I used to play around with custom ROMs back in the Nexus days but I use my phone now for so many banking and other security - focused things nowadays that I feel it is just too risky to do all of that on a device that uses a non OEM ROM.

Maybe I’m too paranoid, but phones have gotten so complex today that even highly technical users have trouble ensuring that every aspect of their device is safe unless it is locked down to some extent.

Yes, they do go on some tangents occasionally. I used to think it a bit strange but have grown to like it. A number of years ago Steve went on this Vitamin D research kick and he compared taking supplements versus sunbathing nude (imagining him doing that is hilarious in its own right) and getting his levels checked after each trial. The discussion on this made me decide to start taking Vitamin D supplements and I feel like that has been a benefit.

The Melatonin thing comes from a different research project Steve did to find the “perfect sleep supplement formula” and he experimented for months with different ingredients to come up with what he contends will help him sleep and help him go back to sleep after nighttime bathroom visits. I tried some of the weird ingredients and it did help, but I didn’t stick with that. Even got my wife to try it. I’ve also discovered some great Sci-if authors from their book reviews.

I think they go on these tangents to keep the show fresh after 15 years. I believe that Security Now is TWIT’s most successful show but I wonder how they are doing overall.

LOL yes it is a weird name and I almost spelled it as brita. The company is actually Elecom and the trackball is called birta - https://elecomusa.com/products/b08p66zvzx

It is a nice little trackball that comes with a case - I use it with my iPad when I travel.

Great review! Thank you for the detail.

I was a trackball user for many years, but have gotten away from that for the most part. This might be a product that would drag me back in.

I do have a Birta MT1BR mini trackball I use for travel and it is great.

Agree completely about Security Now - I’ve been listening since the beginning (like 15+ years now?) and I honestly don’t remember Steve Gibson saying much political stuff. Leo is obviously pretty liberal, but he normally keeps a lid on anything political as well, unless it is tech industry specific. (Full disclosure - I am fairly liberal so maybe I’m oblivious)

I’ve discovered more music new to me on Radio Paradise the last few years than anywhere else. They stream up to FLAC quality so an excellent choice for listening on the home stereo. https://radioparadise.com/home

Haven’t tried Obsidian, but have heard good things about it. I have about 12,000 notes and continue to be impressed with Joplin’s ability to handle that with no issues.

I switched to Joplin a few years ago from Evernote and haven’t looked back. Take control of your own notes - Joplin is open source and has clients for every platform, and imports notebooks from Evernote.

Yes, I am now 90% on Lemmy - the new Memmy app for my iPad is close to Apollo-quality and Liftoff on my Android phone (S21) is “almost” as good as Sync for Reddit was.

For Reddit, I am using RSS feeds only to browse for any posts that interest me - I am trying to not give them traffic if at all possible.

The content on Lemmy is getting better every day!

Just go to your subreddit, copy the URL and add a .rss to the end, for example https://www.reddit.com/r/news/ becomes https://www.reddit.com/r/news.rss I’ve been doing this for years, using Protopage as my start page in Chrome and I make widgets with these RSS feeds. Lemmy and Kbin have RSS feeds as well, but you either just put in the URL and the RSS feeder recognizes it, or you click the little RSS icon by the sort selection and use that.

I’ve been pretty happy with Tidal. MQA gets a lot of criticism, but I have a DAC that decodes it and those re-mastered tracks sound great for the most part. They are moving toward lossless FLACs in addition to MQA. One thing that keeps me with Tidal is their support for play lists with basically unlimited numbers of songs (at least 10,000) - I have a “thumbs up” playlist that I have been curating for many years that is about 4,000 songs and Spotify in particular does not support playlists of that size as far as I know. Tidal also give more money per song to artists that the other companies. I believe Spotify is among the lowest per song, but they have many more users so probably pay out more in total.

This is probably a confirmation that Apple (or to lesser extent Tidal, Amazon and Qobuz) has siphoned away a fair number of Sportify subscribers who care about high quality audio. I’ll probably stick with Tidal although Spotify offers some really good features.

r/HarryPotter missed a chance to only allow pictures of hairy people operating a Potter’s wheel.

This sounds like something the management saw on a Mexican soap opera, what a bizarre way to treat employees. The settlement comes out to around $5k per employee - not enough, they should really feel some pain from doing something like this. I live in the area and have seen these restaurats - thankfully I have never eaten at one that I can remember.

Apollo on my iPad and Sync on my Android phone.

You may be interested to know that any Lemmy community can become an RSS feed. Look for the little RSS icon to the right of the Sort Type drop down, click that and it takes you to the RSS feed. That URL can then be pasted into just about any RSS reader and you will see a list of the latest topics. I use ProtoPage as my browser home page and have widgets that show me Beehaw Technology, News, etc. I clicked on one of those stories to come to this post. (By the way, Reddit works this way by just putting an “.rss” at the end of the subreddit’s URL. I used that a lot and am ecstatic that Lemmy allow a similar thing!)

This does nothing to address one of the most expensive aspects of attending college - room and board. With rent and real estate prices climbing dramatically, this is a huge (>50%) part of the expense of college for those who cannot live at home. Students get loans to help cover that and over four years it adds up to many tens of thousands of dollars.

I agree. Let’s see if the mods have the stomach to keep the subreddit’s dark indefinitely. I also wonder if Reddit will just take over the larger subs and install new mods?

Yes, good point. I really feel something like this is more of a building surge, rather than a tsunami. A lot of us leaving is not going to sink them in the near term, but they will slowly see an erosion of quality posts and more importantly quality comments. I’ve heard they really want to monetize access to all the conversations for data harvesting, and if the overall quality of that drops, the whole thing is worth a lot less.

Yes, but most of the traffic is from people going to the front page and seeing /all (this is what I read yesterday, I am assuming it is correct). My guess is most visitors who use Reddit’s apps or go in through the browser are not participating in the blackout, or maybe don’t care, so there will still be a large number of posts. The people supporting the blackout likely make up a large percentage of users who comment on new posts, and that is way down. I’m seeing a lot of posts, but far fewer comments on those posts.