Like many self-hosters, I've looked upon the recent price hikes for storage in utter disbelief. Faced with paying double the price of what I paid only last year for new hard drives, I dug around my hardware stash and came across about a dozen of old 2.5" 320-500 GB drives which I had saved from the dumpster once, but never deployed. After all, they were too slow to be used as PC system drives and too small in storage size for any meaningful use in a server. Now seemed like a perfect time to look for a way to put them to good use after all. And I found it in mergerFS.

For anyone not familiar with it: in spite of its name, mergerFS is not a filesystem in the sense that in order to deploy it, you'll need to reformat any drives (although this wouldn't have been a problem for my use case). Instead, you can theoretically take a bunch of drives (JBOD) and string them together with no modification to their filesystem, keeping existing data intact. It is agnostic of the filesystems present on the drives, meaning you can even combine volumes formatted with, say, ext4, btrfs, and xfs. All drives will show up in your filesystem as a single volume, and - depending on the policies you configured - store some data on this and some data on that drive. Since data isn't striped, the drives will remain individually legible, i.e. there's no need to rebuild all of them after a drive fails.

Speaking of drive failure: while mergerFS itself does not come with RAID, you can add SnapRAID to the mix for parity-based RAID (although it's not real-time RAID; parity data must be written on schedule, so it's not for mission-critical data that is frequently being updated and rewritten).

Combined, these two technologies allow me to have my cake and eat it too:

• I can put drives to use that would otherwise be rotting in a drawer.
• I can avoid additional cost - both financial and ecological. (The energy bills won't increase by much, either, because most of the energy comes from solar cells on the roof.)
• I can always flexibly tack on more drives, regardless of size.
• I can have the added data security of a RAID, but at the price of very few (if any) of its drawbacks (e.g. no drives of equal size needed).

If this was news to you - maybe you want to give it a shot too. (I don't consider myself a very advanced user and I found it dead simple to deploy.)
If you're already running mergerFS and SnapRAID, feel free to showcase your use case and setup!
If you found any of the above incorrect or misleading, feel free to correct me.

I just had an encounter of the turd kind with a banking app that I want to share.

I'm in the process of migrating to a new degoogled phone (GrapheneOS) and upon installing the app in question via Aurora Store, it gave me an error message, saying it had not been installed from a "trustworthy" source. It would, therefore, refuse to start and tell me to install it from the Play Store. (For anyone curious: it's the Consorsbank app, and the issue is well-known at this point.)

In spite of being on GOS, I was faced with the prospect of

• installing Play Services Framework (sandboxed or not, I don't want that shit)
• installing the Play Store (sandboxed or not, I don't want that shit)
• logging in to the Play Store (I definitely don't want that shit!)

only to run a damn app.

I eventually used USB-debugging and ADB to trick the app into thinking it had been installed from the Play Store. LINK to the ADB command, translated into English

//Edit: I have just installed the first update through Aurora - unsure whether I'd have to go through the whole procedure again. I did not. Apparently, the "installed from" property is untouched by and persistent throughout updates, meaning: spoofing the installation source once is enough.

So even though everything is running fine now, this doesn't feel like a victory. For the first time in a long while, I feel I have come head to head with a piece of tech that was not just maladapted for my janky way of running things and just needed some tinkering. This was outright malicious, refusing operation and trying to force me to use services I want nothing to do with. It only gave me the option to either give in or walk away and stop using their services. Now, I don't mind doing that for non-essential things. I don't have big tech-owned messengers, I don't have social media (save Lemmy) and all the other stuff people these days feel they cannot live without.

Banking, however, is a different kind of beast. Banking is essential. Second factor authentication is usually done via apps these days. And if this kind of thing becomes normal for banking apps, and Google keeps locking down Android so hacks like the above won't be accessible any more, things are looking grim.

Tonight has left me with more questions than answers. Is Android still the 'right' ecosystem? What are the alternatives if this thing becomes more wide-spread? How do we combat this? Put pressure on banks to keep technologies open? Revert to physical second factor generators, until those become phased out by banks as well?

I've been using a degoogled customROM on a Pixel phone for years now. As a camera app I've been using firewalled Gcam, i.e. the official Google camera app, but forced to be offline.

Since the phone and the custom ROM have reached end of life, I need to switch to a new phone, and I'm considering a FairPhone.

Hence, I'd like to ask all users of degoogled FairPhones: which camera app do you use, and how well does it work as compared to stock?