I’ll see if I can remember any interesting ones. One is a portable satellite messaging device using this:

https://blues.com/starnote/

Simplest case would be a small waterproof box with a battery and a board and MCU inside. UI would be a phone communicating by wifi. The box could run a web server so you would operate it with a phone browser and not have to install an app. Nicer version could have a minimal keyboard and display, like from a Lilygo Deck.

Note: this functionality already appears in a few high end phones (Iphone 15, Pixel 9) so it may make its way into more affordable phones after a while. Thus, the special hardware might stop being interesting. Meanwhile there are things like the Garmin Inreach which require over-expensive monthly subscriptions.

Another: a privacy oriented health monitor something like a fitbit (it wouldn’t have to be as small), that communicates with your computer or phone but doesn’t send anything to Google etc.

There were a few more. I may make another post later if any come to mind.

Go to physical therapy if your insurance covers it or you can afford it. They’re not omniscient but they do have some training and experience treating this stuff.

I’d consider it unlikely that Google or Apple put anything like that into their phones on purpose, because of the reputational hit if it came out. But, new vulnerabilities are being exploited every day. And don’t forget the need to protect metadata.

Do you know the movie Citizenfour, a documentary about Edward Snowden? During its production, if the filmmakers wanted to discuss something sensitive, they would leave their phones in the office and go outside to have their conversation without them. There still might have been listening devices around, but they did what they could about the phones.

I swear, this place is even stupider than Reddit. Kamala Harris spent a billion dollars literally campaigning against Trump, far more than you did by simply voting against him, but she helped him by running such a terrible campaign. And Biden? Among other things he managed to actually get infected with COVID just in time for his debate with Trump, causing him to throw a cog on nationwide TV. That helped Trump more than anything. If he had just worn an N95 mask, well I can’t guarantee that he would have been re-elected, but he’d have probably avoided infection and done a lot better in the debate. Thanks, Biden.

Anyone who actually does their homework knows Democrats are far and away the party of the working class compared to Republicans.

“Compared to Republicans” is a pretty low bar, just sayin’ :).

It would help if you said what your interest and skills are. If I wanted a small GNU/Linux desktop or server thing I’d just write it myself. But I can suggest some Android apps since I’m not set up to write those at the moment.

There used to be a GNU project task list but it no longer has concrete suggestions, oh well.

Actually one desktop thing I’d like is a gnus.el back end for Lemmy (if you don’t know what gnus.el is, this project isn’t for you). I might pursue that someday but I’d rather that someone else do it so I can use it.

Another thing I could use: a Pandoc exporter for bbcode, for some other forums I visit. So I could easily convert Org or Markdown files to BB. Pandoc is written in Haskell so that could be an interesting language learning project too, if you don’t already use Haskell. There could be an Org exporter as well, or instead (written in Emacs Lisp).

Those are off the top of my head. Maybe I can think of a few other things too.

“Make this” evokes hardware projects for these. I have many ideas for those that I can’t really pursue myself, as I’m not a hardware guy and don’t have the resources for it.

It’s not false equivalence when they really do both suck! Anyway, have fun under Trump 2.0, courtesy of people like you refusing to acknowledge your leader’s mistakes.

And you downvoted anyway. Silly cultist. 800,000 people dead of Covid under Biden, not a good look.

I think you are rationalizing. Biden and Trump both did terrible at dealing with Covid. OWS was one of the few things done right. It really was something like the moon program. Otherwise you can never credit or blame a politician for anything unless they are the ones personally doing the work. But that’s not what they do.

The alternative to OWS would have been to just let big pharma develop vaccines the usual way, instead of using a lot of approaches in parallel with government funding to get usable ones faster. Of course the protection from those vaccines was then pissed away under both administrations, by doing almost nothing (except during the initial lockdowns) to stop airborne spread of the virus. The Herman Cain Award is one of the most memorable legacies from that.

Trump already met with Biden a couple days ago.

Biden welcomes Trump for fireside chat as he prepares to watch his legacy burn

Trump authorized and funded OWS. Obviously he didn’t do the actual science. It’s JFK and the moon landing. JFK didn’t build the rockets or fly in them, but the project as a whole happened because of his getting behind it.

This is farcical. Operation Warp Speed (fast development of Covid vaccines) was one of the few good things that Trump 1.0 did.

Then my laptop is a phone? It’s sort of a phone but it doesn’t connect to the phone network, so only sort of. Since it needs a wifi signal it’s not so mobile either.

Ok but wifi only isn’t really a phone?

I didn’t watch the video but I don’t think there is any phone that lets you avoid having your location tracked. If there is wifi near where you want to use the phone, you could run a voip client on on a wifi-only tablet, perhaps.

I’ve been wondering whether satellite communications gizmos with no GPS allow any type of precise location tracking from the satellite. I’ve been interested in this, which lets you exchange text messages at fairly low cost (about 2 cents per 50 byte unit). Besides possible privacy advantages, it also lets you communicate where there is cell coverage:

https://shop.blues.com/products/starnote-starter-kit

Start CRIMP, the Committee to Re-IMpeach the President?

Harriet Miers is smiling.

I’ve never been able to get a library card anonymously, but anonymous email is pretty easy I thought. I use mailinator sometimes, which has no registration even.

Mute the entire TV and use the closed captions when watching the programs. I do this.

They don’t say what models but it probably doesn’t matter. It’s fine with me if my phone is basically generic. (Moto G Stylus 5g 2023).