I’ve got a nice wireless optical one; absolutely love it.

I’m currently playing Portal, Portal Reloaded, and Portal Stories: Mel at the same time.

Basically I’ll play one, hit “that freaking level” and then rotate through. lol

But if it’s legit HL3 it’ll be hilarious if they announce it on April 1st.

That would break the internet lol.

Will take your word for it. I’ve been out of the gaming scene for slightly more than a decade. I just saw this and immediately felt like it would be a “must buy” for me even if I have to upgrade my setup. So yeah, for me at least, this is the first game I’ve been hyped about in a long time.

Yeah, I recall hearing about that a good while back, but like you said, dunno how enjoyable it would be. From my understanding, much of the game mechanics are designed for VR.

I don’t have VR gear,and basically have no desire to buy into it. I have read the synopsis of each chapter on TV Tropes, though, so I’m at least familiar with the story. I may also see if I can find a “Let’s play” video and watch through that.

I never bought into VR and couldn’t / still can’t play Alyx so I’m very excited if this is real since the article calls it out as a non-VR game.

I’ve bought probably 5 or 6 tablets in my life. Each time, I thought I’d find a use for them. Every time, though, I ended up giving them away to someone so they didn’t languish in a drawer.

The only use I found for a tablet was as an e-reader, but it was never really great at it (too large/awkward, poor battery life, etc). Bought a Kobo for that, and it’s perfect.

Smartwatches? I can see the appeal for those. I don’t wear it anymore, but the one I had was useful to use as a remote control for my phone (answer calls, see incoming notifications, music control, etc) while leaving my phone in my pocket. It didn’t have any radio besides Wifi/BLE and was purely an accessory device. It synced with my phone via GadgetBridge, and everything stayed local.

And a smartwatch with a cell radio is no more/less a tracking device than the phone you’re already carrying. Assuming you’re not syncing your health data to some cloud service, that is.

When I bought my current car, I went for the one with the “dumb” sound system. For my purposes, it’s just a fancy bluetooth receiver. Not sure what I’m going to do when I upgrade, though.

I have Play Services on my secondary LineageOS device for some occasionally-needed things, but I don’t have it signed in with a google account.

My daily driver is rooted with Play Services disabled; everything is from F-Droid or Aurora Store. Haven’t tried removing it with the de-bloater since it wouldn’t actually remove it (just masks it).

Not OC, but I use OrganicMaps for maps and don’t even want Android Auto so not an issue.

Hey do you think you can recommend a good utility to move apps to the SD card?

Not really, unfortunately for a couple of reasons.

My devices running Lineage have sufficient internal storage that I haven’t really needed to mess with it on those or look for / familiarize myself with a solution.

My daily-driver device running do-googled stock Android only has 16 GB, but it does allow moving apps to SD. Sadly, I’ve had lots of issues with using the SD card in “extended storage” mode. Like, consistently, after each reboot, all my app launcher icons were gone from the home screen for anything that was on SD. Another time (and this is what made me say hell with it lol), I rebooted and the SD card was just wiped.

I’ve side-stepped the issue by using app-level options to store data on SD (with the apps still being on internal storage). e.g. I’ve got Organic Maps set to store the map files on SD, Nextcloud uses the SD card for its app data, camera defaults to the SD card, etc. It also helps that I don’t run a lot of apps in general; pretty much most of my “apps” are just pinned web apps.

Glad I could help!

TBH, my instructions were just my own phrasing of what I earlier read on XDA. I love XDA forums, and I’ve learned so much from there, but yeah, they do gatekeep pretty hard.

Ah, yeah. I haven’t used TWRP for a while since my last couple devices weren’t supported and I had to use Lineage’s own recovery.

Sideloading should be the same way you installed Lineage, assuming you used the official instructions and Lineage recovery.

I’m doing this from memory, so the steps may vary a bit.

Boot to recovery, click “Install”, then choose “ADB Sideload”.

From your PC, run adb sideload Magisk.zip (assuming Magisk.zip is in your working directory).

Then the phone should show progress; ignore anything pertaining to inability to verify. That’s normal since the app you’re installing isn’t signed by Lineage.

Magisk needs to patch the boot.img file somehow.

Here’s how I did it:

• Download the Magisk apk from Github
• Rename it from Magisk.apk to Magisk.zip
• Reboot into Lineage recovery on your device
• Sideload Magisk.zip and let it install
• Boot back into Lineage
• Open Magisk and it’ll likely tell you it needs to install.
• Click through, and it should patch the boot partition in-place
• Reboot
• Open Magisk and make sure it shows as installed.

You really don’t, though. At least not if you consider having full (root) access to your device as a requirement for owning it (I do).

Google blocks any rooted device from using RCS through the Play Integrity checks. Moreso, if you use any of the Play Integrity fixes, Google constantly updating their blacklist with the known spoofed fingerprints. So you basically have to play cat and mouse and update your device fingerprints every few weeks. Otherwise, RCS will appear to be working (the only indicator you have is that in the settings it says ‘Connected’) but if you try to send a message, it will fail and ask if you want to fallback to SMS. If someone tries to RCS message you, the message just gets eaten by the system.

TL;DR is that if you want to use RCS, you have to use a device in a configuration that’s “blessed” by Google which means you cannot fully own it.

Yeah, on my un-rootable work phone I have a wireguard connection just for DNS to my pihole, but I’d prefer the phone just not make those connections in the first place. There’s a noticeable battery life improvement with hosts file based blocking since it doesn’t have to make a network connection at all.

System-level ad-blocking is not on that list, so looks like I still need to root 🤷🏻‍♂️

Ever since Android 4.1 Jelly Bean, you’ve been able to disable (and sometimes even uninstall) many pre-installed apps without rooting.

That statement is just gaslighting. T-Mobile’s first-party bloatware is un-removable and un-disableable without root. One of the unremovable bloatware app is just an app that installs / “recommends” more bloatware.

Be that as it may, apps must work for me and never the other way around.

If my bank’s app ever forces me to choose between my keyboard of preference and their app, it’s their app that’s getting uninstalled.

AOSP keyboard on my regular smartphone, Traditional T9 on my daily driver CAT S22 Flip.

No. Just…no.

Yep. Migrating to that from Snapdrop is on my to-do list since Pairdrop natively does the internet sharing I had to patch into Snapdrop. Just one of many things I haven’t gotten around to yet.

Snapdrop or PairDrop

Those send over WebRTC through the browser, and there’s also apps that can tie into the Share menu. You can also self-host it if you want. The data doesn’t go through the server, it’s peer-to-peer, and only devices on your local network can see each other.

If you long press (mobile) or right-click (desktop) you can send text strings which is great for sending URLs and such between devices.

I could be wrong, but I don’t think old school Bluetooth OBEX is even part of AOSP anymore.

I patched Snapdrop to tie into Authelia (uses the display name passed from Authelia instead of a random name) and removed the local network requirement which lets me send files to anyone authorized to use my instance even if they’re not on the local network. The Authelia requirement is relaxed on my local network, so if someone is on my wifi, they can just connect and send (it uses the random usernames if there’s no auth header).

• Github: Snapdrop
• Github: Pairdrop

Some people…lol.

I’ve got a “tough” phone that’s made for construction workers and such, but I still baby it because I want it to look nice.

Ugh, I miss the simplicity and “just works” of OBEX.

If your device supports USB-C video, you might have luck with a USB-C dock that has video output; from there, either disable invert colors directly and see if that fixes it and also authorize your current PC’s ADB while you’ve got access. The dock is also useful there since you an use a keyboard and mouse to work the UI.

Beyond that, without ADB being authorized, I can’t think of any solution that would not involve wiping the device’s user/data partition via factory reset in Lineage recovery. Unfortunately, Lineage’s recovery can’t mount the encrypted user partition like TWRP can, and if there’s no TWRP build for it, then you may be out of luck.

I was going to suggest using Lineage’s recovery, enabling ADB (which works independent of the main OS’s ADB authorization), and pulling an image of the encrypted user partition. However, I believe the encryption keys for those are bound to the hardware, so you won’t be able to do anything with the encrypted partition image.

Was also going to suggest trying to boot into safe mode, but I don’t even know if that’s a thing on current Android. What I can find of it is old (2013) and seems to require being able to long-press the power button from the OS. I tried the steps with the physical buttons, but that puts my phone into EDL mode. May still be worth a shot. Note, I don’t know if that will work since it seems to just disable certain 3rd party things rather than an OS setting like invert colors.

1. Press and hold the power button, then choose Power Off.
2. Turn your phone back on with the power button, and hold the power button until you see an animated logo appear.
3. Hold the Volume Down button once you see the animated logo appear.
4. Continue holding Volume Down until your device boots.

Typically, when I have a device that’s in the “unbricking” phase, the data on it is already considered lost.

Cannot recommend Aurora Store enough. Play Store has been unusable for years and is only getting worse.

Native Alpha: https://github.com/cylonid/NativeAlphaForAndroid/

Uses the system web view to make any website open in a dedicated window. Has some other niceties like applying adblock on a per “app” basis.

Doesn’t do extensions, though, but if some of the built-in tweaks are sufficient, may be worth a shot.

I think OEM, non-carrier OnePlus phones do (someone correct me if I’m wrong or out of date). I just setup Lineage 21 on a OnePlus Nord N200 (ca 2021) and after enabling bootloader unlock in developer settings, I just had to pass the oem unlock command to fastboot. The carrier-branded ones require you to go through the unlock code request, and those take a minimum of one week (and can be cockblocked by the carrier for whatever reason).

There may be some kind of Android check, though, because the “Allow OEM Unlock” developer option was greyed out until I connected the phone to wifi for a few minutes. Not sure what that’s about, but it’s common for most/all android devices. I don’t know of any device that lets you unlock the bootlaoder without first enabling that in dev options.

HTC tried to make it usable with their TouchFlo (I think that’s what it was called) skin, but once you veered out of that, it was a mess, yeah. lol.

Which is kind of sad because under the hood, it was pretty advanced for its time.

I had completely forgotten about that aspect of it until you mentioned it lol. I just remember rarely seeing WM after getting that Android build on there.

Technically true, and niche devices with QWERTY keyboard like the ones from PlanetCom still exist. But they don’t really benefit from economies of scale, are prohibitively expensive, and are usually at least a generation behind in hardware.

Plus Apple started, and Samsung joined, the “thinness wars” that got us to where we are today. Slide out keyboards were definitely a casualty of that, and I still hold some hope, albeit slim, that those could still make a comeback.

It’s been a while, but I think that’s mostly how mine worked. You had to launch it from within Windows Mobile, but after that, only Android was running the device. Android booted from the SD card and basically kicked Windows mobile out of memory and took over from there. AFAIK, WM wasn’t still in the background, at least on the Froyo build for it. I want to say that’s the case since the TP2 didn’t have much RAM, and Android ran way too well to be sharing memory with Windows Mobile lol.

Regardless, my interest in building and running custom ROMs was born the day I did that lol.

I blame Apple (and then Samsung for copying Apple) for stealing this form factor from us.

Didn’t have that one, but I did have the HTC TouchPro2 that came with Windows Mobile but was able to shoehorn a functional version of Android “Froyo” on it. Peak smartphone form factor limited by the technology of its time. Shame.

We have very similar device requirements lol. Though I can’t speak much for the camera portion (I’m not a shutterbug and deal with whatever).

I just upgraded my trusty workhorse OP3 to a OP Nord N200. It’s a few years old, but that usually helps since the custom ROM support is more mature.

OnePlus is usually pretty easy to unlock as long as you get an OEM model (e.g. not one branded / sold by a carrier). Been a while, but if you buy an OEM one, I think you can just unlock it without having to request an unlock code. I had to jump through hoops to convert this T-Mobile carrier model Nord into a global version, but after that I was able to unlock the bootloader with just the fastboot command (e.g. didn’t have to request and flash the cust_unlock.bin. Was still carrier-locked to T-Mob, but that’s who I use, so no biggie.

Similar to what you’re seeing with ASUS, Motorola used to be, but I think their unlocking policy has gone downhill as of late. Haven’t messed with their hardware for a while.

I haven’t used Nothing Phone at all, but they were contenders (and still are) when I was looking for a successor to my OP3.

Same assessment of Fairphone: ideologically pure, but other issues ruled them out for me.

Should be pretty easy if you use Nginx. You can just proxy the full URI and params.

Main network:  192.168.1.0/24
Restricted network:  10.10.10.0/24
ShellyPlug IP:  10.10.10.5  (assuming it's REST API is on port 80, but adjust if needed)
Reverse Proxy IP:  192.168.1.10

Nginx "conf.d/shellyplug_proxy.conf": 

server {
  listen 80;
  server_name  shellyplug.lan;
  location / {
    proxy_pass http://10.10.10.5:80;
  }
}

As long as your reverse proxy (Nginx) on your main network can reach 10.10.10.5 port 80 on the restricted VLAN, it should work, and you should be able to use call the api from your main network at http://shellyplug.lan (or http://192.168.1.10) just as you would to it directly to the plug on its restricted network.

HTH

In that case, a reverse proxy on your “main” network that can access the Shelly Plug on the “restricted” network should work.

Easer cannot switch Wi-Fi networks: I was hoping to use the Shelly Plug’s local access point (AP mode) for a more portable solution, but since Easer doesn’t have permission to switch networks, I’m restricted to my home network.

What about setting up a reverse proxy on your main network that can then make the call to the Shelly Plug on its VLAN? I do this with my HomeAssistant and its devices which are all on an isolated network. The HA machine has internet access, but none of the other devices do (via firewall rules for that VLAN).

You’d have to make a firewall rule to allow the reverse proxy to be able to reach the restricted network, but that’s pretty straightforward.

Easer cannot start external apps: It also can’t trigger external apps that might help with network switching or more advanced controls.

Not familiar with Easer (will have to check it out, though), but can it make an HTTP(S) call natively?

Wish they’d just reign in notifications. Most of my apps have notifications disabled or severely restricted because my notification area will never be ad space.