To his credit, Rob’s videos introduced me to cell phone privacy. But his products are all just pre-flashed off-the-shelf devices. The bespoke Brax phone models are merely rebranded mid-tier phones from a generic ODM. None of it is more secure than what GrapheneOS on a Pixel offers and all of the offerings have alternatives that are cheaper or better audited.

Desktop: Librewolf, Chromium as a fallback

Mobile: Vanadium on devices with GOS; adblocking via DNS. Cromite for my secondary phone and degoogled but not GOS tablet.

Just curious, what kind of batteries are powering the remote and if rechargeable, how often does it need charging? Not saying they wouldn’t do such things, still a good preventative measure, but I’d be surprised if it could sustain telemetry with only the power of AAA batteries in a typical remote.

You could make it about equivalent to the protections afforded by the typical BIOS password, i.e. the attacker must first disassemble your laptop to reflash the spi chip or pull the hard drive. A grub.cfg like so would do, assuming everything in encrypted partitions:

set prefix=(memdisk)/boot/grub
set superusers="myuser"
password_pbkdf2 myuser grub.pbkdf2.sha512.10000.<your hashed password>
cryptomount -u <UUID of LUKS container>
search.fs_uuid <UUID of the root filesystem under LUKS container> root cryptouuid/<UUID of LUKS container>
configfile ($root)/@rootfs/boot/grub/grub.cfg

Assuming you boot directly to GRUB or locked out the SeaBIOS boot device selector, then GRUB will only ever look for a boot device matching your disk’s UUID; attempting to do anything else aside from entering the LUKS passphrase will prompt for the GRUB password. You’d still have your own recovery path by pressing Esc, entering your GRUB password, and dropping to the GRUB shell. Bonus points for patching the GRUB code so it doesn’t echo the UUID of your disk.

No, it isn’t bulletproof against physical access. But yes, I had the same question you did when starting out with coreboot and this was the solution I came up with.

What I like to call temporal horror vacui. Some things are easy to start, they do require some periodic checking, but are otherwise passive. So I’ll start a 3d print, get water boiling on the stove, or start running an offline backup. Then my mind is bothered that those are such “empty”, “unproductive” tasks, and so reactively fills in the gaps with things I’ve been procrastinating like dishes, meal prep, planning, etc.

Also body doubling. For emails, I have a good friend at work who also massively struggles with them, so every now and then, we make a commitment to each other and for an hour or two, both sweep through our inboxes, with a bit of commiseration along the way.

Anyway, it’s still a struggle that makes me wonder about seeking an ADHD evaluation … next month maybe.

Through my entire stint having to use it in Europe, the closest I could find was a webview for the web client: https://f-droid.org/en/packages/io.kuenzler.whatsappwebtogo/

Sadly, they enforce use of the official client to create an account and resync whenever the web client session expires. Even once got locked out for using the official client downloaded from Aurora Store, apparently I ought to have to downloaded the APK directly from their website, if not from the play store.

Edit: I also think potential legal pressure also contributes to a FOSS client not existing. Last time someone tried making a feature-complete FOSS Instagram client, they stopped after a cease and desist from Meta.

Obligatory, I would have loved to go without anything Meta in the first place, but if you’ve spent any time around non-techy colleagues in Europe, you’ll know how much of an uphill battle it is.

On that note, I still laugh when I recall this story of some college student blackout drunk at a party, friends came up to her to ask if she needed help, while trying to emphatically shake her head ‘no’, projectile vomited and the violent motion of her head made the vomit cover everything in the room.

I use it to generate little bash and python scripts for mundane tasks, random ideas I don’t have a good starting point for, or boilerplate code I don’t have the energy to write manually. Or also to decipher cryptic error messages and logs. Nothing that I publish though, just all testing and personal scripts.

I do this with models running locally on my gpu. 14B parameters is surprisingly decent and fast enough for a 16 GB slot-powered workstation model.

For fun, since the model is local, I also toss in some excerpts of my writing, see what it can glean from my style and vocabulary, something I’d never do with an LLM hosted by someone else for obvious reasons.

Larger denominations also become much easier to smuggle. Concealing and slipping an envelope vs a whole bag.

Dirty lounge chairs because people sit on one and prop their feet up on the next

Put on a good podcast and enjoy my comfort foods

• TI-89 calculator. Got mine for college, wouldn’t trade it for any other calculator
• Thinkpad X230, quad core modded
• Librebooted HP Z220 desktop in authentic 2001 beige case and 1600x1200 beige monitor
• 90s-era UI via Chicago95 on XFCE
• Early 90s car with intact tape deck
• Personal website in pure CSS/HTML
• Beige speaker-subwoofer set with added mixer for multi-device connectivity
• Cash. Don’t worry, I won’t waste your time counting out coins; I save them up and deposit into my bank account at the end of each year
• Palm Pilot. Tbh, taking notes on my phone is just as easy, but I’m afraid it doesn’t look nearly as respectable in front of the speaker.
• If I need to deeply comprehend literature, I have to read it on paper. My mind defaults to skimming anything on a screen.

The one piece of old tech I don’t miss are bulky charging bricks. I use my GaN USB-C charger whenever possible, sometimes with the help of adapters.

Focus follows mouse and unchecking the option to auto raise the active window. Couldn’t live without it and being used to it has made me extremely clumsy when I do pick up my Windows work laptop.

I change the taskbar clock to be a one-line MM/DD HH:MM:SS format, drop in my customized locale (based on en-US for maximum compatibility, but without having to deal with US formats and units that I’m not fond of), and point the taskbar shortcut for my text editor to a script that creates a pre-named file and launches the editor with autosave enabled. Because having to manually save and come up with a name for your spur-of-the-moment notes sucks, automatically generating 20260831_text_1 is so much better than a, b, a2, etc.

XFCE specific, I get rid of the second panel full of launchers. Acquired taste, but also Chicago95 theme and icon pack.

As others say, where the use cases are so specific to each machine, it’ll be a headache juggling all of those images if your needs and workflow change down the road.

But I’d be remiss to say I don’t practice a form of what you mention, I would go insane if I actually had to reinstall from distro defaults. I have a single perfected VM image with customizations and software common to all of my machines. And yes, if you were to go this route, there are little quirks to iron out manually each time I image to a new machine, even old and well-supported ones. Some just cosmetic, some preventing graphical output. Although still much less time than setting up from scratch.

It works well enough for me, but it also frankly leads to a poorly-documented system that will accumulate cruft with updates, and can’t propagate changes in the VM to my existing systems easily, so I’m interested too to see what other people here suggest. Particularly for those niche customizations that land outside of /home and /etc (e.g. /usr/fonts, packages not provided by the distro).

Astronaut. Or a trucker. A mad scientist, after my first science class.

I haven’t become any of the above (yet)

Look into threat modelling, we’re all striving for more privacy-friendly ways to keep in touch with people, and if you seal yourself off too early, you’ll suffocate.

I know my friends and colleagues well in person, they know that I’m a privacy nut, and we agree to not report me missing just because I’m unreachable on a particular day. But knowing that they SMS each other their plans and that I’m probably not a target of the state, I’m cool texting them things like when we’re eating out together.

Also don’t be disheartened, I keep at it even though my methods are nowhere near airtight. Even if every move of mine is known, the surveillance capitalists will at least know that I am flipping them off and trying my best to make their jobs hard.

Phone: 316

Desktop: 294

Laptop: 79

You could say I’m making use of all the ram I’ve installed

Habit. And I’ve become good at finding outfits that look nice and are just as comfortable as ones that look more casual.

They like to say we are doing better than ever because the the numbers and technology are great. Yeah, I might not be starving, but what’s the dignity in a rising tide of techno-feudalism and serfdom? And the technology that, in another society, could have freed us from long hours is instead being used by the ruling class to further exploit us.

Imagining if trusted computing became legally enshrined and windows was the gateway to the internet. Would keep my use of it to a minimum, perhaps to fulfill work obligations, do taxes, pay bills, etc. and save anything that didn’t need the internet for another machine running Linux. I’d also consequently make much greater use of my hoarded media and ebooks.