audio mastering engineer at Total Sonic Media - https://totalsonic.net

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Joined 9 months ago
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Cake day: February 13th, 2024

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  • You could do what I did:

    1. only buy a house in a place that has no HOA
    2. xeriscape the front, let most of the back just grow out wild, and keep a small patch of grass in an area where you like to chill (for me this is in a courtyard)
    3. use an old school push mower for this small patch. You get a little exercise with this, but not enough to ever stress ya, and it requires no gas, no oil, no electricity and barely ever any maintenance.



  • This article is FUD for the most part:

    • replacing ads - nope, by default you don’t see any replacement ads, rather you see the least amount of ads on any chromium based option out there (e.g. Brave is the only browser I’ve found that still blocks the vast majority of ads on YouTube videos). You need to opt in to see replacement ads
    • affilate links - yeah, that was some bs that happened 4 years ago, they were called out on it, and they promptly removed them, and these things have never appeared again.

    Regarding the crypto stuff - that is by default off, again you need to opt in to it. Now, there is basic usage stats that are sent back to Brave that are on by default, but these can be turned off easily in the settings.

    If there is any real objection that can be made to Brave it’s that the CEO has contributed cash to anti-gay-marriage campaigns in the past (which is why he has fired from Mozilla) and that he has expressed some reactionary political views in social media. I can understand people boycotting Brave for that.

    Meanwhile, Brave is the only browser I’ve found that completely passes the EFF’s test at coveryoutracks.eff.org - and in other pricacy and security audits it performs always at “best in class” levels.





  • Dalton is an amazing and very cool guy, and when he left it was indeed a big hit to dev speed at first, but recently a few super smart and dedicated guys have been able to do a big jump in updating the base from 16.04 to 20.04 (which involved moving from upstart to systemd) and they are getting close to rebasing to 24.04 (target for this is this June in fact). Plus Waydroid support has gotten really good in the time since Dalton moved on, and snap support is getting worked on now as well.



  • Between October 2018 to April 2023 I used as my daily drivers a series of phones (OnePlus One, Meizu Pro 5, Volla Phone, Xiaomi Redmi Note 9 Pro) all flashed to running Ubuntu Touch. During this time UT (Ubuntu Touch) was less developed than it is now, in that Waydroid (which allows using some Android apps over a Lineage OS container that boots on top of UT) did not yet exist, and Libertine (which allows some Linux desktop apps built for Ubuntu arm64 deb to be installed) was not as functional. And yet is still worked great for my modest needs (e.g. I don’t do banking, or any kind of more advanced gaming, on my phones).

    The reason I reverted last year to de-googled Android (“vanilla” Bliss ROM on a Xiaomi Redmi Note 10 Pro) is that being in the USA, the carriers here have closed or are closing down all their 3G/2G networks, and requiring VoLTE for phone calls. While UT supports LTE for mobile data without a problem, given that VoLTE is a proprietary closed protocol with implementation varying between carrier, oem and device, the only device which UT currently has VoLTE support for (and which is still shaky) is the PinePhone Pro.

    Anyhoo - the UT dev community is pretty small, but definitely dedicated, and still offers some promise into the future for a nice privacy respecting alternative OS for mobile devices and tablets. Hopefully at some point VoLTE, and a few other issues gets figured out for it so I can return to using it for my daily driver - in the meantime I’ve got it on a OnePlus 5t as a secondary device, and on a Lenovo x306f 10" tablet.