The Art Of Not Asking Why

Intro:

I read “There are too many iPhones” from @gr36 this morning, which got me to vent. I went into my old archives and dag out my post about the Pixel4a, A phone I stupidly sold to get the Pixel 6, which I regret getting (too costly, too Google, and of course, too damn big).

This is the old post from 2020-08-27. Almost everything I say in it is relevant today, including wanting to go into GraphineOS.

I received my new Pixel 4a a Friday before last and after a week I can say this with confidence: this is the best smartphone Google ever made. I also hope it will be the last phone I buy from Google.

If you want to read more about the Pixel4a, There are plenty of reviews on the web, both written and videos (here’s a recent in-depth one from arstechnica, and a quicker video from the Verge). Here I’m going to focus on why I like this phone.

Hardware: The Phone

Let’s start with the obvious: the price. At $350, Google is back where it has always been best: supplying top tech at a price that doesn’t twists people’s arms. At hard times like this, with folks losing their jobs, this is a welcome change from the $800-plus flagships.

The Pixel 4a is not a statement of class like the iPhone, and it’s far from delivering the latest and greatest. That’s fine because I don’t need the latest and greatest, I need a damn phone. The iPhone 8 Plus, which I have for work, still sells for about $500 today(1)

The iPhone 8 Plus is too heavy and too big, yet somehow the screen on it is smaller than the one on the Pixel 4a. This makes a big difference. The Pixel doesn’t fall out of my hand when I pick it up like the iPhone 8 Plus does. I can reach the corners of the screen without doing crazy hands acrobatics. It doesn’t stick out of my pocket for everyone on the street to see. It fits into my pouch when I go for a run. These may look like insignificant details, but the overall experience is liberating.

As a bonus, the pixel comes with an earphone jack. I can carry my FLAC files with me on the phone and listen to my higher-end earphones at the office now. The Bluetooth headphones are good for meetings and streaming music, but if I want to get lost in some good stuff, I need an audio cable(2). It’s also nice to plug in my good set and charge my phone at the same time when I’m at my computer.

I know the argument for/against Pixel phones is all about the camera, the better battery life, lack of better water resistance, Android sucks/rules, blah blah blah. I don’t care about those. While I don’t particularly care about looks, the Pixel does look nice. The edge-to-edge screen without bezels, the crisp image, and the fabric cases to match, it puts the iPhone in perspective.

The software (Android)

I used to marvel at Google’s utilitarian vanilla Android and scoff at anything that isn’t a pure Android experience. Now, after a couple of years in IT working with Android, iOS, macOS, Windows, and of course Linux, I’m moving forward.

It’s called GrapheneOS. A mobile OS that strips the Pixel from what makes it Google. It’s a mobile OS built for privacy geeks who want a smartphone that doesn’t call back to the mothership. I want to wipe this phone clean and see if I can live without Google on me all the time.

But I’m cheating. I still have my iPhone. I’ve decided that all the apps that need to “spy” on me can be on my work phone. Bank app? I don’t mind if my job, which pays my salary, sees my bank statements. Google Maps? If I travel, I can’t leave work completely behind anyway. Phone calls? I barely call people anymore and most of my contacts are on iPhone, so I don’t mind using Facetime. Everything private however will live on the Pixel. My org notes in Orgzly, my contacts on Signal(3), my media, passwords, etc.

Right now, this is a challenge I want to take. I still have my old Pixel 2, and I’m planning to use it first as a “demo” version to see how this works out - or fails. By the time I’m done, I believe GrapheneOS will already have a working Pixel 4a version.

Why? Well, why not? This blog is called the art of not asking why, after all.

Footnotes

(1) This price came up for a refurbished iPhone 8+ on Apple’s website.

(2) I find that I don’t need my amplifier when I connect directly to the jack. With the USB-C dangle, which looks terrible and prevents charging at the same time (so the phone slowly runs out of juice), I need to use an AMP as well. Visualize this: an audio cable from the headset goes into an adapter, which goes into the AMP, which goes into the phone. I want to say there’s a slight difference in sound quality without the amp, but I don’t have a professional-grade headset to detect that sort of thing.

(3) This will be tricky since Signal is not exactly open source, but I’m aware there’s a way to install the APK anyway. Actually, Signal puts out its APK on its website.

I updated my old blog one last time. I like writing in Emacs, which is what I used to do on the old blog each time – but I also like having the option to not worry about it and just type away when I want to.

Made a couple of changes to How I browse the net: bookmarks, org-mode, and a password manager and trying something else to get this on Fosstodon.org.

It’s only appropriate to get serious about the Micro.blog section in my wiki at this point, isn’t it?

Added “comment on micro.blog / Mastodon” plug-in 💡. I hope this will help with comments from fosstodon.org 🦣 as well. Open to suggestions!

I was recently asked about bookmarks, and I realized my browser/bookmarks workflow might seem a bit odd…

• My main browser at home is LibreWolf, which is a privacy-focused Firefox fork (kind of what Brave is next to Chrome, but not really). It uses a Searx instance for searches.
• For work and “We don’t like your VPN” places (like my bank for example, or health insurance) I use Brave. I believe it uses its own search. (I switched to Google, as this is my “boring me, vanilla guy, nothing to see here” kind of deal.)
• For blogging at home, I use Firefox. It uses DuckDuckGo (the default) for searches
• For writing (journal and sometimes blogging) I use EWW, which is the Emacs' built-in web browser. It uses Wikipedia as a search engine.

Sometimes I launch a URL directly from KeePassXC. I have a section of pages I visit often, so it’s another way of logging into those with the credentials ready to go.

I do have bookmarks saved where it makes sense. For example, my Brave browser has bookmarks for various bills-paying related sites; but LibreWolf does not have bookmarks I use often, because these are launched from KeePassXC.

Another way I sometimes browse the internet and save pages is with org-mode - but not the way you probably think. I don’t have a “bookmarks.org” somewhere or a file with different URLs. Instead, the links depend on the task or project they’re attached to.

For example, if I want to buy a new hard drive, I will have the task in org-mode and several links in it leading to search results across different sites. Another example is a link to a location, say a museum, I visited on a certain day. This works well because the connection I make mentally makes sense to me; if I want to find the model of the hard drive I purchased, for example, I will look up the task that had to do with it and find it. When I work in org-mode, the links will open in EWW. If I need a full browser (to visit the hard drive link from Amazon), I just need to press “&” to open my external default browser with that link.

Do you have your own weird way of saving locations on the net? Do you even bother? Or do you keep a tidy list in your Safari/Firefox/Chrome?

Transferred my domain to micro.blog successfully. taonaw.com will take you to the new blog now, complete with SSL, courtesy of @menton and the MB community.

The old blog will stay up with an alternative link. I hope to migrate posts over slowly, at least some.

The CSS is fixed, with the help of my partner. No more white highlights or pink ones.

to quote @manton: “The Alpine theme is a “Hugo theme for Micro.blog, based on Marfa theme, which was based on NeoCactus and Cactus for Jekyll.”

Alpine had a white color highlight for links, while the other (Marfa?) had pink ones. We had to find and adjust both stylesheets.

A bit of The Matrix thrown into a cheesy heroic story about freedom. Good for a chill night for easy viewing, don’t expect anything special.

The twist in this movie is not really a twist, because by this point we’re used to it, like turning around full 360. Bla bla aliens enslave humans, bla bla brain washing humans, bla bla somehow humans' brains can’t be brainwashed completely, bla bla true love will unlock everything, etc etc.

Left unexplained: why do such advanced aliens need humans to fix their own machines? Why keep any humans alive? What’s the point?

Cool tech, cool toys, nice action, awesome drone noises. Tom Cruise with his Top Gun sunglasses is still flying like a bat from hell.

Forgot that WhatsApp doesn’t care what phone number to tell it to use, if you switch to a device with a different number, it disconnects from the identity you had and starts a new one. So, I had to update my family and friends I’m switching numbers, confusing them yet again.

I spent over an hour trying to fix a few annoying #CSS issues on the blog, and I give up for now. Certain changes I make seem to work the first time around but not later.

For example, I could specify I want links to have an underline (text-decoration: underline;). I don’t always see the effect in the preview pane inside Micro.blog, but I do see that in a private browser window. So I make an additional change, and… nothing. I switch back to text-decoration: none; and… links are still underlined.

This drives me nuts. You can’t change something if you get different results for the same copy-paste CSS code. There’s an option to reset the cache in Firefox, so it doesn’t do that, but it still doesn’t seem to work, and by this point, I lose track of what I’m trying to change.

Enough for now; I’ll try a bit more later.

Still confused about #microblog.

My posts (like this one) will show on #mastodon OK, but then it’s coming from another account, so when people reply on my jtr@fosstodon (probably what you’re seeing now if you read this), the interaction won’t show on micro.blog.

I’m trying out CoPilot (blame Wheezy Waiter for this). I discovered that my Fitbit Sense, which I got for free because my Ionic was recalled, doesn’t really integrate with Apple health.

This is not a big shock, especially now that FitBit is a Google toy, which they’re going to cancel sooner than later. What is nuts though is that after I connected my Sense to the iPhone, I wasn’t able to connect it back to my Android, no matter what I tried (including a factory reset). I tried to connect the Sense back to the iPhone and succeeded with no issues. Not only that, the sense downloaded firmware updates that seems like I was missing on the Android. There are a few features working now that weren’t fully working before.

This makes me think I should switch to an Apple watch if I want to keep up exercising and use a watch for payments etc (my bank information is on my iPhone).

New updates to the wiki, and a CaptianLog explains what’s new: taonaw.gitlab.io/taonah/

2FA, the holy grail of security. Until you don't have access to your phone number anymore.

Good-luck trying to reset your password or your account. It's all based on 2FA.

"to reset your password, please verify the code we sent to this number"

"yeah, I don't have that number."

"sorry to hear that, please verify your information so we can reset the password"

"how do I verify..?"

"please verify the code we sent to this number..."

I will use keepassXC forever, thank you.

Maybe I have a thing for pizza. I mean, most folks do, no?

A walk to one of my local pizza joints around the neighborhood in the cold weather is rewarding for leaving the apartment.

I’ve been thinking of what I posted here, on micro.blog, and how I want to keep up posting content. There’s nothing solid at this point, just a lot of floating ideas.

Well, and trying the MB mobile app, of course.

I love it how whenever I test something on Mastodon (to check if cross-posting works, or if some other automation works, etc), someone always replies to my test 😄 It can be a split second, it doesn't matter, someone will find my silly "testing, 1 2 3" and tell me they can hear me. This... https://jtr.micro.blog/2023/01/15/081659.html