Depends on what exactly it’s tracking. Is it tracking downloads from the Play Store. Installs based on a tracker embedded in the app once installed, or logins through the app. You’ll likely have to ask the friend to check the terms of the sponsorship to determine that.

This is what I use. I mostly just have the DNS filter turned on to allow for blocking similar to what my pihole does at home, bit allows me to have it when I’m outside of the house, too. But it has lots of other capabilities like a firewall, proxying through Wiegaurd or Tor, anti-censorship features, etc. It does use your device’s VPN connection but it creates a local VPN just to force routing all apps through it and then if you want an additional external VPN you use the proxying, but that’s optional.

But the DNS-only option doesn’t drain the battery like a full filter/firewall may, so that’s one reason I only use it for that. And I use GrapheneOS, so apps are easier to control at the OS level than standard Android, do it’s not as necessary for me anyway.

Depends on what you want. You can have the application have an https certificate which could either be one issued my a globally trusted issuer or could just be a self issued certificate that caddy is configured to trust. And caddy can then add the globally trusted certificates from let’s encrypt or whatever. But that definitely requires extra steps. Just, how secure do you want to be?

Right. Instead say “here you can use this as you like, and if you improve on it, share that with everyone in the same way so we can all benefit from it.” Is why GPL is better.

I use forgejo on a raspberry pi.

Don’t include the non-encoded part of the data or it will corrupt the decryption. The decoder can’t tell the difference between data that’s not encoded and data that is encoded since it’s all text.

Still are, though most often it’s heat rather than photons from sunlight since it’s not really necessary to disassemble hardware to that extent these days. And there’s available processing power to retry or do other error handing for any interference. Like running an unshielded Ethernet cable through a wall next to a power cable or through a room with heavy machinery can definitely cause data corruption from EM interference, but it will likely manifest as slowness rather than crashing a whole system. But there are lots of things that still cause computers or applications to crash that are related to stray energy, we just are so used to buggy software now that it rarely is noticed. 😁

Do you mean this config option?

[server] 
hosts = 0.0.0.0:5232, [::]:5232

That is binding the service to a network interface and port. For example your computer probably has a loopback interface and an Ethernet interface and WiFi interface. And you can bind to an IPv4 and or IPv6 address on those interfaces. Which ones do you want radicale to listen to traffic from and on what port? The example above listens on all interfaced both IPv4 and IPv6 and uses port 5323 on all. Of course that port must not be in use on any interface. Generally using this notation is insecure, but fine for testing. Put the real IP addresses when you’re ready.

OK so this is just the client and there’s another server doing Jellyfin server. That changes things. So on the client side yes if all clients support all major codecs then you’re good. Issue comes if one client like a smart TV, this device, or older android device doesn’t have it, then you have to transcode or the client has to software decode which something like a raspberry pi or smart TV is going to have trouble with.

Do you need it to do realtime video transcoding of high resolution video (>1080p)? If so, you may need a video card to do it efficiently. Otherwise, that should be more than sufficient. I know others have recommended a raspberry pi, but I don’t think jellyfin supports arm CPUs, though I could be wrong. So you’d have to run it in a virtualization layer and that would increase the hardware resources and may or may not be OK on a pi, but likely would not be as energy efficient as a pi usually is and almost definitely will have trouble with realtime transcoding.

To get around the realtime transcoding you can either make sure your devices support the codecs of the videos you are playing, or you can use a separate device to do batch transcoding of the files before giving them to jellyfin. I haven’t implemented jellyfin yet, though it’s next on my list, so I’m not sure if there are ways to do background transcoding inside it.

If you’re not hung up on Jellyfin, check whatever streaming software for it’s hardware recommendations, but Jellyfin is pretty good overall from my playing with it. It’s not the lowest resource using system, though.

RCS text messaging is another to consider, at least in the US. The carriers implanted it in a proprietary way, so only Apple and Google apps have it. It’s a poor substitute for an IM/chat app and not private and secure like it was promised due to poor implementations, but it’s still far better than plain SMS. I still have people I can’t get to use Signal or another secure IM app.

The Android Auto is the only one I’d be sad about. I love not having to use my phone’s screen for navigation and the navigation built into most cars is crap and expensive to keep maps and data updated. I like being able to use any navigation app, though Google Maps/Waze is still the only one I’ve found that has both live traffic info, which is extremely important with my city, and reading the street names rather than just “turn left” it says “turn left on some street” so I don’t have to look at the screen as much.

I use GrapheneOS and that’s what I won’t be able to replace once I finish my Immich and Home Assistant self host setups to replace Google Photos and Google Home/Nest, but st least they are sandboxed a bit.

Though Google has been moving to make it even more difficult to use their apps on these alternate OSes. Like I just found that Google Photos latest version pops up a not closeable error screen if it doesn’t have full “photos and video” access. Doesn’t work with the limited access or storage scopes that come with GrapheneOS, at least for now. I have photos I don’t want google to scan and index even if they are not being uploaded, which they do now. It’s obviously a ploy to get access to your data since it used to work fine. Now, I just use the mobile website instead until I have time to get Immich totally working and get people to switch if they want to see my stuff or share with me.

Yeah, the definitions are actually more about alignment with the US political parties rather than left or right. And since both parties are demonstrably right of center, just to different degrees, the bias meter should only be used to determine which political party’s sponsors likely biased the article.

For example, an article saying climate change is not human caused and presenting debunked evidence will be ranked mostly center and second mostly right. But an article calling for incentives to reduce use of fossils fuels will be ranked mostly left. That’s mostly center if anything. An article calling for the government to explicitly force companies to stop using fossil fuels would be mostly left and center. One further advocating for the government to take over energy companies that don’t comply and make energy production public would be mostly left. Just presenting scientific evidence and refusing to give a voice to debunked “alternative facts” is not a leftist position, it’s a centrist one at best and should be the baseline.

Yeah, it’s easy enough to configure it properly, I have it set up on all of my servers and my laptop to treat it as a network mount, not a local one, and to try to connect on boot, but not require it. But it took me a while to understand what it was doing to even look for a solution. So, hopefully that saves you time. 🙂

NFS is really good inside a LAN, just use 4.x (preferably 4.2) which is quite a bit better than 2.x/3.x. It makes file sharing super easy, does good caching and efficient sync. I use it for almost all of my Docker and Kubernetes clusters to allow files to be hosted on a NAS and sync the files among the cluster. NFS is great at keeping servers on a LAN or tight WAN in sync in near real time.

What it isn’t is a backup system or a periodic sync application and it’s often when people try to use it that way that they get frustrated. It isn’t going to be as efficient in the cloud if the servers are widely spaced across the internet. Sync things to a central location like a NAS with NFS and then backups or syncs across wider WANs and the internet should be done with other tech that is better with periodic, larger, slower transactions for applications that can tolerate being out of sync for short periods.

The only real problem I often see in the real world is Windows and Samba (sometimes referred to as CIFS) shares trying to sync the same files as NFS shares because Windows doesn’t support NFS out of the box and so file locking doesn’t work properly. Samba/CIFS has some advantages like user authentication tied to active directory out of the box as well as working out of the box on Windows (although older windows doesn’t support versions of Samba that are secure), so if I need to give a user access to log into a share from within a LAN (or over VPN) from any device to manually pull files, I use that instead. But for my own machines I just set up NFS clients to sync.

One caveat is if you’re using this for workstations or other devices that frequently reboot and/or need to be used offline from the LAN. Either don’t mount the shares on boot, or take the time to set it up properly. By default I see a lot of people get frustrated that it takes a long time to boot because the mount is set as a prerequisite for completing the boot with the way some guides tell you to set it up. It’s not an NFS issue; it’s more of a grub and systemd (or most equivalents) being a pain to configure properly and boot systems making the default assumption that a mount that’s configured on boot is necessary for the boot to complete.

As I said, it was a good distro for gaming that was also stable enough to use as a daily driver workstation.

As I said, it was a good distro that could do gaming and still be used as a stable daily driver workstation without needing to dual boot.

Ubuntu used to be one of the best gaming desktops that was still very stable and usable for everything else, but Canonical has been ruining it to make it more aimed at business and making more ways to profit, so Fedora has been filling the gap IMHO. Still some better dedicated gaming build distros, but Bazzite is good at being a gaming distro that works well as a productivity desktop too.

I have m.2 hats for the couple of raspberry pis that need more intense disk operations. Never use SD cards or flash drives, which generally end up being just SD cards in a USB package.

I just use the Play Store in sandboxed mode on GrapheneOS. The other stores out there haven’t looked all that trustworthy, especially ones that modify the apks. Some are even on common spam blocklists which may be for things other than abuse by the store portion of the site, but it reduces trust.

For anything open source I use Obtanium, the few proprietary apps I need I use the vanilla play store.

Are you wanting something that you don’t have to download from GitHub yourself (so a project that hosts a docker container somewhere and just code is in GitHub is OK), or are you looking to boycott any project that is not boycotting GitHub and so any part of that project should not use GitHub for any code at all in which case possibly even dependencies should not be on GitHub even if they publish their distributions elsewhere? Or somewhere in between?