Andrew

That's what I have and it's great! No exhaust to waste the hot air, just a water outlet/reservoir. It's maybe a tad slower than a conventions dryer but it still dries an entire load in an hour or less, for way cheaper.
The other factor that makes a massive difference is having a washer with a high speed spin cycle. Mine is 1200 rpm but I've seen up to 1800 rpm. Even 1200 rpm squeezes out way more water than your typically slow top-load machine.

Graphene likes to push the use of user profiles (just called "users" in the OS) but I find that to be a trash experience myself. Instead, you can enable work/personal profiles right within the single user account and keep sandboxed Google Play and the apps requiring it all within the work profile. You can restrict location and other permissions for Google and don't even need to log it in for it to work. You just need the Island or Insular app to enable profiles.

The Google camera app works perfectly for great photos with the pixel hardware and last I checked it doesn't even require network access or Goodie Play - except it won't embed GPS in photos without Google.

As you can probably guess, the amount of data Google gets will really depend on your setup! I like to use NextDNS to further filter connections. (Pihole might be better but it's more effort.)

Regarding seedvault, you can have it save to a webdav location, Nextcloud, or directly on the phone. If saving on the phone you could just have SyncThing or something similar auto sync the file to another device.

Agreed! Knowing what I was getting myself into was the only reason I even bought my MacBook. One thing not mentioned in that write-up is that if you increase your swap file size to offset the limited RAM it's surprisingly quick still, I assume due to a fast nvme drive. For my use case it's perfect. I'm even able to run some LLMs using Ollama that don't otherwise work with 8gb of memory.

For Windows machines I've found the Linux experience has vastly improved over the years. It seems that most mass-market hardware is functional right out of the box.

I think hibernate is a missing function - I've never tried it though. Here's a good write-up on the pros/cons and potential issue depending on your use case :
https://www.anuragrao.site/blog/05-asahi-linux

Maybe not what you're looking for, but I use Asahi Linux on an old M1 MacBook Air and it's quite nice. I bought it used for $480 last year.

They constantly force you to update or the app won't work. I was already having issues with Revolut on GrapheneOS so I just closed my account and switched to Wise. The Revolut app was a bloated mess anyway.

Wait, you'd prefer a rando barrel plug to a standard USB-C PD?? Why?

Long ago, pre-internet I read this sci-fi book "Star Chase" by Brian Royal that I found at the library. (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1520203)

I later looked it up and found out it was a blatant plagiarism of "Escape Across The Cosmos" by Gardner F Fox.
(https://bookwyrm.social/book/1370737/s/escape-across-the-cosmos)

Even the authors name was faked!

Not a medical procedure, but take the time to reevaluate your medical plan before open enrollment! Look at the cheaper plans and see how much you'd save in premiums. It might be greater than the difference in max out of pocket. And if you get a qualified "high deductible" plan you can even contribute the savings to an HSA that you get to rollover and keep forever into retirement, without ever paying taxes on it.

There are always people claiming Organic Maps or other OSM apps are perfect replacements for GMaps and I'm just curious what other tool these people were using for location based searches. Because it apparently wasn't GMaps?

Full article: https://archive.ph/2024.08.23-021803/https://www.newscientist.com/article/2444394-part-of-the-atlantic-is-cooling-at-record-speed-and-nobody-knows-why/

Key points:

Temperatures in that part of the Atlantic cooled off more rapidly than at any time in records extending back to 1982. This sudden shift is perplexing because the strong trade winds that normally drive such cooling have not developed.

“We’ve gone through the list of possible mechanisms, and nothing checks the box so far.”

“It’s the latest episode in a string of events for a climate system that’s gone off the rails for a number of years,”

I have this but it's no good for consent-or-pay, unfortunately.