SSH in first place. No explanation needed.

But also MATE and Pulseaudio (yes). I really like paprefs, pasystray, and how easy it is to send audio over the network. To the point where I reinstall Pulseaudio instead of Pipewire, because Pipewire requires long command lines for what was easily done in a few clicks with Pulseaudio.

I dread the day where I will be forced to “progress” to Pipewire and lose that easy feature.

In the end though, it’s not making much of a difference aside from nostalgic value. There’s a minimal maintenance to it too. My parents still have the cassettes and the Betamax VCR stored somewhere. Physical photo albums also have to be stored. We don’t want to get rid of them but they’re kind of useless now. It’s around 200 GBs of files to be kept.

It’s also a bit cringe to see yourself being a stupid kid on video. Or read what you wrote in a journal on a floppy disk in the mid 90ies. I went to watch a few minutes because we mentioned it but it’s not something any of my family members return to regularly. It’s just stuff that now sits there. Nice and nostalgic to watch every few years or decade, but not healthy to keep returning to it.

Lots. I was born in the 80ies and my parents took lots of pictures when I was a baby. My sister was born a few years later, and there was also lots of pictures. We have albums full of pictures that I ended up scanning and digitizing. My father was also somewhat of an enthusiast for video cameras and he bought a BetaCam by the end of the 80ies, and a few other ones until the beginning of the 2000s.

So I have videos of my childhood from my first years of school to being a teenager. He was filming at Christmas, at birthdays, and sometimes at random events. He often just set the camera in a corner and filmed for the length of a Beta tape.

I digitized all of the Beta cassettes into mp4s during the pandemic and now I offer USB drives to people of the family that don’t have any videos of when my grandparents were alive.

Plus, my maternal grandfather also filmed some gatherings and events. So I also have digitized videos of them in the 60ies and 70ies.

Ironically most of us never liked to be taken in photos, or filmed, but I’m kind of glad we still have them. If I compare to my friends, apparently, I have a “treasure trove” of videos and pictures.

Once translated: “ugh, those fucking idiots”.

In my native language: “ah les osti d’épais”.

As we all know, we can always trust on businesses to do the right thing.

A few years ago I would have said they are useless but I ended up buying one for my off grid cabin in winter and I like it.

I have solar panels and batteries with a small 500w inverter in the cabin and the setup works very well in summer for my usage. However temperature averages in January here are around -10C and the batteries get too cold to charge them. Also there is generally not much sun in winter anyway.

So I bought a small generic power station to bring there and it’s excellent for my needs. It lights up the place and charges my laptop and phone.

To be fair it’s kind of overkill because my laptop and phone can be charged from a hefty power bank using PD.

I have an old Realme GT NEO 3 with the stock ROM. There was no LineageOS ROM for it when I got it but there’s been one for two years now, so I may give it a try eventually.

The camera is not good but apart from that, it works. I have Google apps installed on this one and use mainly Gmail and Maps. Maps is shitty but I also use openstreetmaps on the web through Firefox. I don’t have the YouTube app and watch videos in Firefox, with uBlock Origin, Sponsor Block and Video Background Play Fix. I tend to use the websites, or FOSS apps if possible through F-Droid. No weather app, I just go on the website with ads blocked. But I don’t mind paying for some apps that I use if they are useful and don’t have ads. Ads are the devil.

And my backups are simple, using FolderSync connecting via SSH on my headless Orange Pi.

Cycling on rail trails and long isolated bike paths. Getting from A to B without burning any fossil fuel. I live in an archipelago and pull my inflatable kayak to the river and the lakes nearby using a bike trailer.

Mild guess. The dev(s) don’t know about navigation buttons. Gestures have been “standard” for a while now so maybe someone forgot about this as a possibility?

I even have a plan when there are power outages. The hard drive that contains most of the media I collected over the years is external. In case of power outage I can power it with a power bank and a USB-C PD to 12v adapter.

But this probably reads like wizardry for people that equate wifi to internet.

At least it’s giving me job security. I’m a middle age geek that worked low level IT most of my life, thinking the younger generations would know how computers work and be able to fix small issues on their own. Hah.

Last autumn I needed a small carpet to put by my door because winter was coming and the old one was disintegrating. While walking through the dollar store I saw one that seems perfect for the task. Unfortunately it seemed much bigger in the store than on my floor.

Wifi being down is just a minor inconvenience for tech oriented people. Spare some lives and just contact your local geek/nerd.

Hehe, that reminds me how it feels when you don’t like something the rest of society really really likes. I’m Canadian, don’t like hockey, but when I stop to pay attention to things around me, there’s hockey promotions on bags of chips, on soda bottles and cans, on cereal boxes… there’s even hockey promotion on toilet paper packaging. So I’m sitting on the toilet, looking at the pack of toilet paper, and can read about some contest I could win in relation to hockey.