I had a faraday phone case at one point. They also make jackets with faraday inside pockets. I quit using the faraday pouch because if you use that as a convenient off switch, the phone works harder to find a tower, draining batteries. So to save juice you need airplane mode. There’s probably still reason to use a faraday bag along with airplane mode, but since I’ve parted with a GSM chip as well, it’s just not worth it unless you’re someone like edward snowden.

That’s insufficient. Mobile providers are not even getting your location through that Google mechanism that feeds Google. Their towers track your location even if you have GPS off.

I always tap “disagree” to location svcs when turning GPS on and take a hit on slow positioning. But that only cuts Google off. To cut the mobile carriers off, I keep my phone in airplane mode and also keep the GSM chip slot empty. In fact I don’t even carry a gsm chip. I believe in this state I can make emergency calls (IIRC, airplane mode automatically gets disabled when an emergency number is dialed).

Yet a vast majority of people have no problem when people are forced to subscribe to mobile phone service:

https://infosec.pub/post/11658371

This kind of information should be startling enough to at least see the merit in not having a mobile phone subscription. But no, people will just say “that sucks” and continue to being the sucker while also expecting others to be equally naive or cavalier too.

from the article:

AT&T told The Register said it should not be blamed for the failure of those buying its data to obtain proper consent, and said it will fight the fine.

Private investigators are treated as legitimate consumers of that location data. An angry ex-boyfriend or ex-husband hired a PI to find out where his ex was, who then simply bought the location data from a mobile carrier. The guy used the info to find her and shoot her dead on the spot (headshot while she was driving a car). The data sharing was “legit” in that case, in the US where privacy laws are generally non-existent.

It’s strange how that murder case gets omitted in these articles about mobile carriers selling location data.

I might be able to get by without them. I just found that I can render the body in Firefox well enough (that often fails but it works with the particular emails I’m dealing with), fiddle with the paper format and scale to exactly fit a page, and then import it into LaTeX, rescale, and attach a header. If you’ve already got the script ready then I would be happy to take it anyway and compare the script output to what I’m manually rigging up. But if you’ve not started then no worries. Thanks!

(edit)
fwiw to anyone with the same need, I found this project: https://github.com/nickrussler/email-to-pdf-converter It looks a bit messy to install on my distro and I’m not sure of EML / Mbox differences, so I’m not planning to use it myself.

My python knowledge is quite rough but if not much hacking is needed it could be useful. I’ve seen others asking for a similar tool. I thought about creating one over the years but keep passing on it thinking I won’t need it often enough and every situation can bring different requirements as well. Which is why I settled on pasting into a LaTeX template. I do things like use a tiny font on signature blocks that are so big they would spill over to another page.

Does python have a standard library for HTML rendering? Or do you call a browser of some kind?

Ebikes and electric devices, however, sound to me like something futuristic

There are kits enabling you to convert a muscle bike (push bike) into an e-bike. If you get one with a torque sensor, then it will detect how hard you push on the pedals and drive the motor proportional to that force. So you still must pedal but it amplifies your effort which preserves the natural feel and control of pedaling. It essentially makes the hills go away; a hilly place becomes a flat place.

IMO part of the fix for that is liberating psychedelics. There has been some research finding that if someone takes psilocybin (shrooms) before they reach the age of 35, they are significantly more open minded for the rest of their life. Though I’m not sure how they controlled for the question as to whether the drug makes people more psychologically flexible or whether they are more psychologically flexible in the first place if they are willing to try it.

Either way, it seems to naturally follow that conservatives proportionally tend to avoid psychedelics. It’s anecdotal but my fellow psychonauts are all liberal.

Might be a fun social experiment to propose a public gun lending armory. Like a library, you can walk in and check-out an AK-47 for a day or week for free. But just like the library charges for printed pages, you would have to pay for the ammo.

I don’t think a car-free city actually exists. The article mentions Copenhagen:

“[London] has avoided the kind of outright car bans seen elsewhere in Europe, such as in Copenhagen”

I’ve been to Copenhagen. There are cars throughout the city. There are some cycle-only paths that connect to intersections with cars. I cycled along side cars all over the city. Apparently Wired is calling car-reduced cities and cities with small car-free regions a “car-free city”.

Exceptionally, Brussels is a car-free city but for only one day out of the year. And car-free day falls on a Sunday. On that day it becomes illegal to drive a car in the city center without a special pass after showing you have good reason to use a car on that day. But even on that day, the outer region of Brussels is unaffected.

I’ve ditched email for the reason you mention. If I need to email a private sector entity, I might check their MX server and attempt to send a message if the receiving server is not Google or MS. But generally I nix whatever company I would otherwise want to reach. If I need to reach them (e.g. to get support for a product I already own and I’m stuck with), then I use snail mail. Same for public offices. Most government offices use Microsoft for email which is a non-starter for me. If they use MS then they’re getting snail mail from me.

What’s TAN?

(edit)
Regarding the train svc, the carsharing, Netflix, etc, I generally draw a line and say all the private sector stuff can be disregarded apart from life essentials like groceries. So in your list, the train service is a good point because that’s a public service which invokes human rights (equal access to public service). Since you mention Germany, I happen to recall some Germans saying that the train app can access tickets and fares that are otherwise unreachable, perhaps in part because some stations have no kiosk.

Don’t need Google account to access my bank. How does that work exactly?

Like most banks, a bank pushed an app exclusively via Google Playstore or Apple’s store. At the same time, that bank shut down their website and closed their walk-in over-the-counter service. Customers then had 3 choices to access their account: join Google’s walled garden, join Apple’s walled garden, or make an appointment for every single transaction which incurs fees. Alternatively, the Android app can be obtained using an app called Aurora and violate Google’s ToS by using a shared account to download the app.

I think that particular bank started making their app available in Huawei’s app store, so there is an alternative walled garden for Android users in that case. But Huawei is an uncommon option as more and more banks trend in the direction of forced-Google-patronage.

Never needed an app to dial 911…the whole point of 911/999 is that it’s easy to remember, easy to dial. Also, I haven’t dialed 911 in 25 years, but I’m pretty sure opening the dialer and pressing 3 buttons isn’t too difficult. Also, I don’t see how having a Google account is required to dial 911 (or use an app? ) to do so.

A 911 app was hypothetical but a 112 app certainly exists. You populate the app with important details like name and address. The app is capable of both voice and text (SMS) and IIRC can also connect via wi-fi if there is no GSM signal. If you can’t speak for some reason (choking, throat cut or you’re hiding from an intruder and must be silent) the app transmits all the data you configured plus whatever you can type.

Ah, that’s interesting… that’s what I was missing. So indeed if it directly controls the tuner and maintains a schedule, that sounds like a direct replacement of mythTV.

I just checked the official Debian repositories and there is no pkg for “Plex”. This means it’s either non-free, or it hasn’t become mainstream or mature enough for Debian to take notice. I’ll have to look into more and see why it’s not in Debian. I may be forced because it appears mythTV is dropped in recent Debian versions.

It sounds useful. Though it doesn’t replace or compete with mythTV AFAICT… it sounds like something that would work with mythTV. Plex could probably sling content that mythTV collects from the air.

I never heard of Plex but from my quick gander it seems like a different beast for a different purpose. Correct me if I’m wrong but Plex looks like a Netflix alternative service that needs a media player comparable to Roku, AppleTV, Amazon’s Fire<stick? or something> and an unlimited high-speed internet connection.

MythTV is open source PVR software enabling offline people to anonymously browse a database of broadcast TV schedules and record shows/programs using a tuner. AFAIK, MythTV is the only open source game in town for scheduling recordings. It’s somewhat indispensable to people on capped/limited/shitty internet connections. The recording can indeed be stored on LAN-attached NAS storage and some media boxes can then then play the content.

I could really use a MythRadio of sorts as well because streaming radio is also a non-starter for measured rate internet customers. But it seems nothing exists. There was a DAB radio with a record feature but for whatever reason that thing was discontinued early on.

s/exit/edit/ ↑ I’ll write my corrections like this in situations where I cannot edit the content.

https://git.sdf.org/humanacollaborator/humanacollabora/src/branch/master/github.md

Ideally there would be a service that expands on what downinspector.com does. Something that tries to access an URL from various kinds of IPs (CGNAT, Tor, VPNs, public libraries, various regions) to establish whether or not the file is reachable by all people. Then ideally lemmy could be coded to treat links based on whether exclusivity is detected.

In principle this would be in the domain of the #OONI project. But I doubt they have anything like this. E.g. OONI tracks whether a country blocks a domain (https://explorer.ooni.org/domains), but not whether a domain blocks a country.

Hopefully it’s a chatbot, which can bring interesting opportunities for consumers. If you can trick a chatbot to make a favorable statement, it can be legally binding.

True but Amazon would have done the math to begin with. So a complaint would not cause them to do extra math and complaints are probably unlikely to change their calculation.

I boycott Amazon already but if I were an Amazon customer I would not be motivated to help their business by giving them useful customer feedback.