If you can accept 11” the old intel macbook airs are what you’re asking for.

They’re in the free - $50 price range now.

Okay I got another stupid question. You have everything going to the rear of the pc, but often times motherboards will have a riser to send audio to the front or top of the case so you can plug your headset in there. Do you have this facility and if so does running to it make any difference?

I may end up having to bow out but if I don’t get to keep trying to help: at some point you’ll need to fire up a daw or obs or jack or something to figure out if you can actually see the signal you’re dealing with anywhere.

The troubleshooting process I’m working through is more akin to what you’d do if you were at a big old mixing console trying to figure out why there’s no sound as opposed to the seemingly more obvious process of tracing device drivers and whatnot.

It’s been very helpful to me when troubleshooting sound issues “in the box”, so if you get stumped fiddlefarting around with lspci and whatnot, give it a shot from that side.

If you’re mechanically inclined and can work with small parts, the old Sony branded walkmans are generally good quality and have a decent supply of replacement parts. Some of the new portables have awful wow and flutter that will make it seem like that two step is a polyrhythm!

I listen on my phone in the world, cd and tape when I’m driving and on whatever at home. Today it was goat and escape-ism.

You’ll fit right in.

What do you like to listen to and what do you like to listen on?

SMTP is only encrypted if the second server responds correctly to the first servers starttls.

The striptls type of attack, which prevents the servers from getting a valid starttls exchange, was in use over a decade ago by some telcom against its own customers.

Even if you know the person you’re emailing has a correctly configured client you can’t control a man in the middle attack between servers which has been in widespread use for years.

The c7 has a usb with enough juice to run a 2.5” external enclosure if memory serves. You need to link up with the portable file server person and form up.

No worries, I didn’t see that you were looking for open source or anything.

Are you mostly worried about the compromised American cell (and by implication other nations 👀) network or something else?

It’s just as well, rcs in America only has guarantees of features if you’re on the same servers as the other people, so there’s a big split between the Samsung and google rcses with all kinds of weird mixed media stuff if you’re both on gchat or the Samsung fork and nothing but maybe higher resolution pictures if you’re not.

It’s part of why I’m so willing to recommend imessage because for better or worse in America it’s the defacto standard.

Yeah and even if you’re on an ios with rcs plenty of old android devices just scale the videos down to postage stamp size anyway by default so you get bad looking pictures no matter what.

Yeah per text charges are really uncommon in the anglosphere, although the pay as you go carriers and plans have data limits.

If you’re on contract or renewing contract with an American carrier they’ll usually take literally any phone you have in trade for their lowest cost ios or android device, your choice. I took them up on it several years ago because the gimmie device was the only physically small iphone at the time. Sometimes it adds a couple of bucks to your monthly bill if you pick one with a little more storage or whatever but that amounts to them selling you the phone for fifty bucks or so over two years.

Hell, usually if you’re signing up for a new account they’ll offer some android and ios phones for free to get you on contract.

Half of each person is getting them to use encrypted chat with you one on one and half is getting the group chats to use it. If you can knock out half the battle most of the time then you should do it.

In my experience ios and android users are equally open/resistant to using some new thing.

I recognize that for a particular type of threat model or ideology all proprietary software amounts to the same level of vulnerability. The op only asked about encrypted chat. The implication that I picked up on and responded to was that the op is in America or concerned about American cell network compromises and wanted to address that.

That’s a real simple threat to get past, just go to whatever is encrypted that the most people use.

Most people use imessage, so that’s what I suggested.

As I said, use signal for everything else.

If immediately getting sixty percent of your chats encrypted isn’t worth a hundred bucks to you I don’t know what to say. We’re looking at this from fundamentally different perspectives. I’m trying to meet a goal to solve a problem and you’re trying to find the fair solution.

It’s good to try to find the fair solution.

That’s awesome! I didn’t know there was an option for android users.