From reading the Magic Earth FAQ, I believe the user data actually isn’t used for traffic at all (at least the manually reported events certainly aren’t).

Edit: never mind I missed a later part in the FAQ:

Do you share data with third parties?

We send position data to our traffic provider to generate real-time traffic information. The data is anonymized on the phone, using a changing key (so it’s not linked to you), and it is deleted after 5 minutes.

The first quote is taken out of context:

Not only are privacy and data protection founding principles for both Mobifree and F-Droid, the use of tracking-based in-app advertising poses a moral dilemma as well. If someone wants to gain access to an app, but does not have the financial means to purchase it, they can use it at a different kind of price - their user data.

For me this reads as them explaining and condemning that dilemma, instead of considering it as an option for F-Droid.

If the main battery isn’t “meant to be replaced”, it will often act as the CMOS battery (e.g. MacBooks have been doing this since roughly 2008).

Yesss fcast looks incredibly promising. Sadly the only app implementing it seems to be GrayJay, I really hope it will catch on more.

TVHeadend is the way, I’ve been running it with a USB satellite tuner for 5+ years. Setting it up can be a little confusing, but once it’s running you pretty much never have to touch it again.

As for clients, there’s a Jellyfin plugin, however it seems to not work for me right now.

My client of choice is Kodi with the TVHeadend plugin, and that works great. If you still want Jellyfin integration, you could just add your recordings folder as a library in Jellyfin.

Could I purchase two different brand drives and use them with btrfs?

I don’t quite remember the source for this, but I believe I read some time ago that it’s actually a good thing to have separate drives. The reasoning is, if you buy two identical drives (at the same time), the likelyhood of both drives failing around the same time is severely higher.

This is then amplified by the fact that rebuilding a RAID puts a lot of strain on the non-dead drive, so if ie. drive 1 dies and drive 2 is about to die, the strain you put on drive 2 in order to rebuild your RAID onto drive 3 might kill drive 2 before you even finish rebuilding your RAID.

Again, this is just from my memory, it might be worth doing some more research on.

Same! I’m lowkey tempted to get a fancy one now, but deep down I know it just isn’t worth it.

Soumds like revolt might be interesting to you.

Streaming, especially video, is quite challenging and expensive. The fact that discord’s video streaming was so cheap was always somewhat suspicious.

I highly recommend transcoding all your videos with ffmpeg, for me that reduces their size to anything from 10% - 25% of the original (100MB -> 20MB). I always use this command:

ffmpeg input.mp4 -vcodec libx265 -crf 28 ouput.mp4

(This will strip metadata, I was too lazy to figure out how to make it keep metadata). What I also do for most videos is turn them all into 1080p30 if they aren’t already.

You can ask ChatGPT to make you a small script to apply that command to all files in a folder, I can’t remember how to do it off the top of my head.

Edit: for linux run this in the folder with your videos:

for file in *.mp4; do ffmpeg -i "$file" -vcodec libx265 -crf 28 "${file%.*}_transcoded.mp4"; done

My phone’s at like 120/128 GB, I have 70 to 80 GB in apps, 90% of which I haven’t openened in the last year. But you better believe I’m not deleting those apps, cuz a) I still have pleeeenty of space and b) what if I need them some day.

Duude I tried blindly plugging in a USB-C at the back of my PC ones, I was like “Aha, gotcha” and then my PC just shut down. First came confusion, then I realized it wiggled left and right. That was incredibly scary, luckily ASRock has good protection circuits so nothing happened.

But I sure as hell haven’t blindly plugged in USB-C since then.

I don’t know if this works for all Ubisoft games, but for Rayman Legends there is a dll that will circumvent the stupid Uplay Launcher and just make it launch normally (see https://steamcommunity.com/app/242550/discussions/0/3647273545686004759/ , comment by murla)