The few times I’ve needed to man [app name] on a system without internet access or on an obscure utility, I’ve always been able to find what I need in the included docs

I hope the dev eventually gets sponsored, this is one of those utilities that you don’t think you need until --help doesn’t cut it

I use OSMand alongside GMaps WV (a webview for Google Maps, wipes all data automatically after closing). Works well enough for me, but in GMaps you can’t rotate the map or provide your location

I use “Automation” (on fdroid) - the UX could do with some improving but it thoroughly covers the basics.

Newer versions of Android make it difficult to automate certain things though, I find root helps to get around that in some cases

I was looking for Sleep As Android too!! Separately to this I saw a comment on R a while ago asking for FOSS alternatives, and to say the dev’s response was out-of-touch would be an understatement. They just complained about not being able to make a living from a FOSS app…

Regarding Gadgetbridge though, those devs and contributors are running into more and more accessories using encrypted protocols which is a bit worrying. Right now I’ve settled on the BangleJS which has official support, just wish it had a more accurate heart rate sensor!

My dream FOSS health app would be some concoction of OpenScale and Gadgetbridge 😂

Haven’t watched the video - just my thoughts…

Minetest (specifically Mineclone2) is an impressive feat, and a very faithful reproduction of the original. I pretty much used the Minecraft fandom wiki to progress through the game. Hours of fun was had without handing money to M$.

I only really stopped because the redstone functionality wasn’t fully implemented.

Hats off to the devs on that project regardless

AFAIK on Windows the physical disk containing the partition needs to be marked offline in Disk Management, and the disk or a partition given exclusively to VirtualBox running as administrator, otherwise access is limited to read-only

I would suggest checking some other sources as well, just in case this has changed over the years. If you do successfully pass the physical partition into VirtualBox read-write, you might need to set up a virtual disk with grub to boot into your physical Linux partition

Windows 7 being discontinued.

I migrated my HTPC to Linux several years ago, and since then just transitioned more and more of my machines over.

My desktop is the only machine left running Windows at this point due to there being no Freetrack implementation on Linux for sim games

A while back I made a Lolin32-based weather station that lasts for around 60 days on a single disposable vape battery.

It wakes up every 15 mins, and while it’s connecting to WiFi it retrieves the AM2302 sensor readings. As soon as they’re transmitted it goes back to sleep.

I wish there was a more power efficient alternative though, like whatever is being used in those BLE LYWSD03MMC sensors that last for around 3-6 months on a cr2032 whilst also having a display built in

First time hearing of this! Thank you 😁

I was coming from Lighttpd which at the time had a very similar config syntax to Nginx. It was pretty much a no brainer, considering I wanted to shift to an automated Letsencrypt renewal process at the same time.

Sadly I wrote some python web services for CGI (not django/flask) that cannot be run anymore, since NGINX only supports FCGI, rather than just CGI as far as I can tell

The Grayjay app includes an entire development environment for plugins.

No idea why the keyboard app is “large”. Could it be for support on obsolete Android devices where they’ve needed to re-implement missing APIs and features entirely themselves (like Firefox/Fennec and the Share menu)?

They could also be using completely different local AI tooling, or a custom trained model that has a higher space footprint compared to other similar apps. As always the true answer lies in the available code…

Edit: Grayjay’s = The Grayjay

This looks like one of those low cost netbooks from the time where “EPad” and “MID” tablets were a thing. There is an edition of Windows CE floating around for these - but WiFi will not work, neither the modem if this has one built in.

No idea about Linux - there is a kernel so you’re technically half way there, but considering most of these had a slow single core ARM CPU and 256MB of RAM on a good day, practical use is limited IMO

ASMedia is the only controller IC manufacturer that can be trusted for these IME. They also have the best Linux support compared to the other options and support pass-through commands. These are commonly found in USB DAS enclosures, and a very small fraction of single disk SATA enclosures

Innostor controllers max out at SATA 2 and lock up when you issue pass-through commands (e.g. to read SMART data). These also return an incorrect serial number. These are commonly found in ultra cheap desktop hard drive docks, and 40pin IDE/44pin IDE/SATA to USB converters

JMicron controllers (not affiliated with the reputable Micron) should be avoided unless you know what you are doing… UASP is flaky, and there are hacky kernel boot time parameters required to get these working on Raspberry Pi boards. Unfortunately these are the most popular ones on the market due to very low cost

Probably not.

However, not all USB to SATA adapters support SMART, so even if there is a bad sector that gets remapped by the HDD on-the-fly (and thus does not show up in the software scan), you may not find out easily

Chromium… I’m so getting downvoted with this one.

Why? Anyone is free to use whatever browser floats their boat 🤷‍♂️

Firefox itself is quite sluggish and slow to open on that piece of hardware

Do you get the same issues on an older version of Firefox for that device? If yes, proceed with caution - your device’s internal EMMC might be nearing EOL considering how old Android 6 is

But the problem is they all do not support modern arm64 apps that most Android phones use nowadays. Instead they need this other type called armeabi-v7a

They probably just stopped building for Android 6 devices. The SDK and various third party libraries continue to add new features all the time, and unlike Firefox, the majority of devs do not have the time or resources to manually code-in the missing bits to retain compatibility with old versions of Android. As a side effect, these custom implementations may have bugs or issues that go unnoticed due to the shrinking install base.

One of the more noticeable bits that changed is the Share API, which is why Firefox’s one looks so different vs every other app. There are other things like enhanced battery optimization and the storage API, which have changed a lot since Android 6.

IMO your best option is an older version of FF, or install Lineage (etc) on that device and use another browser

Edit: change “age of device” to “shrinking install base”

Really nice to see improcements being made to local voice control.

I personally haven’t opted for it yet due to the computing reqirements - instead been looking into dedicated offline voice recognition modules, since they use much less power. Downside is that they recognise a mostly predefined set of commands, and are just looking for patterns in speech instead of actually performing voice recognition

Would be interesting to compare the two voice control approaches side by side at some point

IIRC Beehaw doesn’t federate downvotes. The OP has been pretty heavily downvoted for no valid reason

I’ve tried both on my low powered HTPC and came to the same conclusion - especially noticeable where video acceleration is concerned

Something about that channel feels “off”, don’t know what it is. Maybe all the rants and abundance of negative opinions?? Perhaps it’s the culture difference in how he communicates on camera?

The only positive videos I’ve seen are him moving to macOS, the dell laptop one, and i guess the keyboard one, the other ones seem to be mostly opinion pieces & rants. There are other channels that do a better, more balanced job of this I think

Explains why I was having issues with this in Gnome on my HTPC…

Ended up making a remote button shortcut to maximise and restore apps