As long as it can be turned off and does not use any non-local services for OCR it’s a good addition. As much as convenience is nice, privacy still has to come first.

Look into tractive a tracker for dogs, it’s quite affordable and made in Austria - which means it respects EU privacy regulations.

How are you using Signal without a phone number? - asking cause I genuinely would love to do so!

It’s good enough for me, but will only be supported for about 10 months.

Your best bet is to get a 9 or 10 at this time.

Nope everything works. I have one profile with play services for my banking apps, but everything else runs in my daily profile that has no play services and no GPS, just the barebones and all apps installed via Obtainium.

I switched to FOSS apps for everything really.

I actually cut out all distractions besides Lemmy, so I reduced phone usage by 2/3rds in the process.

I went form an iPhone 15 to a Pixel 6 that I got for free and it does everything I need. I am not a slave to my phone anymore, I just use it as a tool when actually needed - not as as a distraction machine.

Dropped Mac, iPhone and all US (cloud) services after 20 years in the Apple Universe.

Was using Linux Mint first and just bought a brand new Tuxedo Laptop in November and am using Tuxedo OS now which is a Ubuntu LTS fork with KDE Plasma and Flatpak instead of Snap.

I am really happy with my decision and not looking back. I feel like I have control over my stuff again and my computer is listening to me instead of forcing me to do things in a specific way that Apple deems correct.

My phone is a Graphene OS for now until Postmarket OS or Ubuntu Touch are usuable and I am self hosting everything I need on Proxmox / Podman and I have a TrueNAS Server with a 64TB Raid running.

If you wanna conquer other countries you better get to learning the metric system.

The mirror at my brothers is in another European country 400km away. I think that’s a good protection against natural disasters and fire

Yeah I need to dig deeper into the best strategies. Regular WORM backups seem to be the industry standard in this regard. So for now my external USB HDD backups once a month seem to be quite good as a start.

Thanks for your input, I appreciate the advice.

Yeah that’s one of the ideas I have in mind. Currently it’s mirrored at my brothers place on his NAS and I am doing regular backups on external SMR usb drives.

And Apple Photos!

I finished transferring all my family members from Apple photos/icloud to my NAS (which is mirrored at my brothers place) yesterday.

All together we will save ~40 USD per month.

Weren’t they just complaining that the youth of today isn’t going out anymore?

Oblivious idiots!

Sure enough it all that data collected flows back to the US oligarchy / fascism machine - Thiel, Bezos, Zuck, Musk.

My kidneys are too old, I don’t even get a CMR HDD for them.

Look at this guy flexing his own RAM. Most of us can only dream of actually owning RAM someday… /s

Make the visa waiver program opt-in then. People who have no interest in visiting fascist shithole countries shouldn’t be forced to have their data shared.

Я прощаю тебя, товарищ

Ever considered installing a tool to detect humor?

The article text looks pretty censored to me. /s

Times New Roman

/not allowed to say anything else or my boat will be sunk.