I was a little sad to see that my icon pack foregoes this feature, but I can’t see myself using a different one. Delta icons on F-Droid has so much coverage (10k+), are free, and they’re so clean looking.

Plus I’m using Chrono as my default clock and alarms.

Story time.

I learned Debian-based distros back in high school from a college tech class. After leaving school and getting my first job, I built my first computer (after two DOA boards and much gnashing of teeth). I sat happily in my Windows bubble for a long time.

Years later I had a catastrophic failure when trying to get clever and unlocking my system32 folder to do some tinkering. I’d had enough of Windows. Thought Pop! OS looked really nice.

But we sometimes have that one friend. Arch. Every time I talked about my OS or showed him my clean setup, Arch. If I had a problem with packages. Pacman. AUR. Arch.

I was going nuts. Did he care I was running Pop! OS with KDE Plasma using Kubuntu backports to jury rig a later version? No. Arch.

After a long and grueling battle, after slogging through mountains of unsolicited Arch memes in my DMs, after vehemently defending Debian, I will only say this:

I use Arch, btw.

That’s enough from you, gregorium.

I found a cool little app on F-Droid called Gramophone. It has neat little animations that make me happy, and it can color the player controls according to album art. I’m a sucker for nice UI. I was using Auxio before that. Both are good.

If you want something for ad-less streaming, RiMusic is really nice. For local audiobook playback with chapter selection, Voice is the best I’ve found so far.

I should look into Jellyfin myself. I really need to introduce myself to containers. It’s something I should familiarize myself with as a Linux user, but I just barely got done learning the basics of WINE prefixes.

There’s not much that combines these two apps together like this, but there are separate alternatives. Nova Player for hosted media (I use Plex on my Raspberry Pi), Antennapod is one of many many podcast forks (most open source podcast apps use the same layout).

For listening to android localized audio books, I absolutely love Voice. Voice does have chapters built in as long as your audio books have them. You can pick up Voice and Nova Player for free on F-Droid if you want to try them out. Plex and Pi are a little more involved.

IF you needed the storage and badly, then I remember Hiren’s BootCD used to come with a tool to scan for and quarantine bad sectors. However, this is just a bandaid on top of an infected wound.

The wound will keep spreading, eating up precious backup files. I’ve only ever used quarantining once on my mother in law’s laptop because she had to wait weeks to get a new drive, due to the Philippines flooding back then.

Also, this was an old copy of BootCD that ran through terminal prompt, not a built in Windows PE, and I believe the tool I used has been removed. However, it seems to be replaced with a few alternatives.

That’s hopefully the plan if that time does come. Two of my three sisters lived at home and single while raising their first kids, so I tried to help them out as much as I could. I wouldn’t be completely blind going in. I’d be fretting a lot at first, though. The world would seem much more dangerous with a kid to worry about.

Not for the lack of trying though. They’ve been trying to destroy alternative frontend apps for a while, but the devs just keep rolling out workarounds. You know when your app is buffering endlessly that is time to check for an update.

None taken, friend. I understand that, but I still think about these things a lot. I’m still young enough where I could have a happy accident, even if we’re not trying. My mind is always on how to be a good father if it did.

This is the way to go. I don’t have kids, but it’s how my sisters went about it. For the longest time if my nephew wanted to call and talk to me, the number would ring up as my sister’s number, because not only was it a spare phone, but it was dually connected with her number (not sure how tbh, she worked for a carrier for a long time).

It’s just hard to find that thin line between allowing them to have something or have them be behind all their friends who do have access to one.

My policy would probably be worse, tbh. I’d toss them an old Nokia and be like, “Legends say it’ll take the force of an 18 wheeler and a flood and still work.” For context, I had a friend who ran his over 3 times with his dad’s mack truck, reducing it to just a screen and PCB which he used as his phone at school. Then I watched him accidentally drop and fully submerge said screen and PCB into a half foot deep puddle while we ran down a mountain in a thunderstorm and that sucker still worked.

It was his experiment, to keep trying to destroy it to the point where he couldn’t use it but have to use it if it did. I think it died not too long after, though.

Can confirm, I had a heck of a time figuring out Bluetooth and sound myself. The distro I was using came with Bluetooth hard disabled and PulseAudio by default. The wiki, these four packages, and setting my Bluetooth to autostart on login got everything working with minimal hassle.

I’ve started using Fulguris lately, just random tryout. Its actually decent and has a built in content blocker where you can add lists with the big three main ones already being there. I’m not 100% sure how barebones privacy is on it, but it is open source and from what Exodus says there’s no trackers (unless you opt into Google Crash Reporting which is off by default). It does have some extra permissions you might not need, so if you want a near-permissionless browser, it might not bwe the one for you.

I’m dead set in my belief that this happens to every phone, and I’m sad to see the nothing phone is going the same way.

I had a Motorola X that was suddenly dying in less than 5 hours and one day I couldn’t even connect to my service. I looked and found that an update had uninstalled the phone’s modem. Not even a factory reset helped.

After rooting and finding the correct package for my modem, the phone ran flawlessly using Resurrection Remix (I miss that ROM), proving that the battery and modem were indeed fine.

Absolutely. LinusTechTips had to issue a formal apology for dumb stuff someone had said about another reviewer, but in the unveiling of all their shit, it was revealed that they had mis-reviewed a gaming mouse.

The mouse was in prototype stages, and the LTT member that reviewed it did not take the plastic off the gliders and said that the mouse was horrible and dragged a lot. The company then floundered and had to sell the prototype and rights at auction at the next CES.

The worst part is that they assumed that a competent reviewer had the fucking common-ass sense to remove the plastic that… you know… comes on almost every gaming mouse, so they didn’t even dispute the issue.