internet connection quality, not by my hardware not having some obscure DRM feature.
So how is this “hacking” if the information is publicly accessible for all?