That’s good, glad to hear it! I also put in a good word for you which doubtless helped I’m sure!

It’s pretty quick to set up luckily. Depending on your security needs you can set a PIN and prevent access to certain controls and areas of the screen. If you have a need for real security (e.g. an app on a corporate campus) you’d want real single app mode, but for home use it’s more than enough I think.

Did you ever mend your relationship with your crow friends? It sucks that feeding them isn’t legal in your region (though that’s probably for the best from an ecological perspective).

Like others here, I use mine as a sort of “kiosk” for smart home stuff by using Guided Access to lock it to a single app. If you have a Mac you could also put it into real single-app mode via Apple Configurator policies, but it’s more time-consuming to set up and if the app stops working there’s no way to fix it short of restarting the entire iPad (whereas you can end Guided Access, restart the app, and start Guided Access again).

Just in my personal experience, I use IronFox with Mullvad, which YouTube flags and throws the “Sign in to confirm you’re not a bot” error whereas NewPipe, for example, typically works (I believe they have a workaround similar to yt-dlp that leverages the Android VR API).

Oh man, I had totally forgotten about this game! I might have to pick this up.

Hmmm… seeing as food is the number one way to our- er, I mean, a Crow’s heart… you might be in trouble! But worry not, I’ll put in a good word with my brothers… I mean my local neighborhood Crows because I am definitely a human living in a house around other humans!

I think it’s an underappreciated city and I always really liked it when I lived there.

Thanks! I think the trouble I had with Bandcamp is that it seemed to be missing some stuff I wanted - some of it was more niche but a good bit of it was pretty popular so I was surprised by that. No reason I couldn’t use more than one source though.

7digital looks promising, thank you!

Are there any good alternatives to Qobuz? I tried it out and was annoyed that they didn’t seem to embed metadata in the files (like album art) unless you use their “downloader” and I think it’s silly that I have to install that to just… download some files. Or maybe I missed something?

Thanks for the writeup! I think bidirectional sync is what I’m used to but very few solutions seem to support it outside of the big tech ones, like you mentioned. Perhaps I need to re-evaluate whether I truly need it; I guess it’s not often I switch between editing a document on my phone to my laptop and need those changes synced instantly, and I did find a way to get Cryptomator to immediately upload any pictures or screenshots I take. I would still like my Obsidian notes files to upload instantly too, though, I think.

Thank you! I did just find in the FolderSync docs that 2-way sync isn’t supported for encrypted files, which is a bit of a bummer. I think Nextcloud on Android had a similar limitation where it would only actually sync at most every 15 minutes. I did find the Cryptomator app on Android does have an “immediate upload” folder, but it’s only for images captured with the camera and screenshots… which I guess for now fulfills most of my needs, so I may stick with that after all.

Thanks for the suggestion! I have a few questions, if you don’t mind: what did you like more about rclone than Cryptomator? Is it suitable for sync, or is it more for backups? I’m ideally looking for near-ish to real-time sync for contacts, notes, files, and pictures. Are there any frontends for Linux you’d recommend, or do you script out the functionality you’re looking to implement?

Did you try Syncthing at all? I ran into the same issues with Nextcloud on Android and I’m trying to decide on Syncthing or FolderSync and I wanted to see what people thought. I’m currently using Cryptomator but it doesn’t do everything I’d like yet.

Yeah I just spent a few days trying to get Nextcloud on Android working and it was a disaster. I ultimately decided to use Cryptomator to handle the sync since I’m already using it on my PCs, but I’m looking at maybe Syncthing or FolderSync (not sure which is better) because Cryptomator lacks some functionality like keeping local copies and making files available to other apps like galleries, music apps, etc.

Better yet:

[deleted user]

some random words here. This comment has been mass redacted with Reddact.

some other user

Thank you so much, this fixed everything!

Haha well if it sounds that way it’s only because I got tons of great info from you, the resources at the UK Barn Owl Trust you mentioned (which is an absolute trove of info), and our friend anon6789 here!

Rest assured if I can get a little owl family to move in, this will be the place I post it!

Thanks! I sent you some info. The UK Barn Owl Trust is a great resource (and also has some pretty great owl cams!)

Thank you! I was exploring the pole mount options as our building mount options are a bit limited by roads, which, as you mentioned, should definitely be avoided. I had also been reading about their nesting habits and seeing that barn owls often use a nest box for a long time, so that was some of my impetus for wanting something that would last them a good long while.

I checked out the Barn Owl Trust and there was a lot of great info there - thank you again and best of luck to you in the course!