LarryDarrell

This is what I ended up doing. I have LineageOS running on a Moto G. For banking, I have a tablet.

I didn't want two phones, because it just seems so silly. The tablet, based on it's larger size, at least offers things that another phone cannot.

When economic reforms are off the table, and austerity has run out of things to be austere about... yeah, anti-immigrant political parties are going to feast.

Here in the US, there's a dumber revival of the Red Scare. The scare mongering isn't as effective this go round because there's no existing abundance for the people. All people want is affordable housing, jobs that let you plan for the future, and healthcare that won't bankrupt you. But there's no solution to any of those problems that don't involve some class of investors losing money/power. So we're stuck with MAGA. Incoherent ideology for incoherent times. When I look at the AfD, I see the same helpless thrashing taking hold.

For discovering new music, I listen to my old college radio station. About once a month they play something good that makes me do a deep dive. I use Pianobar while I work, and creating a station based on a new (to me) artist tends to give me more to explore. I also use music-map.com from time to time.

As for acquiring music, I use Bandcamp. If they aren't on there, I'm not above finding it via file sharing.

I have a bunch of python scripts that help me rename all my files once I get their tags sorted out. For that I mostly use AudioRanger because it's so simple and I only process one album at a time.

From there, I use Syncthing. But I'm thinking about replacing it with rsync and just kick it off manually when I want to update everything about once a month.

I've been a subscriber to Kagi for a few years and just started using the AI assistant.

On the one hand, it's made me a believer in AI as it relates to web searching.

On the other hand, the only reason I need AI to search the web is that the web is now a impenetrable forest of near unreadable, SEO-stuffed, spammy articles.

I knew it would be their higher end devices but I really wish they would have put it on their lower end as well.

I have a Moto G running LineageOS and it's my favorite phone ever. The ability to have my 800GB of music synced to a sdcard is something I'm loath to give up.

They were so busy trying to create modern that they forgot what made things classic.

"This isn't technology related." says the HN poster as he's lined up against a wall.

The writing was on the wall when Kamala Harris wouldn't commit to keeping Lina Khan at the FTC. We had some soft Anti-Trust action for the first time in decades, and the Trusts responded. If we get the chance to try again, we should be more clear eyed about what we are up against.

I've de-Googled my life as best I can, but I know how little it actually matters. Now that Google is clearly on the path of closing up Android, I hope the Linux phone effort gets reinvigorated.

Windows users have no negotiating power. Windows will continued to be monetized in user-hostile ways. Call it enshittification, call it the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, call it what ever you want. It won't reach a breaking point. It'll just get worse and worse, steadily and slowly.

I'm trapped because I'm a C#/WPF developer. But, the day after I retire will see a reformat and installation of Debian.

The only thing I'll miss is Directory Opus.

Unlocked. It was a 2023 model I bought in 2024. There are some screaming good deals if you don't mind buying one model older at the right time. I cannot stress enough how much I don't care about OS updates as long as my apps continue to work (not many, mostly from F-Droid).