Also funny that the other big number, 1.3 billion, is literally double 650 million. Maybe they split it it up because the numbers are tied to specific geographic areas with specific water/energy quantities but yeah it does not read very well

Glad to see many apps I already use here! Just to add ones I haven’t seen mentioned:

Lichess - the best chess Paseo - simple step counter Wikipedia - duh Gmaps WV - for when other maps fail Openreads - amazing and underloved books / reading tracker SherpaTTS - offline text to speech Whisper+ - offline speech to text FairEmail - email client Fcitx5 - Traditional Chinese keyboard AnkiDroid - Anki flashcards

Good to know, I haven’t done anything yet of course but will look at the relevant regulations at some point. Thanks!

Just to answer the “why?” question and offer one data point, as someone with a university gmail account that I obviously can’t change myself this is a welcome update.

I kind of prefer the separation at the moment but it’s good to know I can simplify things in the future if I choose to.

noai.duckduckgo.com is the best drop-in replacement for a free pre-AI search engine.

kagi.com is great if you can justify paying for it.

I’ve used both for a long time and have never missed Google, especially in its current state.

Yup have to embrace the tinkering haha. Good luck!

One profile is a good plan and helps a lot with sticking with it.

Being downloaded from the play store doesn’t necessarily mean the app is dependent on play services. There’s an app called Plexus that can help you check, I have actually found basically all of my major US banking apps work without play services. I am not sure about living across profiles but I think for push notifications to work you need play services to be installed in that profile as well but I could be wrong.

The method that worked for me was to install everything normally in one profile and then see what apps actually required play services and slowly transition one at a time to either an alternative or to the setup I have now which is degoogled main space and play services in the private space.

I think the trick is to not let the perfect be the enemy of the good. I run GOS and have apps from fdroid, obtainium, aurora and play store. I used to have google services in the owner profile but recently moved all my apps that require google services into the private space so my main user space is fully degoogled.

The nice thing about GOS is that while they take a hard-line stance on security the OS itself is fairly agnostic to what you do. You can also change your mind over time about what you are ok with, like I did. Privacy, security and anonymity are all different goals to strive for but its always a a balance. You are already ahead of the curve just for trying. Keep it up!

I hate it when the money to store my balls and the payment for the lawsuit I settled with myself derails my 70 billion in funding for an unaccountable secret police force

As long as the villain is still an extreme close up of George Lopez’s disembodied head I’m in

On a side note but related, https://github.com/kmille/freetar is a private front-end for Ultimate Guitar that’s amazing. Free public instance at freetar.de.

Never went back to UG after finding this, so much better than navigating their awful website.

Why not both??

Same, the shrek 2 DVD menu and bonus features went so hard

I switched to Infomaniak when I first started seriously migrating away from gmail. I found it a really clean and almost too good to be true, email is fundamentally un-private and IK seemed like a great balance. Also all their apps were open source and on fdroid! Wow!

I was disappointed to see them take a stance against Swiss encryption law, which ultimately made me stick with Proton (also not perfect, but who specifically took the opposite side of this proposal). This issue seemed to be at the core of what I expected from a privacy focused email provider.

What really made me upset was that when I then tried to leave Infomaniak I found that they lock email forwarding behind a paywall (something not even Google does). It actually became very difficult to leave the small number of services I had migrated over to, and I still have my ikmail in my client by necessity.

This is definitely a positive change. I want to take them seriously and more competition in the relatively private non-American email space is good. But I am still hesitant to reccomend or embrace them. Would be curious to hear anyone else’s thoughts?

Gogoro a moped/scooter company in Taiwan has these. Little stations all over the country where you can swap your battery out, it was pretty amazing.

This is what I did with my Pixel 7 and I third it! As long as you go through a well-established refurbisher there is little risk and the phone will often come with a warranty/30 day return window. If you are US-based I used backmarket.com, where a P7 is currently $183 and a P8 is $298. Reasonable price, no money goes to Google directly, and I have been very happy with GrapheneOS.

I recently bought an XP Pen Magic Note Pad that I’ve been pretty happy with. It’s sort of a hybrid tablet/notetaker that’s going for a jack of all trades master of none vibe while still having an overall good writing experience and I think it succeeds at that

Pros:

• bought for $200 refurbished on an eBay sale directly from XP Pen (I think it’s $300 or so resfurbished normally)
• runs an OS based on Android 14 so full play/aurora/F-Droid access easily
• comes with a good pen, small folio case and notetaking app based on Jnotes
• screen is matte with a slightly textured feel. Can switch between a full color, paper color and grayscale display mode with a single button. 90hz, palm rejection while writing is very good.

Cons

• Came out this year but a little worried about continued OS support being a niche item
• built in notetaking app is great except for the handwriting recognition. I bought Nebo for that which is a one time license of $8 which isn’t bad at all and their handwriting recognition is like dark magic it’s amazing
• not a true e-ink, so battery life is more like a standard tablet. I’m usually getting 2-3 days of use wheras e-inks will give you weeks
• not a true paper-like writing experience but better than an iPad out of the box
• overall it’s a mostly fine android tablet with a few tweaks aimed at the note-taking market

All in all I do really enjoy it, and for $200 including a pen, case and software it was hard to pass up. I’ve locked it down a bit but you’re not going to get a totally degoogled experience. At $300 I would still consider it but probably wouldn’t buy new. Let me know if you have any other questions!