We (wife and I) de-googled ourselves about a year and a half ago, moving half a TB of photos to Ente and canceling our paid Google subscription (while still keeping our gmail addresses). We set up our (Android) phones to back up photos to Ente and everything was lovely.
Then I started noticing my wife's Google Photos storage use growing again. Somehow her phone had been switched to backing up on Google again. I turned it off. Then it happened again. And again. She couldn't explain how it happened, but I suspected she was the victim of a scary prompt warning that her photos weren't getting backed up.
This wasn't happening to me because I had switched my phone to LineageOS, but hers was still a stock Pixel with Android.
Lately, I have run across a different example of Google locking in its services. As part of our process of leaving Google, we moved our email, contacts and calendars to mailbox.org. I set up her phone's calendar app to use the new server but to my dismay every new appointment was defaulting to use the Google calendar service! I switched her to the Etar calendar app (which is the default app on LineageOS), disabled the default calendar, and asked her to use Etar instead. Everything was great until I began to notice that her new appointments were showing up on Google again! I look at her phone and see that Etar is completely gone and the only calendar app available is the default Android one.
This calendar fiasco only just revealed itself the other day, so I haven't had enough time to figure out how or when it happened but it feels like it might be the same Google Photos tactic of sucking people back into Google.
I have another, similar example, though not quite as insidious. I switched to GrapheneOS and it's been mostly great. Unfortunately Graphene's stock camera creates drab shots compared to what the hardware supports. OpenCamera is available, but due to OS restrictions it doesn't work with hardware controls. In other words if you want to take a quick shot you have to unlock the phone and select OpenCamera. Bummer if you're into wildlife shots.
Graphene recommends installing google's pixel camera and sandboxing it, which, fine, I did and it takes beautiful pictures. However the pixel camera locks in google photos for it's gallery. As a result going from the camera to the gallery requires going back home first and then selecting the gallery.
Glad to hear about experiences like this because it was getting tempting to install and sandbox google photos as well.
Google's workspace features are almost hilariously transparent in how they do this. I have to use it for work and have chosen to do so on a single device also for personal use because I don't want two devices. I don't have Chrome installed on this device, but if you click a link from any Google app, it will still popup a selection menu with Chrome as the default and a generic "this device's default browser" last option with no distinguishing name or icon, unlike every other app I am aware of that chooses the default browser by default because that's the entire point of having a default.
It takes up quite a sizable amount of the screen, too, so anything in the corner is effectively hidden without interacting with the popup. These pop-ups have been the bane of my life.
There was brief time when Pinterest automatically logged in Google account users if you made the mistake of clicked an image in Google search results. Popups sound downright civilized and principled by comparison
It looks like the pop up is part of the browser UI in Chrome, and displayed as part of the website if using non-Chromium browsers. I block ads and don't use Chrome, so I don't see any version of this often.
This happens exactly because you're not on Chrome. For some reason the sign in with Google pop up only triggers on non-chrome browsers. Especially on Firefox.
It's not a matter of "letting" her do anything. She can choose to use whatever service and hardware vendors she wants, as long as she can take care of her own tech support.
Obviously I didn't mean it as her asking for permission, but as him not questioning her if she wants to go the Google route. People will make sacrifices for their significant others if they think that'll make them happier, out of their own choice.
Who would even honestly interpret it that way nowadays? This isn't the 19th century.
Remember to choose the `tar` version, not the `zip` one, unless you like downloading ten thousand zip files one by one. The tar files can be up to 50GB, the zip ones are much smaller.
The zip files can be up to 50GB as well, but they recently changed something on the backend so that if you do use the zip option you may still get however many 50GB files then maybe a 1MB, a 7kB, and a 1GB file, I assume because of the way they parallelize the tasks. I don't know if the tar option behaves in the same way.
Did the same. One issue was the links had some # of retries you can do before they become invalid. Solved it first by exporting them to google drive instead :D
As a high school teacher, I first noticed this effect when I started using a CO2 monitor in my classroom as a proxy for air freshness during COVID. The CO2 levels in our supposedly "no problem with the air" classrooms shot up to 2000 ppm within minutes of the start of school and stayed there all day. Kids weren't checked out ONLY because I teach mathematics. They were breathing bad air, too.
Worse, when I brought the monitor home, I found the levels there were elevated even with no one home and surpassed 2000 with just two or three of us in a room.
The good news is that I stopped worrying about making my house "tight" for the sake of energy efficiency. I keep some windows cracked all year and don't worry about how tight the door seals are.
> The good news is that I stopped worrying about making my house "tight" for the sake of energy efficiency. I keep some windows cracked all year and don't worry about how tight the door seals are.
The point of having "tight" houses is not (just) about energy efficiency but about air quality as well. The general mantra is build tight, ventilate right. It's why modern building codes mandate air tightness and having ERV/HRVs.
By having a leaking house you do lose efficiency because in summer the air you paid to cool goes out and the hot-humid comes in, and in winter the air you paid to heat escapes and the cold comes in. But in addition to temperature (and humidity/moisture) you also get things like pollen, brake dust, (depending on your region) wildfire smoke, etc.
By ventilating right with ERV/HRV, you remove stale air and bring in tempered fresh outside air that you filter before distributing throughout the building. Air quality is also why 'spot ventilation' is also generally mandated at certain locations like over a cooktop/range in the kitchen, and in bathrooms (where the primary purpose is not taking care of smells (though helpful), but rather moisture from showers/baths).
> I would not want to live in a city where I have to be careful letting in outside air or going outside because there's too much air pollution...
1. Not living in a city (polluted or otherwise) still does not solve the problem of letting out cooled air and letting in hot-humid air in the summer, and letting out warmed air and letting in cold air in the winter. If your CO2 is high are you going to crack open a window when it's -10 outside? Or in the middle of a heat wave (esp. if you have AC and paid to run it to cool your house).
2. Not-city living also has pollen and other allergen leakage. You're also more likely to get wild fire particulates in less urban areas.
Building tight and ventilating right is applicable in all locations and all climates.
And in the extreme case, if you believe the outside is the healthiest environment, live in a tent or under a tarp. :) Buildings were invented to have a separate outside and inside, and leaky houses reduce the effectiveness of that separation.
Living in the countryside won't save you. I spent my childhood in a rural area and our house had the misfortune of being situated on a steep hill, so at all hours of the day and night you'd have cars and motorcycles and tractor trailers revving their engine to get up that hill. Every year we'd have to powerwash that road-facing side of the house to clean off the accumulated black grime, and sleeping with my window open, which faced that same road, always caused me to wake up raspy and hacking. Cars are a problem no matter where you live.
Cars are not a problem no matter where you live. You described a very specific circumstance and projected it on to all rural areas, which doesn’t work.
The point is that urban/rural is irrelevant to this discussion. Every urban area that I've ever lived in has had better air quality than the rural area I grew up in.
Even if you live in an air quality paradise, it’s not ideal for your indoor air to be the air that manages to sneak through all the little cracks in your structure. Especially if you have cold outdoor temperatures, indoor humidity such that the outdoor temperatures are below the indoor dew point, and airflow through the walls that can lead to condensation and possibly mold in those walls.
Your indoor air should enter through windows or intentional intakes, not incidental gaps.
> Even if you live in an air quality paradise, it’s not ideal for your indoor air to be the air that manages to sneak through all the little cracks in your structure.
Small cracks are also things that critters may be able to get through.
How much does implementing all that cost? What degree of benefit does it offer over simple window in situations where those concerns are negligible? What other benefits to human life could be procured with that money?
It just boggles the mind that people feel emboldened to only look at one side of the equation.
> How much does implementing all that cost? What degree of benefit does it offer over simple window in situations where those concerns are negligible? What other benefits to human life could be procured with that money?
Everywhere not being LA is actually an argument for ERVs/HRVs. The weather in LA (AIUI) is fairly even and consistent and it is probably fairly easy to just open a window.
But if you're in Texas with high humidity, or Arizona with high heat, or north of the Mason-Dixon line where people get winter, it's kind of hard to open a window when it's 0 or -10 outside. If you have stale air (perhaps as measured by high CO2) what are you supposed to do?
Over the July 4, 2026, weekend it's supposed to get >90F/>32C on the east coast of the US: do you want to open your windows and let all of that heat in? Especially if you already have an AC unit so paid to run it get your home's inside temperature down?
If you have a place with ducts, you can purchase an ERV and tap into that for US$ 1000:
And even in milder climates (like LA), have the ERV suck in air from the outside through an MERV 13(+) carbon filter, and not only do you deal with things like wild fire smoke, but wild fire smell:
Uh, no, homes should not be airtight. You'd have a hard time closing exterior doors if they were, and anyways, houses need to be able to "breathe" to be able to keep humidity down (you don't want mold problems), oxygen up, CO2 down, etc.
Most studies don't register cognitive changes in the range of 2000ppm. A lot of the military and space studies used exposures multiple times higher than that without registering cognitive problems. It wasn't until you got to very high numbers that they registered any changes.
Only a couple studies purport to show cognitive changes at levels around 2000ppm, and the ones I know of all involve one controversial researcher named Usha Satish.
There are a lot of studies with CO2 levels at 10,000ppm or higher that have failed to find cognitive effect (an example https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29789085/). Your 2000ppm classroom air would have been like fresh air relative to the concentrations these studies are looking at.
>The good news is that I stopped worrying about making my house "tight" for the sake of energy efficiency. I keep some windows cracked all year and don't worry about how tight the door seals are.
You could also install an energy recovery ventilation (ERV) system.
Houses where I live were fitted with those. People turned them down to the lowest settings because they were loud. Then people developed health issues due to high CO2 and they had to refit the systems.
I didn't realize how much I had come to rely on Unicode until I created my own VT-100 emulator as part of the Forth language engine (https://github.com/Eccentric-Anomalies/AMC-Forth) in the spacecraft simulator game I'm building. The display is implemented as a shader with the original VT-100 display character set embedded in code, and there is absolutely no support for anything else. Things were going along swimmingly until I realized I just shot myself in the foot when it comes to translating the game to other languages. Sometimes the old ways really did suck. At least that part of the period "feel" is guaranteed to be correct!
As far as I can tell, the video itself is 100% fake. A bad fake. I particularly love the part where the worker levitates a large coil of steel with his hands. The narration sounds OK, so just turn off your monitor.
Used Chromebooks are plentiful and cheap on eBay and many of them are easy to convert to Linux using the tools and instructions at https://docs.mrchromebox.tech/. I used to have a house full of Chromebooks, but now all but one of them are Linux laptops. My favorite is the Acer CP713 because it comes in flavors with lots of RAM and drive space. I also prefer the convertible touchscreen models because they can go on a shelf and make cheap and attractive Home Assistant dashboards.
You get a dealbreaker keyboard because of the lack of an alt key and you don’t even save much money for the effort of working around the Chromebook restrictions. A laptop originally sold with Windows is so much more straightforward to work with.
I’d just grab something like an HP EliteBook 840 G10 on eBay. Around $300, upgradable RAM and SSD, and reasonably recent. Relatively modern/attractive aluminum build.
Or I’m sure there’s some other 2-in-1 not-Chromebook convertible model you can grab if you need the touch screen.
You seem to know what you're talking about. I used a cheapie Taiwanese Intel netbook for years, on Linux, with great success. When it came to replace it, there was nothing left in that niche (i.e. small and cheap) except ARM Chromebooks with (apparently) locked bootloaders. So I reluctantly bought a heavy and expensive Intel laptop.
Was I wrong to assume that the average big-box-store Chromebook cannot be jailbroken, or has only driverless hardware, or are things changing here? If the latter, surely this opens a boulevard for Linux? Any insight much appreciated.
If you are using a password manager, start by searching for every record with your gmail address. Make a list. Every day, go to the next entry on the list and change your email with that app or service.
Of course, set up gmail to forward messages to your new address and filter them into a folder. Once you have changed all the services you know about, watch for emails coming to the gmail folder, looking for more services that need to be updated. Eventually the only thing arriving in the folder is spam and you can just route it all into the garbage.
I am not an MS Office user, but I have seen the effect of format lock-in with Google Sheets. A few months back I began a project to de-Google my life, which went pretty smoothly until I tried to download my spouse's accounting spreadsheet from Google Sheets to Excel format. Both LibreOffice and Excel could open it, but nothing worked correctly. So for several months, I kept that one Google Sheet live until I could come up with an alternative. When I created the original file in Sheets, I was blindly using all sorts of features and capabilities (including Google Forms) that simply have no direct analog in other products.
A couple of days ago I bit the bullet and dug into the Excel file and figured out how to redesign everything and get it going again. Yay me. I'll admit I don't like the UI in LibreOffice, but I didn't like it very much when I first tried using it (as Star Office) back in the 90s either. Yet I keep coming back to it.
If I'm going to be locked into a format or app, I'd rather it be something like LibreOffice.
I was a 14 year old digital electronics hobbyist at that time. At $666 it could just as well have been $1 million. The most I could possibly afford at the time was about $50. For me, personal computing didn't become truly affordable until the Commodore 64 came along in the 80s, and by that point the Apple II was about 4x more expensive. The Apple computers were revolutionary, but to me they have never been affordable.
As someone who grew up with only vinyl in the 60s and 70s, I would never choose it over a CD for audio quality.
BUT I would enjoy recreating the rituals that go with playing vinyl: obsessive cleaning of the disks, the gentle manipulation of a delicate tone arm, and the soft thud when the turntable cover drops. Playing a record was a minor event to be savored. I doubt the younger generations are getting all of that right.
Vinyl absolutely CAN sound great. If you have a nice amp and good speakers, modern listeners will be amazed at the fidelity possible from vinyl played back on a good turntable with a decent signal chain.
BUT.
CD is still better. CD is simpler. You don't have to faff about with cleaning them, or treat them like hothouse flowers. The platform is incredibly portable.
And yet: Vinyl is more fun.
We moved last year. Our audio room can play streaming, CD, or vinyl. It's the first and third options that get by FAR the most usage. CD comes up once in a blue moon.
Then I started noticing my wife's Google Photos storage use growing again. Somehow her phone had been switched to backing up on Google again. I turned it off. Then it happened again. And again. She couldn't explain how it happened, but I suspected she was the victim of a scary prompt warning that her photos weren't getting backed up.
This wasn't happening to me because I had switched my phone to LineageOS, but hers was still a stock Pixel with Android.
Lately, I have run across a different example of Google locking in its services. As part of our process of leaving Google, we moved our email, contacts and calendars to mailbox.org. I set up her phone's calendar app to use the new server but to my dismay every new appointment was defaulting to use the Google calendar service! I switched her to the Etar calendar app (which is the default app on LineageOS), disabled the default calendar, and asked her to use Etar instead. Everything was great until I began to notice that her new appointments were showing up on Google again! I look at her phone and see that Etar is completely gone and the only calendar app available is the default Android one.
This calendar fiasco only just revealed itself the other day, so I haven't had enough time to figure out how or when it happened but it feels like it might be the same Google Photos tactic of sucking people back into Google.