Depending on the VPN location I use, Degoog landed me in quite a few Honeypots displayed as Gandalf in ascii. Eventually I gave up trying to use the public instances with a VPN and had to fall back to another search engine.

This is good to know. It might have been my app, Blorp on F-Droid, that was the limiting factor for my image upload. Next time I’ll try the browser directly. Thanks for posting the stats!

I’ve been using the F-Droid app Blorp, testing its features. I might try switching to another client and see if the app was the limiting factor.

Also, sorry about the ads in the gallery. I couldn’t see them I guess thanks to my pihole/VPN? I stopped using Google Drive and Dropbox ages ago. Nextcloud and Proton Drive are all I have now.

Lemmy would only let me upload one photo and while I don’t upload galleries often, I know Imgur is not the way to go anymore. Is there a privacy-based free image hosting site I should be using?

This is true, the mic did not appear to be in series with anything critical since I did lift a trace in the Onn remote. When I looked at the board I saw how small and close together the traces were. I didn’t have the datasheet for the model of Mic I found on the board, so I just decided the remote was better without it entirely. It may not have been the most elegant solution but it did work. I will consider the razor blade option in the future once I get some leads that are both thin and sharp enough to pierce the small traces.

This is the mindset I had when I posted my procedure. While I could have gotten all three and de-soldered it properly, it isn’t something most people can do. I didn’t want my post technique to feel unapproachable by people with small tools and steady hands. Thanks for mentioning this since I forgot to!

I added some pictures for reference in the gallery link and if you do it just take your time and be careful. Remotes are easier to replace than TVs, but it would still be inconvenient if it broke. Good luck!

I liked it at first because I thought it would let my bypass the horrendous on-screen keyboard. Then I learned that these things are likely recording even when the button isn’t pressed and I decided on this project. I’ll take garbage on-screen keyboard over eavesdropping remotes any day.

This is very important and deserves its own post. Resellers typically either don’t specify or don’t know if the bootloader is unlockable on a Pixel so the buyer has to find out for themselves. Sadly “Unlocked” in an eBay post often refers to the carrier rather than the bootloader. Thanks for mentioning this!

You noted on the phone hardware but not the software so I’ll comment on that. Recently OnePlus has announced as of Android 16 that they will restrict bootloader unlocking to only those who fill out an application.

Nothing Phone 3 and all prior Nothing phone bootloader are still unlockable to this day with no call to restrict it. I would know, I have a Nothing Phone 3 running Shizuku and am waiting for Google to move Play Integrity off of its Kanban board so I can root again. Their forums have a strong development presence and as far as I’m concerned this is the one of the last good holdouts on this new restriction standard.

Pixel was the de facto standard for unlocked bootloaders. However, Google is the core of the “registered developers only” movement for their phones, killing sideloading and removing Pixel images from the development models in AOSP. I no longer support new Pixels (certain used ones are still good, don’t get the 6 series though they are BAD).

As everyone on LTT has said before, their talking points are provided by the manufacturer but their opinions on those talking points are their own.

I got the new Keychron M5 ergonomic mouse with all the gaming features and I love it. It didn’t take me long to get used to it and David praised it as well on LTT’s Short Circuit channel.

This is the BEST write up I have ever seen on the topic. Had no idea it was out there and explained a lot about the inner workings for security I wasn’t expecting.

https://www.reddit.com/r/LineageOS/comments/n7yo7u/a_discussion_about_bootloader_lockingunlocking/

Had this experience today. It was incredibly frustrating. Had to meme about it since I can’t get approval for my fix until tomorrow at 9am in another meeting.

Just wait until you get to Transunion’s site. It is a dumpster fire of consisting of the worst sign up I’ve ever seen, “Contact our social team” and "If you haven’t logged in for awhile create a new account. I could not believe how awful it was. I had to just call and do it over the phone.

It was in response to the Naomi Brockwell post she did on Twitter about businesses using WiFi, Bluetooth and Location Services to track you in public locations. You can Google it directly “NBTV Advice from Defcon” or this link: https://nbtv.substack.com/p/advice-from-defcon-turn-off-bluetooth

I have had two major issues lately that were either limited to me or actual issues that should be addressed:

1. Gamepass game trailers are not pre-buffering so they are insanely blurry until they load fully. Hard to get someone to think a game looks like fun to play if it looks blurry for the first 10-15 seconds of the game
2. Gamepass game search closed on me six times mid-typing a game I was looking for. Incredibly frustrating to type in 3 letters and it drop me back to the dashboard

I actually came here to echo this exact sentiment. I was on Lastpass until their first breach and then on Bitwarden both cloud and self-hosted until a few months ago when I set up with Proton. I liked Bitwarden so I put off trying ProtonPass. One weekend I set it up and ended up putting my 2FA items in as well. It feels absolutely seamless to use. The email aliasing for websites is so easy for making new website accounts. In my desktop and laptop browser the way it automatically offers to autofill the 2FA is so clean. I can’t see myself going back unless Proton gets prohibitively more expensive or the product declines in usability/security. If you are currently using Proton’s suite of apps give Protonpass a try. You can easily import from Last pass/Bitwarden and use both to compare side by side.