*mi phones used to be the go-to for the enthusiast; stellar hardware for an awesome price and a wide custom ROM support base. none of those things is true anymore.

as you can tell from https://wiki.lineageos.org/devices/#xiaomi the support is lackluster. the way I heard it the dude who was in charge of publishing kernel sources quit/got fired (?) and now there’s a backlog and they ain’t super-enthusiastic about keeping up. the unlock process was a shit-show even before they tightened the torture rules, now it’s downright masochistic to participate in that scam, with additional limits per year, evermore extending “wait periods”, mandatory mi account, etc.

my advice, go get the F3 if you ain’t tossed it and replace the battery, it’s fairly easy.

got fed up with the local marketplace options so Imma scrap together a market. haven’t touched django in like a decade, not up-to-date on tooling, don’t wanna pay for 3rd party services… what can possibly go wrong?

and all those are on top of the covert peer-to-peer network that every apple device is a part of, constantly phoning home - including when your device is supposedly off. you can’t disable it or opt out of it, and its security, full functionality, and breadth is unknown.

got a busted Lenovo Ideapad 520ISK out of a dumpster, missing screen but otherwise perfectly functional. the thing has i5-7200u, 8 GB, two SATA ports inside and this prompted me to look up converting the thing into a server, specifically figuring out how to run 3.5" drives off it; I’m very anti-friendly towards using USB solutions for such a task.

searching was arduous, both web and yotube, and except one lonely forum post (remember those?) didn’t find anyone attempting let alone succeeding in running it thus. the 2.5" and 3.5" connectors are identical (there are micro SATA to SATA adapters for the DVD port) but the drives will need 12 V that the 2.5" ports ain’t got.

what I’ve concluded is that all that’s needed is a M/F SATA extension cable which I have trouble sourcing locally; the power will come from a separate ATX PSU for the time being, although I’m sure I can pull 12 V from somewhere on the board.

don’t got no 3d printing nor fabricating options, so it’ll likely look super-janky, but that’s not a huge concern for me now. I’ll do a write-up if I succeed.

lol fine - 3x 2 GB 1333 modules out of a busted 1366 motherboard I found and one 4 GB 1866 module I couldn’t pair with anything, worked fine for years. the i7 got upgraded to workstation and a C2D i found by the dumpster took the server role. same drives, same debian, same docker-compose files - all good so far.

I’ve downgraded my server from 1st gen i7 10 GB RAM (don’t ask) to Core 2 Duo 4 GB with the same load and barely felt it. my entire infra including desktop, laptopS, tablet, phoneS, etc costs like a third of this “missed value”.

not shitting on your choices, but positing that the price-gouging retail market is all there is, kinda disingenuous; there’s sooo much stuff being discarded although perfectly usable.

like, I couldn’t bear the super-expensive raspberries while they were in the $50 range, let alone now. marketplaces are awash in busted laptops, with way better value and performance. discarded corpo desktops can house cheap HDD and run 24/7 for eons. etc.

way more modern CPU and chipset resulting in better power management; also faster and better graphics, but that’s not important for the use case. an undervolted i5 5250u can run with wifi and lit screen in the sub-5W range, netting you 10ish hours of continuous light use out of a decent battery and days of standby (that you can turn into weeks if you implement suspend-then-hibernate). you could make an earilier model work but the price difference should be in the $20 range, so why bother?

edit: microSD, yeah, I guess you can boot off them but why would you want the flaky and slow mess when you got a perfectly fine PCI-E SSD?

anyone drone-savvy up in here, can recommend cheap drones that are okayish wrt range, carry capacity, ease of hacking, zero clown shit, etc? ideally some white-label that’s globally available…

macbook air 11 2015 8gb version. just this one and no other, no 13, no 2013, no 4 gb versions, etc.

very linux friendly (once you sort out broadcom wifi drivers), sips power, tolerates undervolt. it’s useless to the apple crowd as it don’t got support for latest OS so it can be had for cheap, even more so if you wanna buy busted units and frankenstein together a new one. also, wide cross-gen parts compatibility. aliexpress got $5 USB-C to Magsafe2 adapter so you don’t gotta haul the charger around.

don’t get the 12" ones, unless they’re close to free. spectacular screen, but the keyboard is atrocious and prone to die, with no option of replacing it, SSD is integrated so can’t get the data off it if something dies, fragile display connection, it’s a shit-show.

thanks, good stuff! sadly, got none of these locally available.

what kinda hardware do you need to “run this on your desktop”?

thanks. the notification went away after login and I wasn’t able to find its text anywhere in the myriad of pages.

also I’d take this “does not” coming from them with a bag of salt.

this thing here. I’ve dramatically reduced support work at two shops I’ve set this up for. incidents went from from coupla times a month to once a year. not to mention - you don’t need no VPS no more, don’t need no database, nothing, the simplest web hosting will do and it’s very cache friendly.

for $0 a day, you can utilize Codeberg pages for static hosting or VMs from Oracle Cloud Free Tier (4 cores and 24 GB RAM that you can use on up to four VMs).

for the domain part, you can get 'em from afraid.org or eu.org.

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I’m not that interested to find out what exactly it’s doing. it suffices that I was explicit about fuck no don’t do none of that and it’s still outbound.

like the latest one I blocked is QownNotes. everything related to online is turned off yet it still wants to connect to api.qownnotes.com.

I’m gonna piggyback off of this to remind everyone to install OpenSnitch and go through the iinitial and super-tedious approve/deny outgoing connections.

there’s stuff on linux that, despite being perfectly offline capable and having turned off everything related to clown sync and remote check this and that, still phones home.

I mighta misunderstood what you want; freetube gives good & relevant recommendations if you’ve selected a video, like you’re watching something and then you see related stuff in the sidebar.

if you want to open freetube and then it recommends you things to watch, unprompted, that’s not a thing. honestly, wouldn’t want that to be an option at all.

when you turn off the “viral” shit, block a buncha slop channels (super easy - stupid face in the thumbnail? blockety block) and make your subs the home page, it becomes a joy to use.

freetube recommends decently similar videos with the occasional slop in there, in addition to your subscriptions that are not visible to google or anyone else. only here, when you hide a channel, that thing is hidden forever, won’t pop up again randomly.

varied diet of whole-foods, calorie deficit, resistance (i.e. weight) training. unless you’re like 19, all three are mandatory.

but that’s too hard, so people look for quick fad bullshit, ala keto, intermittent fisting, chrono, whatever the current fad is.