I’ll start: printers.
I bought an HP in March 2020 when my job went remote and HP bricked it remotely after only 100 pages because I wouldn’t sign up for their subscription program. Ended up trashing a perfectly good printer.
Luckily my library’s close by and I can print there remotely.
Company apps.
Every business you deal with has an app these days. Grocery stores, restaurants, etc… Just install and scan to get your discounts and track your points. Yeah… No thanks.
ditto. fuck that app shit.
Running Calyx and don’t have the play store installed so guess I won’t be using your app.
I don’t house any apps from any companies, restaurants, shops… The people who have shit like McDonalds, Zara, whatever else installed on their phone by the dozens actually seem crazy to me. And not even for privacy reasons (although those are a part of it). Those people also seem to be always complaining about running out of space on their phone (and %50 of the time what they are running out on is actually their iCloud/Google Drive from auto backups but they dont know the difference…)… why dont you try deleting the 50 different fast food apps on your phone? What’s that? It gives you a coupon for a %20 discount or a 6 pack of nuggies/small fries every 2 months? Well then, everything is fine and dandy. Time to keep it in your phone 24/7.
I also never give my phone number out to stores when they ask. Its crazy how normalized it is for stores to ask you for name, address, phone number etc. to make an “account” for you without even explicitly saying that they are making an account for you at checkout. And people do it!!! It enrages me. I just want to give you my money in exchange for goods and services, no unnecessary fluff on top, HOW HARD CAN IT BE???
I hear you on the phone number thing. That’s another stupid thing I don’t really do. I have a separate VoIP number that I use for any business I need to deal with. No way are they getting my real number.
And speaking of friends and their apps and my phone number, I rarely give anybody my phone number too. I don’t need it being harvested by the load of apps they have installed. You’re only as strong as our weakest link, and most people don’t give this stuff any thought.
When I bought my current house, the previous elderly owner’s sons had outfitted it with Ring doorbell and security/monitoring including Alexa in a few rooms…even had a piece of paper stapled to the ceiling above his bed that said “ALEXA EMERGENCY”. It was Probably good idea to keep an eye on their dying parent.
The day I closed on it…I ripped out the panels, unplugged anything Alexa, and disconnected the ring doorbell. The only things ring-related still here are a motion sensor and 1 or 2 door sensors…but all the wiring has been disconnected.
Fuck Ring.
I ended up putting in Eufy with a Home Base, zero subscription.
Televisions.
I will not have any “smart TV” that has access to the Internet, spewing ads and harvesting data in my house. I currently have two older dumb models and when they ultimately fail, I will switch to projectors. Chromecast and a Raspberry Pi server can handle everything I want, without ads
Microsoft products or any suscription that doesn’t have to be a suscription.
Avoid Google as much a possible, may be next phone will be graphene.
No social networks
Using GrapheneOS for a few years now, its great. Banking apps also work. Only thing that doesnt work is NFC payment via google pay.
I’ve read that a lot of stuff is outright blocked graphene based phones
I haven’t found anything apart from Google Pay’s NFC payment that doesnt work (Google Pay for online payment does work).
My list of working apps includes banking apps for two different banks, national government communication app, audi app, two apps for charging electric vehicles, two apps for public transport tickets, …
You’ve read that the Volkswagen app did this , you’ve conflated it to “a lot of stuff” and you probably don’t own a Volkswagen FWIW
No social networks
You’re on one right now.
Pretty much anything that doesn’t run on foss. Game consoles in particular. When they all started requiring a subscription for basic online functionality, I moved all my gaming to PC and now also those retro bootleg handhelds. Love my Retroid Pocket 5.
Anything smart or iot, or that requires a subscription to use.
A windows license.
Games consoles. (I would consider a stream deck to be immune from this as it’s just a handheld PC)
Android phones, Apple phones.
Wireless earphones.
A modern car.
Wait, why wireless earphones?
Hazarding a guess, but wireless earbuds means your Bluetooth has to be active, and your Bluetooth radio is something that can be used to track you
Ugh, yes, good point. Bluetooth is not the height of security.
bluetooth got real fucking creepy once you had to start having location enabled to use it.
What device? Never heard that before
Samsung Galaxy phone, admittedly years ago, cause it made me stop using bluetooth.
But a quick sanity check, to make sure i was remembering correctly, by doing a search for variations of bluetooth cant be used without location on do return results showing that I was not out of my gourd and that it does happen.
Thats absolutely insane. Have they ever bothered with an explanation?
For real? I just tried on my P10 Pro XL running GrapheneOS and I could pair, forget, re-pair with location turned off.
I replied to another user about this, but aside from Bluetooth being a privacy nightmare, there’s also the limited lifespan, the bad quality dacs, the lithium batteries and increased e-waste. Not to mention the expense. For $500 you can get genuinely very good wired headphones that will last the rest of your life. For the same price you can get mediocre wireless headphones that will eventually fail to hold a charge and become useless in X years
idk, my $90 earbuds that I use for meetings in the office and occasional personal use are almost five years old and doing fine. can’t say I’ve noticed an issue with the battery life because they live in the charging case and only get taken out for use periods that are max a couple hours. and the quality is more than good enough.
I’ve got some nice proper headphones. they’re not the right tool for that use case, for me.
Track me with what? The pigeons don’t actually have Bluetooth tracking readers on them
The pigeons don’t, but phones do. They have access to bluetooth data from everyone who has it turned on in their phones, including yours. You’re surrounded by “pigeons”.
But there isn’t anyone else nearby carrying a bunch of phones unless I am in public or at work, where I am tracked anyway.
Lol, we’ve known about Bluetooth tracking for YEARS. Apple released the iBeacon in 2013, so this isn’t even remotely a controversial statement, unless you’ve been living under a rock. Add on the BT tracking we hear about for LPRs, and you can easily see why someone wouldn’t want to keep the radio active
Also curious about wireless earphones, if it’s an audio quality thing, I can understand that.
Please also reply to me so I can get a notification to see your answer
I’m not OP, but here are the downsides I’m aware of:
- Poor reparability
- BT always active
- Codec support
- Latency
- Some need apps for full control and they can come with ads/tracking
Foggenbooty pretty much nailed it.
Poor repairability, but also, why would I use 2 cheap dacs (1 in each earbuds), when I would use wired earphones and have 1 good dac. And the fact lithium needs to be mined for 2 batteries is super problematic considering the conditions lithium miners face.
Of course then there’s the issue that everything with a battery has a limited lifespan. Those batteries will die one day and render your wireless earphones useless. My headphones will last for the rest of my life, meaning less e-waste is generated.
BT being active is a privacy nightmare, and the ones that require apps is also a privacy nightmare.
But then also they are just inferior to wired headphones in every way. So yeah, I’m not gonna buy an objectively worse product for way more money than their wired counterparts, that also exploits lithium miners and our planet and is also a privacy nightmare.
I got fed up after the battery died on my 4th pair of AirPods, and the 20+ year old Shure IEMs I have, still work good as the day I bought them.
I have 4 pairs of AirPods on my nightstand where only one ear works, and the other ear gets maybe minutes of usable time, or is crackly and awful sounding. To be fair, one pair went through the wash. But even then, I’d rather wash a pair of 25 dollar wired headphones, than another 250 dollar pair of AirPod pros.
Newer cars. They come with cameras pointed at my face!
If I see an ad playing at a gas station pump, I get back in my car and keep driving.
I stopped at a station a few years back, it started blaring an ad at me so I immediately stopped pumping, gave the cameras the finger, and left. left a shitty review.
almost exactly a year later, drive by and it’s convenient time to get gas, sure let’s stop. exact same situation plays out, except when I went to leave a review, I found I had already done that.
I had remembered that there was a reason I didn’t go to that gas station, just not what that reason was, and so I had pulled in anyways because it was on my way.
I fantasize about keeping a power drill in my car and when the ad starts playing I’d just drill straight into the speaker and waggle the drill bit around until the noise stops.
If you spill some petrol because you were distracted by the advert, they have to clean it up.
They hide. I swear I’m going break one of the screens from getting pissed and pushing every button as hard as I can till it shuts up.
I absolutely support that. Also FYI all of them should have an unlabeled mute button. I just start pressing buttons until the audio turns off when I have to use one, and it helps with my sanity.
I’ve only discovered one local station where I can’t mute the ads, so naturally I won’t shop there anymore.
Most of the gas stations removed the mute functionality where I am when moved to touch screen only. I now get most of my gas at a place that is consistently more expensive, but has no ads. I am just trying to drive less and less and avoid the entire process.
Until you find that station and disabled the mute button.
New anything. Analogue or bust, if it wants to talk to the internet and isn’t a game console or computer then it can absolutely go and fuck itself dead.
Micro$oft. Everything from them. Windows, Office, etc.
Only yesterday I bought a piece of hardware, an old surface tablet, and immediately installed Linux on it to make it usable and safe.
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Don’t let your own stopping reading confuse you. I told the solution right there.
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Windows is fine. But it’s a lot harder to justify when “for brainless morons like me!” distros like Bazzite are so readily available and robust and SteamOS is right there too.
But like. It’s fine. You can turn most of the annoying stupid shit like copilot off.
But like. It’s fine. You can turn most of the annoying stupid shit like copilot off.
you can turn most of it off… by hunting the internet for the right tools for that. Because built in settings certainly don’t allow disabling the majority of it. until they turn them back on with an update.
and the rest you just can’t turn off, or can’t reasonably discover.windows is not fine. that ended with windows 7.
I agree with both of you. Windows is not fine. But it can be made fine with an easy privacy modification.
I recommend ameliorated.io to everybody who needs to use windows. It makes it a viable OS, stripping out the junk, and setting better defaults for security and UI. I run it in VMs whenever I need it.
That seems like a pretty useful tool. Thanks!
But why is its website written like it’s trying to sell me something?
I never thought of it as salesy before, but I can see that.
They are not selling anything. The tool is free to use. The playbooks are free too. Or you can make your own, but I’ve never done that.
I’ve used this since I learned about it on multiple machines, and never need to think about it again other than when recommending it.
Probably the only “bad” thing is you need a legitimate, activated instance of windows.
Hello, I run an easy privacy modification modified windows installation as a dual boot with Arch. Windows is still not fine. It still manages to enrage me every now and then.
It’s definitely a lot more usable and acceptable than a vanilla install (god forbid using an out-of-box windows installation), but Arch is still so much more stable and sensible.
Also like every update just decides to go ahead and undo a “make windows usable” modification so its kind of a constant uphill battle if you dont completely turn updates off. I have completely turned updates off and now it always thinks there is an update available and bugs me to reboot to apply it, only to end up not applying any updates because updates are disabled.
I understand that switching to Linux (and especially Arch) requires a lot more “dealing with stuff” until you get used to it, but the amount of dealing with stuff is not a whole lot nowadays with “easy” distros and after you get used to it and find your groove the dealing with stuff just kinda stops, unlike windows. Not to mention that the way you’re using your OS isnt some kind of weird hack coupled together with a few different debloaters. I really can’t see how much more difficult installing and getting used to something like Ubuntu or Mint can be compared to setting up a good debloated windows install.
I use Windows 10 with unatendedwinstall and a few more tweaks added on top with cttwinutil. I’d reccomend it.
I’m coming from the same place. My windows updates are off (that’s one of the mods that ameliorated makes) and I have not had a problem with it for a few years now.
I’m not saying that windows should be the choice, but I am saying that when I have to use it (there are legit reasons) then my ameliorated version is fantastic.
I use windows at work daily so I am very well aware of out of the box experience. No way I would ever use that for my personal computing.
Ameliorated is something I always recommend and it sounds like while what you are doing is pretty good, there are some shortcomings. I don’t know, maybe ameliorated won’t work for you either, but its worth a try.
Thanks! I didn’t know about this tool before. I’ll look into it :)
I haven’t needed a single tool to turn off the junk in w11 that’s annoying, replace the dumb icon-based UI with the previous text, and so on.
W11 is fine. It’s not good, but it’s fine.
only thing that means is ypu don’t know what else is it doing in the background. you are operating in “what I don’t see doesn’t exist” mode
Several years ago, I bought a color laser printer/scanner. It cost about twice what an inkjet one costs. It has now lasted twice as long as the average inkjet, and no sign of that changing. And it doesn’t have any of the subscription bullshit. Money well spent.
My old Brother color laser is still going strong!
I have one I bought in 2007. It’s about to get it’s second toner cartridge. No sign of dying.
Mine has a few plastic bits fail but I was able to 3D print replacements
Print out the diagnostic page, you might be shocked at the silly things it keeps track of, fuser unit, drum unit, etc, change at 10000 pages!
Take good care of it and it might outlive you.
One of the printers I was responsible for at a print shop was from the early 90s was working fine still in the 2020s when I left.
phones. I just fucken hate em. Until I can get my hands on a graphineOS pixel I will just feel like I have a spy device in my pocket. So now I just have a 6 year old one that is mostly offline playing local music and watching/listening to videos from grayjay. Once this device is dead I will have to look at getting a new one and im really not looking forward to it. I never use calling and i only use txt to receive spam and 2fa spam. Kinda want something like the mechaComet instead of a phone.
Grab an older phone that you can still root and flash, like a galaxy s10e. They work just fine.
-Sent from a
GrapheneLineage Samsung Galaxy S10eI got a galaxy s10. I can root it I think. Can I put graphine on it?
No. GrapheneOS currently only works on Pixels 7 and up.
Next year we might be able to buy a Motorola with GOS on it. Afaik, that particular Moto doesn’t exist yet so we don’t know what the specs will be or what the privacy/security compromises will be.
I think this is the only way I’d go back to Android. Google is hostile spyware at this point. I’m interested in GrapheneOS.
I’m very much looking forward to that Moto. Hope it’s going to be decent, ideally something like current Edge 60 Neo - no bullshit ~7" tablet size, good battery, decent wired and wireless charging, ok camera.
I’ve heard this new phone described as “flagship” a few times so the specs should be decent.
No. But you can put LineageOS on it. Someone made a rom for it a few years back, though I don’t know if it still receives updates
No, I forgot which rom I used. You can put Odin or Lineage on it though
https://grapheneos.org/faq#supported-devices
Literally on their page
- this page specifically highlights the supported devices per grapheneOS themselves. If your device is not on the list, it is not supported, you fucking dildos *
It literally is not on their page. GrapheneOS only supports Google Pixel phones right now
There’s a LineageOS rom that works for Samsung Galaxy S10e’s, and that’s all I know of
I was replying to fizz? Literally on their page what they support. Iunno where the confusion was?
People need to learn to open a browser and fuckin search, man.
Literally on their page what they support.
It. Is. Not. On. The. Page.
You have 2 people telling you this. I myself skimmed the whole page and even did a search for S10e. Before you pull up your keyboard to tell me I’m wrong, go look through your own link first. It’s not in there, quit lying.
People need to learn to open a browser and fuckin search, man.
Take your own advice. At best you just used the link that Google’s AI spit out, which everyone knows is wrong 10-20% of the time
Holy shit you’re dense. I know it’s not on the page. I provided the page to show fizz what they fucking support you Muppet. Learn to read.
No, I went to the grapheneOS page myself and provided the link to the specific section that reads supported devices.
I run graphene myself on a pixel pro 8. The fact that I had to boil all of this down for you because you can’t process possible inflection online is part of the problem. I’ll make sure that moving forward I write every possible nuance of the message I’m trying to convey for dorks like you.
Graphene doesn’t run on that phone. I don’t know what’s weirder, that you’re lying about it or that no one has called you for it.
I forgot what ROM I used back in 2020 when I flashed the first one.
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Boo hoo. I was only 90% correct. Go cry about it elsewhere.
0% correct. You spread misinformation, you can at least, cop to it.
Wrong. Making a mistake is not spreading misinformation, especially since it was fixed down thread by others. I pointed people in the correct direction to figure out a solution that can work for them.
You are just a doomer that tries to start fights. I never see you try to help, all you do is criticize any niggling point that you think you can make. Piss off, grow up, and be better.
I had the same shit with an hp printer. I returned mine though.
I’m really picky about where I buy gas. There ar two places that don’t play ads at the pump and i go there. I worry they’ll change.
There’s a mute button. Of the 8 or 10 soft keys, it’s been right side, second from the bottom for me. No penalty for hitting wrong. Not saying it makes ads justifiable, just an FYI if you don’t have a choice in stations that day and get stuck with ads.
I’ve seen some that have a mute icon printed on the button. guess they got tired of people just smashing the screens instead.
Some stations disable the mute button. Maybe they like replacing screens.
It always warms my heart to see a smashed screen or ballpoint pen jammed into the speaker on those ad-playing pumps
almost everything.
They are sneaking creepnology into all kinds of things it has no business being.
I’d go back to a Bakelite phone on a fucking land line if I could. As it stands I mostly try to buy older shit, cause not only is it typically better made, its just simple and basic with no extra pointless points of failure.
as far as I can tell. everything. its like any time there is a new purchase I have to scrounge around to see if there is a dumb option.
