It's painful disabling knox so you can root or flash custom roms.

That only blocks for the browser. What about your apps? I never see add banners or popups in apps as i use adaway. Further, I can customize with well maintained blocklists that include other categories like malware and harvesting sites.

Well said... Two weeks before the equivalent i posted moments ago.

I'll elaborate for him/her: mesh devices sold by untrusted companies with a profit model will almost surely be collecting your data.

The problem is not "mesh", it is the companies using a new, cool, buzzword to sell their spyware that is the problem.

They are basically enhanced repeaters that don't require a seperate network access point.

If you get a device that is primarily marketed as basic hardware, like the Asus router, you are more likely to avoid the collection. Bonus points if you can flash FOSS software to it, also like Asus, so yiu know it is clean. Regardless, use a VPN for external communications.

My home is small enough that mesh is unnecessary, but I'd buy another Asus device for mesh if it were necessary.

I'm confused. Authy is just a 2FA client. There's half a dozen in fdroid. I use FreeOTC myself. Are graphene users unable to use anything else?

Android CUPS Print, on F-Droid.

This app provides a Print Service to Android. This means that once it's installed, you need to enable it in the 'Print' section of the settings app. Once the service is enabled, printers are automatically discovered using the mDNS protocol. You can print anything you want from any app, as long as the print service is enabled.

I agree that if it is already AAC, it should not be changed as it has the highest fidelity and best compression.

While AC-3 is not the best, it and AC-4 are the only formats i know that can encode TrueHD and Atmos metadata, so that should be kept it it is there.

Any transcode will lose fidelity unless the target codec is lossless, and I don't think AAC has a lossless mode.

Well, if I'm on my laptop, I just use the browser. It's much easier, and they don't sqawk at me because it is "rooted" - even though it has always been rooted.

I have found a library that had equipment to transfer to DVD, however if the tape has copy protection it won't work. I'll find out. Plus, I can buy a DVD version - I found it in searches - but I already own this and don't want to buy it again.

Thatsva tidy narrative there. Is there a correlary for the other 140k+ layofffs from the 2nd and 3rd tier tech companies that followed the lead?

Another tidy narrative is that these tech companies, besieged by pesky overworked employees who kept trying to unionize and demanding higher pay, decided to teach them who is in control.

Almost the same time all these "unnecessary" people were let go, these same companies ramped up their H1-b visa hires. Hmmmm, coincidence? Maaaaaayybe! It's odd that some of these firings happened as unionization gained momentum. There was a time when that was illegal.

Yes. In fact, when you open the file in a file manager, you can have OsmAnd automatically import it.

You speak much truth, but I think ther is more open source than even Microsoft sees in the ecosystem. Getting started producing working projects feels easier in .net to me.

I was a Java developer in the early days, and found the platform very frustrating. Things started to improve with the spring framework. And when I heard about spring boot, I was very pleased to see that it was all about making a standardized easy initial project startup configuration.

I recently had to do some Java for the first time and literally decades. I was able to use Java 17.

I felt it was vastly better than the early days, I was frustrated by things like the incomplete implementation of generics. And it appears that was a direct result of the way Java evolved.

Unfortunately, it appears many if not most Java projects are still stuck in Java 8 because of all of the Legacy installed code and a lack of decisiveness toward upgrading.

As for .net, I'm a little worried about some of the things coming out of Microsoft lately. I fear they may be returning to some of their old ways. Time will tell.