Brainio’s post about Gentoo got me thinking about my current situation.
I switched my cell carrier from AT&T to Consumer Cellular a few months ago. I was paying a little over 90 dollars a month on AT&T for a lot of stuff I didn’t need. I don’t have any social media so all I needed was talk and text on my phone and a minimal data plan for my iPad.
So I signed up with Consumer Cellular and got a flip phone for about 60 bucks and a 20 some dollar a month talk and text plan. The problem was getting a data plan for my iPad. Consumer Cellular does not support the older iPad I had because, as I was told, the older iPad did not support 4G.
So I ordered a new iPad from Apple, waited over 2 months to get it, and it doesn’t work with Consumer Cellular either.
So now I’m trying to decide what to do. The biggest benefit to me of a cellular plan on the iPad was for the maps. I like the idea of an iPad for personal productivity type stuff like email, banking, and wasting time playing games. But beyond that, I don’t do much with it.
I’ve got an old Garman GPS device, maybe I can dig that out, or get a current GPS of some type to handle what I need as far as maps go.
But overall it got me thinking about how much tech does somebody really need these days.
I’m quite content with LineageOS for mobile stuff until Linux on mobile matures a bit. I don’t really care about phone hardware at all since it’s pretty much all been powerful enough for me for 5+ years now.
Saying that, I’ve just bought a desktop for the first time in years that I’m going to control from my laptop and don’t type anything very long on a phone.
I’m still running the old i5 tower I built years ago as a gaming system. I’m dreading the day it dies because I don’t want to go through the mental masturbation of figuring out what to get next.
Being able to use a browser on the go is very handy. I wouldn’t want to be without it anymore, but I certainly could. Keep in mind here that I didn’t even submit to using a cell phone until about 6 years ago. I’m definitely not a luddite, but I saw clearly how the data harvesting surveillance works. But it finally got to a point where not using a smartphone was more trouble than I wanted to deal with.
In general though, I think that too much tech isn’t much of a problem. But I do think that the steering of tech for control and profit is a major problem and only getting bigger as time goes on.
I have abandoned my desktop at this point. A laptop is far too convenient. At some point I will set it back up as a dedicated daw. 90% of my computing is from a laptop, the rest from a phone. I like spending a lot of time outdoors, as long as the weather is tolerable. So at home I tend to be outside with a laptop.
I could certainly get along without any of it though.
Yeah, I’m over the reinstalling everything on the regular as well. Apparently the next gen AMD APU graphics are crazy good so you;ll probably be able to replace the chip + card in that i5 system with just a chip and let the cool kids blow $1,000 on a gfx card!
Hopefully they don’t run like a frying egg with linux. I’m due for a new laptop. And at this point I don’t see moving away from linux.
I haven’t kept up. I wonder if AMD completely addressed the Spectre, Meltdown, etc. exploits with Zen 4 that Intel seemed not to be addressing last I looked. I remember AMD stating that they would address this stuff in Zen 3, but I think that didn’t happen.
The thing that bothers me the most about smart phones, and I’m sure it applies to my flip phone as well, is the fact that you’re basically carrying around a tracking device that includes a camera and a microphone.
I’m not paranoid enough yet to think that Big Brother is spying on me all the time, but given that the capability exists, and that the two of the major bills passed by Congress regarding this stuff, the Telecommunications Act from the 90’s and the Patriot Act after 9/11 are steeped in so much secrecy, you never know.
But then again, given how so much of government is run on out of date, obsolete tech, they may be sweeping up huge amounts of data, but trying to get anything meaningful out of it is whole different ball game.
I did read an interesting article the other day about Geo Fencing. The article had to do with a judge ruling that Geo Fencing in just the specific case before the bench was unconstitutional.
The article mentioned how the number of Geo Fencing warrants has skyrocketed over the past few years. Geo Fencing is where law enforcement gets location data from tech companies covering a geographical where a crime has been committed. Basically tells them who was hanging around the area when the crime occured.
Another article had to do with a tech guy who took an Android phone and an iPhone, turned them off, wrapped them in foil, and drove around for awhile. He got back to his office where he had gear that would capture what was transmitted from the phones and when he turned them on, they both still transmitted location data from where he had been on his drive.
Kind of makes me wonder if that might have something to do with why you can’t remove the battery from these devices anymore.
At this point, if it is possible I assume that it is being done, which is pretty much what the track record has shown to be the case. It might be a few years before info leaks out that something is being done, but eventually we do tend to get some info about it. Hardware, operating systems, applications, service providers, websites have all been shown to be used for data harvesting, along with that data being handed off to government agencies for various purposes. And much of tech has been and still is being funded via government agencies. So it doesn’t take much imagination to put it together.
When a desktop blows, the plan now is I get another [i5] from a warehouse distributor, Win 10 with no 3rd party stuff, all legit, for around $200 Au
I’ve only then got one offline authorisation to do and then I’m pretty much fully functional again DAW wise.
I upload tracks to my phone, this phone being my only net connection, I got a large Samsung tablet I sometimes hook it up to. It’s got a 12 level clipboard, very handy in a forum argument discussion lol
I still use Reaper 5.9 something, some of my custom actions don’t function since I updated but I’m getting too tech weary to bother restoring them. I’m like “fine I’ll resize the fucking track height manually every time” rather than spending 15 minutes on what could be a wild goose chase to reset the custom action.
Has anyone here successfully installed the Reaper actions from that repository that Julian Sader and a bunch of guys contribute to? Without you’re having the desktop DAW online?
I’m completely out of the loop on all that stuff at this point. For all I know Reaper has a beer opener and Democrat only voting machine built-in by now.
OMG, I went into total tech speak overload watching that.
I’ve always looked at it from the standpoint that all a computer really does is add and subtract positive and negative numbers. Is the switch open or closed?
The larger those numbers are, 8 bit versus 64 bit, and the faster you can add and subtract them, Mhz speeds versus Ghz speeds, the more you can do.
A simplistic way of looking at things, but I like simple.
It’s terrible corpie speak for sure. The timestamp was to show that AMD has integrated a Microsoft security chip, i.e., Microsoft’s own cpu hardware backdoor. Apparently it can be disabled by an OEM, but who really knows. If it were only for machine management it wouldn’t need to be in every AMD cpu. Regular people don’t use their computers in that way. I was hoping that AMD would move in the direction of making their successive gen processors more secure, but it doesn’t look to be the case.
I figure it will follow what we have seen so far with machine management and drm. Proprietary software control only, disabled (who knows if it really is) via permission from the chipmakers only.
By the way, I haven’t seen any mentions in corporate media about Spectre V2 being a big deal again at the moment. https://www.epanorama.net/blog/2022/03/14/new-spectre-v2-vulnerability/ I wonder how the war in Ukraine and resulting cyber attacks might be affecting this. Supposedly linux 5.17 has a patch coming.
