Toooo real. Its like companies have taken the worst of everything and just call it agile. List out every task and estimate them so we have timelines, but don’t actually architect anything as that’s waterfall. Fake waterfall, with fake dates, but fingers will be pointed like they were real commitments, and spend a month doing it for this executive power point instead of fucking off so devs can build the damn thing.

I’m still wired headphones. I use FiiO JadeAudio KA3 DAC and Letshuoer S12 wired earbuds. Not as impressive as I hoped for the price. Mostly wish it went a touch louder.

Could be the battery. My 5a5g died after 3 years and it was the battery. I couldn’t get it to boot that I could tell even while charging. Didn’t try calling it though to see if it rings.

Sounds odd, but have had similar issues with a Nest cam. Main powered doorbell camera resets when someone rings it until I replaced the battery.

Can’t remember if the 5a5g had a headphone jack (using 7 pro now), but you can kiss that goodbye. Fingerprint reader is in the screen now instead of the rear, but otherwise its been functionally similar.

The 8 line has extended support. If you care about security updates I’d check https://endoflife.date/pixel and pick what’s affordable. (a) models are at the lowest end, followed by the regular 8/9, then pro models for the best hardware.

Graphene also recently added some options like:

• Cap charging to 80% to extend battery life.
• Fingerprint reader + 4-6 digit pin. My normal pin is long so I’m happy with this change as forcing my biometrics won’t unlock it alone. Capped at 5 attempts.
• Kill switch pin. If forced to give up a pin it will factory wipe the phone.

Can confirm, it is information they already have. Below is likely the API the telco exposes to the bureau. Each data point queried returns true, false, or a confidence score.

It is intended as an anti-fraud tool. Not saying I agree with it. Something like PGP is sufficient for building out a web-of-trust without needing to share my personal information.

https://redocly.github.io/redoc/?url=https://raw.githubusercontent.com/camaraproject/KnowYourCustomer/r1.4/code/API_definitions/kyc-match.yaml&nocors#tag/Match/operation/KYC_Match

Will check this out! Played around with it for a few minutes and a couple notes.

I do prefer Loop / uhabit UX for recording habits. Only reasoning is it is less clicks to record my habits on the main view. I see the check on the right now. Not sure if I missed it or it came with an update but I’m satisfied with the number of clicks parity with Loop.

Custom behaviors per habit I could see being useful and the possibility of milestone encouragements. Use case: Habit is tracking calories. I may want to do this until I hit a target weight. If I could set encouragements like every 30 day streak I can reward myself with a new outfit or something. The ability to set the streaks per habit and have it repeat by starting a new iteration upon completion would satisfy that. Not sure if encouragements are random or upon completion yet, so if its random, maybe an end of iteration reward to make this work.

I see there is already issue for auto-backups, so +1 to that.

No programming knowledge required.

Graphene only supports Pixels due to the titan chip. The versions with “a” are cheaper. Check when they go end of life to find the cheapest if you care about updates. So probably the 6a or 7a if you want at least 2 years of updates.

1. Not sure on this one.

2. The auditor is to make sure you are installing an authentic version of graphene. That it is not a modified version that has been tampered with (e.g., backdoors).

3. Automatically enables MAC randomization. This can help with being tracked on public networks. Fingerprinting techniques have gotten better though with deep packet inspection and even measuring radio characteristics. I’ve seen demos of two brand new and identical models of iPhones being distinctly picked out due to variances in the radios during manufacturing.

Doesn’t help with advertisers tracking behavior based on IP. VPNs help with “blending-in” by putting multiple users behind the same IP. Provider matters here. Needs to be a VPN provider that won’t just sell your data or cave to law enforcement. Mullvad is my preference. Paid with crypto. RAM only logs. That said, use Tor or I2P for anything you don’t want subpoenaed.

For additional tips:

• Can’t remember if its on by default, but auto-reboot to put data at rest (encrypted and not in RAM). This is for a state-actor threat level, and less about advertisers.
• I prefer pin codes to unlock my device and don’t use biometrics. Graphene has a feature to randomize the pin pad every time to protect against a recording of the pin be entered. Specifically where the numbers aren’t picked up on the video but the pattern your hand makes can be seen. Again, more of a state-actor threat level.

No. Its all text file config. You wouldn’t use live CD mode. You define your own how you want it to work.

Its a steep learning curve so if looking for off the shelf solutions, don’t use nix. If you need something custom but through a single config paradigm, nix is awesome.

Soap boxing here but I feel these kinds of use cases is what NixOS is built for.

Declarative config to setup the system, users, and apps.

Declarative and customizable impermanence exactly how you want it.

I use Tails as well but NixOS is my daily driver. Anything not marked explicitly to persist is dropped each reboot. I’m the only user so I keep the last 30 days of non persisted data for like a power outage but that’s something I had to go out of my to setup for my use case.

There is anonymity and pseudonymity.

Do you need your opsec to be resistant to state-level actors (oppressive regime, censorship, illegal activities)? Well then you need to make sure you don’t introduce anything that will deanonomize you.

Are you trying to be resistant to mass data collection efforts used for profit? Being on the pseudonymity spectrum is a good step.

Dealing with the latter is like dealing with a bully. Make it not worth their time. They just want to put you in bucket X so they can estimate the most likely way to influence you for reason Y. Pseudonymity is about having multiple aliases that get put into different buckets so their privacy invasive efforts are less effective.

This is why we trust but verify. Thanks mom for teaching me that cruel lesson of unplugging the phone cord to get me to bed (dial up days). It lasted about a week before I caught on you always came up from the basement before bed.

I’m so glad you never noticed I swapped my line with the guest bedroom. Also glad that ancient block in the basement could be hand wired.

For our lower environments we use rsync like the author but skip the pipeline altogether. The servers have a watch script to restart when files are rsynced. We then have a local watch script that rsyncs on file changes.

Relatively instant deploy (2-5s) whenever a file is saved.

Good call on a simulated failure. When I first set it up, it was LVM/BTRFS or ZFS as my top choices. It was a coin toss at the time because I hadn’t built this sort of setup before.

I use immutable nixos installs. Everything to redeploy my OS is tracked in git including most app configurations. The one exception are some GUI apps I’d have to do manually on reinstall.

I have a persistence volume for things like:

• Rollbacks
• Personal files
• Git repos
• Logs
• Caches / Games

I have 30 days (or last 5 minimum) of system rollbacks using BTRFS volumes.

The personal files are backed up hourly to a local server which then backs up nightly to B2 Backblaze using rclone in an encrypted volume using my private keys. The local server has a mishmash of drives in a mirrored LVM setup. While it works well for having mixed drives, I’ll warn I haven’t had a drive failure yet so I’m not sure the difficulty of replacing a drive.

My phone uses the same flow with RoundSync (rclone + GUI).

Git repos are backed up in git.

Logs aren’t backed up. I just persist them for debugging and don’t want them lost after every reboot.

Caches/Games are persisted but not backed up. Nixos uses symlinks and BTRFS to be immutable. That paradigm doesn’t work well for this case. The one exception is a couple game folders are part of my personal files. WoW plugin folder, EvE online layouts, etc.

I used to use Dropbox (with rclone to encrypt). It was $20/mo for 2Tb. It is cheaper on paper. I don’t backup nearly that much. Backblaze started at $1/mo for what I use. I’m now up to $2/mo. It will be a few years before I need to clean up my backups for cost reasons.

The local server is a PC in a case with 8 drive bays plus some NVME drives for fast storage. It has a couple older drives and for the last couple years I typically buy a pair of drives on sale (black Friday, prime day, etc). I have a little over 30TB mirrored, so slightly over 60TB in total. NVME is not counted in that. One NVME is for the system, the others are a caching layer (monero node) or temp storage (transcoding as it also my media server).

I like the case, but if I were to do it again, I’d probably get a rack mountable case.

The DNS is cheap. Something like a penny a day for privacy. I typically paid like $50 every 2-3 years for both renewal and DNS on a couple domains.

Was kind of a PITA to be honest as I remember their login process was a little weird. I eventually moved on when they were slow to adopt some of the newer TLDs.

The registrar owns the domain then, not you. I made a root comment about Njalla which offers this service.

edit: Well you could use fake data. Still risk losing claim to it. I tried doing this with name cheap and they figured it out somehow that the info I gave wasn’t real. Was years ago so I don’t remember what I put in. My guess is it was one of those soft credit lookups (where did you live between X and Y?). Could also be misremembering.

One of the pirate bay founders created https://njal.la/#home but with the caveat:

For instance, when you register a domain name in our system, we can register with our own data. We will be the actual registrant of the domain – it’s not an ownership by proxy as found with all other providers. However, you will still have the full control over the domain name. You can either use our information (and our nameservers) or you can go with your custom data. And you can move at any time. Simple, flexible.

I believe it is required (ICANN?) to have a real entity attached to every domain, even with a proxy for the public whois. They simply offer to be that identity to avoid giving any identifying information, but they will have all claim on it if it came to a legal dispute.

I’ve been getting weird walking instructions. Like 6 min walk is +30 to avoid some invisible barrier.

Download 5 seasons of some show from multiple sources or some artist’s entire discography, and want to normalize all the file names? It is way easier in the terminal.

I’ll check this out, but I use https://github.com/stevearc/oil.nvim for such tasks as I have nvim’s full suite of editor commands to rename all the files way faster than I could in a GUI. I’m sure there are GUI apps to perform a similar task, but I already know how to use nvim.