I had some immediate objection to Organic Maps when I first heard of them. Was their website Cloudflared previously? ATM I don’t see what my issue with them was. Superficially they look like a decent 2nd option (which I say having not tried their software yet).

The other demand that makes BIFL phones and even laptops difficult is web browsing,

Web browsing is such a shit-show even with the latest Debian on a PC that I have almost entirely rejected the idea of browsing from a smartphone. I simply will not invest 1 penny of money or 1 minute of my time chasing garbage services with a garbage device. There have been rare moments where “Privacy Browser” on my old AOS5 phone manages to reach and render a webpage but I have mostly given up on that idea. Even captive portals are a shit-show so I usually cannot connect to public wifi. Fuck it.. it wasn’t meant to be.

Added: video codecs (if you want to watch youtube) are another area where old cpu’s can’t keep up,

I’m on the edge of scrapping Youtube altogether because of Google’s hostile treatment toward Tor users and simultaneous relentless attacks on Invideous nodes. But up until a couple months ago I could usually fetch a video via Invidious and store locally. My 2008 Thinkpad has been able to handle every video fine so far. I have the Newpipe app on the phone but I’m not really driven to use the phone for YT videos.

Early flash memory had a severe bitwear/bitrot issue, but at some point (2015?) they made some strides on that. The best resilience is in the SSDs for some reason. I’m not sure how much SD cards improved, but I suppose a phone’s internal storage would be an embedded SD card.

It’s a good point, so it would be useful to know if there is a year where bitwear is less notable on phones.

It’s a shame Fairphone even has internal storage, which seems to go against their vision. But apparently Fairphone users can at least use the external storage as internal (if you neglect the apparent bug mentioned in that thread). I wonder if the internal storage is still needed for the boot loader in that case.

It doesn’t and can’t exist, because the networks keep changing. You could have a 2005 phone that still is perfectly solid, but it’s a 2g phone and the networks now are all 4g and 5g.

Indeed the amount of lifetime you get out of a phone depends on what you need. I don’t actually use a smartphone as a phone. My phone has no SIM chip inserted. Wi-Fi is not getting outpaced as quickly. If you have sufficient control over your device, you can reverse tether as well.

This is how my old AOS 5 device connects (2 ways):

① AOS 5 → Wi-Fi → router w/usb port → USB mobile broadband stick → LTE(4g)
② AOS 5 → USB 2 reverse tethered → 16 year old laptop → router w/usb port → USB mobile broadband stick → LTE(4g)

My AOS 2 phone (from ~2009ish?) can also still connect via method ① but I have no use for putting it online.

What I care about is the phone-laptop connection so I can side-load f-droid apps, OSMand in particular. I will always be able to hack together a hotspot to update the OSMand maps.

and the networks now are all 4g and 5g.

You may have just helped solve a mystery for me. I was using an HSDPA stick to connect 2 yrs ago. Then one day I suddenly had no internet. Had to scramble to get another mobile broadband stick, which happened to be LTE -- which worked. I bitched to the carrier. I thought maybe they pushed a faulty baseband update to my hardware and broke it. They claimed my modem just died. I thought no fucking way does a simple solid state USB device like that just croak. ~~Maybe they pulled the plug on 3g and didn’t inform anyone.~~

(update) Nope.. Just checked and it was this year that they pulled the plug on 3g.. just last month for one carrier. So my mystery is still unsolved. Though I don’t suppose it matters.. what good is a 3g modem now? I wonder if there are any hacks to get a 3g modem talking to a self-hosted fake tower.

Indeed national laws don’t generally limit p2p cash, but the EU law encroaches on that AFAICT.

My flimsy cable lock fell apart. So I needed a new lock. The common choices are a U-lock or a chain. I opted for a chain with a heavy integrated lock at one end. This chain could double as a self-defense tool. I wonder which martial art would bring the most utility to this kind of tool.

The chain is big enough that it’s partially falling out of my backpack. It could now actually be something that inspires honking on the basis that it could fall out.

Hmm.. that reminds me, there may be something w.r.t. direct marketing. Marketers have to get your address and pay postage to junk mail you in the US. That only deters the most reckless marketing efforts. For some ad companies it is worth the postage cost. So then they have to get your address, which means buying your address from a data broker. You can probably pay a fee to get removed from some databases that feed junk mailers.

Data protection is mostly non-existent in the US. So there are countless data brokers that are happy to sell you a removal service. Some data brokers will even remove your records at no cost. But the number of data brokers would require you to quit your job in order to have time to make all the removal requests and constantly monitor new data brokers. So there are services that remove your records from a bulk number of data brokers, for a fee. I think it’s normal that they want your SSN because that’s the primary key for everything. But yeah, it’s a double-edged sword because you have to trust the cleaning company with your SSN and you can’t really know if that SSN just ends up enriching the records of some of the more black market data brokers.

The anti-BifL swindle → no B&M shops sell replacement covers for any mattress.

Some come with removable covers so you can theoretically put the covers in a washing machine, but there is no replacement. Eventually when you need to replace the cover no one will sell the cover you need. A salesperson confessed to me that a lot of the value is in the cover and if they made those replaceable it would damage their bottom line.

Some sales people argued: you can buy a separate cover. But of course a cover needs to breath or your skin would suffocate. And because it breathes, the mattress exterior is still exposed to sweat and spills. Otherwise sheets would be the answer. You can have a cover for a cover for a cover, and in the end the mattress exterior will still get stained or rank.

So this killed it for me. I refuse to buy a mattress if the shop does not sell a replacement exterior cover. We need Fairphone to get into the mattress business.

Electrics cars will make it a non issue

I do not see EVs replacing scooters (which are driven by lower budget commuters). A single unmuffled scooter driving through #Paris at 3am can wake up 10,000 people according to Bruitparif. And don’t forget horns. Assholes will used their horns at 3am on my street. The only thing they give a fuck about is their own convenience when their favorite parking spot is taken.

The idea of harsh punishments works if a vehicle is continuously loud because it will eventually cross paths with a cop. So that position is fair enough. But what about horns? There’s never a cop around when horns are misused.

The rise of teleworking certainly doesn’t help. Quite backwards that instead of cooling one big well insulated office building you have companies sending everyone home where each individual worker heats & cools their (often uninsulated) home.

Good idea.

I have images disabled in my browser so I suppose that’s why I found Ghostarchive better.

Consider how Europe and Australia counter tobacco ads by forcing them to put gross pics on the cartons, and blocking their ads from places where children would encounter them. It’s acknowledged that marketing works. If it didn’t work, it wouldn’t be used.

I don’t have a problem with govs regulating harmful ads. But at the risk of going on a tangent, I think the research shows that the sensational pics Europe and Australia actually proved to fail. Though it failed for reasons that wouldn’t apply to Black Friday. It was related to how the extreme pics stimulated a part of the brain that triggers smokers to want to smoke (or something like that).

Belgium and Netherlands, perhaps France already regulate sales. So at least in those places, why would it be “the wrong tool” to refine a tool that’s already in play?

Even if you banned sales the day after Thanksgiving, that’s not the issue

What would happen? If the absence of sales promotions would have no reduction of consumerism, why would retailers go to expense of organizing a sale and marketing it?

I just cross-posted to !Belgium@lemmie.be as well, which is the English-speaking variant of !belgique@jlai.lu.

EDIT: it’s worth noting that registration on !Belgium@lemmie.be is broken - at least for me. After clicking the button to submit an application, the button just turns into an indefinite spinner. #lemmyBug