Gogo Sempai

Paying education loans even after 20 years of working in public service? Seems like a failure of the education system. I’m from Europe, also been to India a lot on business, and never have I seen anything of this magnitude. You can get a good education even in India for a very nominal tuition fee that middle-class parents are also able to cover without taking out loans. For poor families, it’s virtually nothing in good state universities. The idea is that education will empower even the poor and they’ll be able to get a good job and become tax paying citizens. Not like if you’re poor, we’re still gonna crush the heck out of you with more debt. The latter seems to be the strategy employed in the US. In most European countries, education is virtually free covered by taxes. Of course taxes are high but it benefits everyone in terms of healthcare and education. Is that really so bad? Isn’t it the government’s job to make sure EVERYONE has access to good healthcare and education? Then why does it feel that it is a money-oriented corporation running the country rather than a government?

Sorry, went on a rant there. Whenever I see something like this it just makes my blood boil. Teachers, firefighters, nurses still paying student loans after a decade or two, that’s a failure of the education system right there.

Detroit: Become Human fits the bill perfectly! It’s a great game with some of the hardest choices you’ll ever make in a game period.

Great list! One suggestion: Try Helium’s OpenBoard fork for keyboard. It has tons of features like full Material You theming, glide typing, multilingual language support as well as autocorrect and suggestion support. I’ve been waiting for autocorrect to be added in FlorisBoard for more than an year now.

https://github.com/JJTech0130/pypush

They should add login and subscription handling on their website as well like so many do, with 30% off on the subscription fee because there’d be no Google tax.

Damn I should have pushed harder when that incident with WhatsApp was all over the news. Only a few of my friends and a couple of family members switched.

No end to the greed of these corporations.

Currently costs peanuts in India (have some good friends over there 🥸) and there’s no password sharing crackdown yet. Comes down to $2 per person on the highest plan. As long as this continues, I’ll stay subbed to Netflix.

Thanks to EU, you’ll be able to contact these people on WhatsApp without using WhatsApp.

https://techcrunch.com/2023/09/11/whatsapp-has-started-work-on-cross-platform-messaging-due-to-eu-regulation/

I was shocked when my friend from India told me that for 400 Mbps up and down, he pays only $14/month. Limit: 3.3 TB per month.

Indeed. Simple Dialer is I think the only FOSS dialer app that is actively maintained. And Simple Gallery Pro is fairly advanced for a FOSS app, even having a video editor!

I had recently gone to India and Magic Earth and Organic Maps both had pretty weak coverage. Outside major cities, even roads aren’t mapped. Works better in Europe and US imo.

Getting a Pixel 7 and installing GrapheneOS on it was another option but I just don’t like the low performant and inefficient Tensor G2 chip. 8+ Gen 1 is an excellent chip, both in terms of power and efficiency.

My experience: I got a Nothing Phone 2 recently and decided to degoogle it. Using ADB commands, I removed every google app from my phone, from the Dialer all the way up to the PlayStore, apart from just 2: Play Services and Maps. Both work fine without a Google account. I did take away all permissions of Play Services and it still works fine. Without this app, you will stop getting notifications from most of your apps so it is necessary.

Open source alternatives that I turned towards:

1. Google Dialer -> Simple Dialer
2. Google Contacts -> Simple Contacts
3. Google Photos -> Simple Gallery Pro
4. Google Play Store -> Aurora Store and Droid-ify
5. Google Messenger -> QKSMS
6. Google Calendar -> Proton Calendar
7. Google Drive -> Proton Drive
8. Google Chrome -> Mozilla Firefox
9. Youtube -> Youtube ReVanced (Not FOSS, I use a throwaway account here with Vanced Microg)
10. Google Translate -> Translate YOU
11. Google Files -> Material Files
12. Google Docs/Slides/Sheet -> Collabora Office
13. GMail -> Proton Mail
14. GBoard -> OpenBoard fork with glide typing

Everything works fine :)

+1 to Mattermost. It’s like having an open source Slack which can be self-hosted. There are a number of companies that use it including NASA and Samsung.

Same thing different branding. Also there’s GS Connect for Gnome which is again the same.

Damn 20 years?! That’s a commendable vouch for Brother.

Never buying HP printers again, not after I got a Brother one last year. It works OOTB even with linux and there’s no such lockdown bullshit.

KDE connect is pretty good for that. May not be as fast though.

I had done the same. Was on DDG for around 2 years but shifted to Brave search recently. Results are almost on par with DDG I’d say but the main highlight for me is their AI summarizer. Pretty accurate and often I don’t even have to visit any website. Also like their discussions tab.