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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • Not too sure, but when I was younger I wanted to fit in and picking colorful stuff made that harder. Id worry about it being on trend, or masculine enough, etc. Now that I’m in my 30s I said fuck it and am getting more colorful.

    Doesn’t help that I grew up with a mother who refuses to paint her walls anything but off-white or pale green for resale value. There was so little character.



  • I have no desire to change.

    I’m sure an iPhone would be a completely acceptable phone for me but I have no problems with android that iOS would solve. My phone already does everything I want it to do and more.

    And I don’t want to re-learn what all the best apps are. I already found great ones for what I need and I know many of them would be different on iOS. No need for me to go through that relearning.

    More than that though, I love that my android can do USB OTG and allow me to plug in flash drives, SD cards, game controllers, and Ethernet adapters. I love that i can change the home screen app to entirely change the interface. I like that I can root it when it’s getting slow to debloat it a bunch, or do thorough backups, or fuck around with app files. I love that the dev ecosystem doesn’t require a yearly subscription.




  • even though i might indulge in activities that are pleasurable for me now, they add up to nothing

    I know this isnt what you’re asking for, but I have to wholeheartedly disagree with this (unless you’re talking about drugs, wanking all day long, or something like that). Creating joy in your life isnt a bad thing and has long term benefits. It helps to overcome burnout and extreme fatigue, it gives you something to live for, it allows you a place to find what matters to you. It can help you be MORE productive tomorrow by letting yourself rest today.

    Taking some time away from a problem, from studying, or from work lets your brain work through problems subconsciously that you can’t grasp consciously.

    It’s like sleep. Sure, you can’t be productive during sleep, but you still need it to survive and to take on the next day stronger.

    Enjoying yourself isn’t wasteful.



  • USB OTG on android phones is severely underrated.

    • I can plug in a USB drive and transfer files around, I’ve used this to manage my retro handheld SD cards before.
    • You can tether your hotspot over Ethernet to your computer with an Ethernet adapter.
    • You can plug Ethernet into your phone to get faster connections.
    • You can plug a mouse into your phone and get a cursor on screen. Not super useful tbh, but kinda cool.
    • You can use your phone as an external webcam for your computer.
    • It’s a bit more annoying than it used to be but you can use your phone as a universal IR remote with a small adapter and free apps (I miss my built in IR blaster from my S3).
    • I haven’t used it much, but I can plug in a RTL-SDR dongle and get aerial TV on my phone, or a radio spectrum analyzer. I used it to discover that my garage remote is about to die and that’s why my car’s garage button won’t learn the signal.
    • USB (or Bluetooth) game controllers just work.

    Definitely a relatively niche usecase but I have SSH clients, terminal apps, RDP remote access clients, and other networking tools as apps on my phone for quickly messing with things. Very helpful to not need to bring out the PC when I’m fixing my network.

    The ability to VPN into my home network to access my NAS. Honestly being able to access my NAS in general is already great for backups or just so I don’t have to think about what’s physically on my phone.

    With a cheap Bluetooth device I can connect to my car’s diagnostic port (ODBII) and check engine codes. No more trips to the mechanic just to get it diagnosed.

    WiFi direct cameras are a great addon too. I have a wifi endoscope (camera on a long bendy stick) for inspecting inside walls and my phone works as a screen for it.



  • The Lemmy app we are using on our phones needs to download content from Lemmy so it can be displayed to us. Lemmy might just have one big file full of links, but that’s annoying to have to write code to handle. Or it might have a folder full of files where each file is a post, but that’s also a bit annoying to write code to manage.

    It (probably) uses a local SQLite database to store all of the cached posts.

    Conceptually, a database is just a place to store things, just like a big text file. The database just handles a lot of the grunt work for you and makes it easier to search, organize, and filter the data.

    So anywhere there is data, there could be a database.



  • It really isnt bad. I do most of my computer at home so I really only need a small cloud box to pipe things through when needed.

    And I could reduce the B2 price a lot with some deduping of my data, but that’s an ongoing and painfully slow process since I was too reckless with my local backups in the past, so $7 to avoid that process is worth it.

    And for electric I suspect it’s pretty low. I’m running 3 raspberry pi, a 4 bay NAS, and one micro PC and I live in an area with pretty cheap electric already. I think my gaming machine probably takes more power in a few hours than the rest of the system does in a day.