BenchpressMuyDebil

I post this knowing the article naively hopeful but it's also food for thought. With the recent drama where Google stopped publishing device-specific AOSP code - thus making maintaining custom ROMs more difficult - what will more tech-knowledgeable people do if Android is enshittified further?

Will "phone ludditism" - switching to dumbphone with a simple OS like Mocor RTOS, S30+, ThreadX etc. be the answer for some of them? They're deGoogled out of the factory. I switched to a dumbphone as my main phone, but I still keep an Android smartphone at home for online banking. I also take the smartphone with me if I know I'll need a hotspot or a map. I use the smartphone like a PDA, or a terminal to the Android ecosystem.

It's also questionable whether "Europe is leading in the dumbphone sector". Sure we have HMD, Doro, Crosscall, Gigaset (sold to South Koreans), MaxKom or myPhone but there are so many other potentially bigger companies like TCL or Itel. One thing is for sure - in the dumbphone sector and considering how simple those devices are, Europe at least stands a fighting chance. Whether somebody will become a dumbphone martyr in order to exist in this Europe-friendly sector is another thing.

[...] Norway's competition authority fined Coop, Rema 1000, and NorgesGruppen a combined €420 million [...]

[..] the companies had been using "price hunters" to scan and monitor prices in one another's shops. Instead of competing, they adjusted their prices to match, keeping them high and predictable.

Together, these three chains control 95% of the grocery market in Norway,

One of the few comparable examples is Poland, where Biedronka and Lidl together hold around 73% of the market.

Coop, Rema 1000, and NorgesGruppen have all appealed their respective fines, meaning they remain unpaid. The authorities have asked the companies to cease their use of price hunters, but as stated by the head of NorgesGruppen, they have no plans to do so.

Primary sources are at the bottom of the article.

Obligatory Tylko jedno w głowie mam aka "dancing polish cow"

Primary sources are on the bottom of the linked article and throughout the links in the article itself.

European Correspondent is a non-profit journalist organization most widely known for their e-mail newsletter summarizing events and topics from/regarding Europe.

Highlights (emphasis by me):

the European Commission will now support The European Correspondent with a grant of 2.16 million euros over the next 24 months

[...] The deal is structured so that we maintain full editorial independence, and we can bring our journalism to a broader public. The biggest change: We're expanding into six more languages.

[...] Starting in November, you can read The European Correspondent in German, and in 2026, we're launching French, Spanish, Italian, Polish, and Ukrainian editions.

[...] we'll relaunch our website, [...] we will add an archive with a search function [...]

We will produce daily vertical videos, revamp our social media, and keep visualising data. There's even a secret project we're not ready to talk about yet.

I'm not a fan of the "produce daily vertical videos" idea as up until now they were this low-dopamine newsletter which produced only text which I liked. But well, they'll keep doing that even if there's vertical videos alongside.

I've been subscribed with my e-mail address for a few months now and I really enjoy it. I know that there are people which feel as if they don't know what's happening in Europe and would like to change that, and this is a good way.

They have two newsletters: European Affairs (weekly) and The Continent (weekly) and a customized per-country/region newsletter

The best way to subscribe is through https://www.europeancorrespondent.com/select because it lets you pick individual countries from the regions they write about ("Do you want round-ups on specific countries?" radio button)

If that's too overwhelming you can just put your e-mail in https://www.europeancorrespondent.com/ and after a few days the e-mails will try to guide you to customize your sub

I used to donate to them for a while but then I changed my credit card and didn't re-subscribe, but I see that they now support SEPA Debit as a donation option through their donation service Donorbox. Before they just accepted payment cards from our American overlords VISA/Mastercard

The posts on both the BuyInEU communities seem pretty serious lately, but after reading latest Derek Guy's (dieworkwear.com) "Excited to Wear This Spring" post, I found Filt - the French net shopping bag manufacturer that makes their bags (and other stuff) in France

https://www.filt1860.fr/en/9-net-shopping-bag

Click the yellow "+" to open the DNS IPs for IPv4/v6/DoH/DoT

e.g.

You may already know this from Quad9, but DNS4EU is an European Commission initiative

"Ringer" means that the t-shirt's body is a different color than the elastic on the cuffs of the armholes and on the collar. e.g. the t-shirt body is white, but the cuffs and collar are navy. Sometimes the words "contrast trims" or "contrast piping" are used.

Here are some brands I found:

I really like the Velour Garments one because it's 300gsm and made in Spain but it's out of stock. Considering all the options I'm now leaning towards fruit of the loom, but I know it's not going to be very well made, since it's loom. I'll maybe get one from them and then keep looking

Does anyone know any other options? The ones I listed are all t-shirts, but I wasn't able to find a ringer tanktop anywhere.

I've been researching dumbphones lately and wanted to share about the developments I've learned. I'll be writing from an European perspective. I am omitting Android since I wasn't interested in it. Android Go is discontinued, if you care.

CloudFone

This is an addon to the barebones OS manufacturers add to their phones. Such OS' are e.g. HMD (formely Nokia) S30+ or other Mocor RTOS based systtems. This addon is an "app" within the OS that's a browser which offloads the rendering to another server. It works similar to the Puffin browser.

The advantage here is that the underlying browser engine is ran and updated on the server. This helps avoid the KaiOS situation: KaiOS v2 (the last version in Europe) uses Firefox 48 (current version is 137). CloudFone could be running the latest stable Chromium even on an old device, as long as the rendering server is updated to that version. The remote server rendering is obviously more powerful than what the little feature phone can normally do.

You can see how it works here: https://youtu.be/coaLnA7Twl4?t=295

The disadvantage here is that those apps do not work offline - you need to connect to the server over the Internet to render them. If the underyling rendering server is ever shut down, you lose all your apps and your phone is back to being a dumb-dumbphone. It seems like you don't have control over what apps are available and which are not. These could be rug-pulled at any moment. There are some rumors on /r/dumbphones about a WhatsApp CloudFone app which would be big. Some of the apps are something you wouldn't want on a dumbphone, like tiktok or yt shorts.

The trick is that the firmware versions with CloudFone enabled are only offered to phones in India. The only way to get these firmware versions is to download a custom firmware from the Russian 4pda.to forums. This custom firmware seems to be available for Nokia 3210 4G 2024 or Nokia 220 4G. A more powerful option would be HMD 110 4G 2024 since it has 128 MB RAM, but I couldn't find the CloudFone enabled firmware for it.

I get that this approach is not acceptable to the freedom-oriented, tech-savvy demographic on Lemmy, but it looks like this is where the mainstreaim is heading right now.

The downside of the non-KaiOS devices is that they normally don't support WiFi and thus can't serve as a mobile hotspot. There are devices like itel R60+ which can, however, but I have no idea which website to import it from.

KaiOS

The latest KaiOS version on devices sold in Europe is KaiOS v2.5.x. The latest available outside Europe is 3.1 (?). There's supposedly KaiOS v4 in the works. People say it's dead.

KaiOS is just not an European thing - this is balantly obvious if you look at HMD's "Barbie phone" - it uses KaiOS 3.1 in the US version, but in Europe, it uses the basic HMD S30+ OS.

There's a KaiOS jailbreaking community. See https://wiki.bananahackers.net/en/devices for supported devices. Apps you can install with the jailbreak are here: https://store.bananahackers.net/. I've seen an XMPP client and a Matrix one too.

I've been only considering devices with a USB-C port and available in Europe and what I've found is Blackview N1000 (somewhat easily available on Allegro in Poland, has USB-C and is jailbreakable according to bananahackers wiki, but it supposedly resets itself on long +20m phone calls), Gigaset GL7 (USB-C, unknown if jailbreakable, available only if you buy secondhand from someone), myPhone UP smart LTE (USB-C, non jailbreakable), Maxcom MK281 (microusb, not known if jailbreakable, can buy secondhand only). Note that some of those aren't jailbreakable according to the bananahackers table above.

You could also import an US KaiOS v3/v4 (TCL Flip 4 is KaiOS v4, US only) phone, but the overlap in LTE bands is only on band 7 (I think?), meaning it'd only have reception in cities. There's someone that imported an US Nokia 2780 and reports it works in Italy on /r/dumbphones.

KaiOS devices mostly can serve as a mobile hotspot, which is nice.

postmarketOS

Phones that run KaiOS out of the factory normally have 0.5 GB of RAM, meaning they can boot Linux. See https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/Category:Feature_Phone The newest device in this table is the NA Nokia 2780 released in 2022. The feature support tables seems not to support calls.

SoCs

The "Feature phone SoCs" section seems to be gone from the Unisoc website. The Wikipedia SoC Unisoc table lists e.g. T107 but doesn't list the newer T127 or T157 (supports 5G and only ever used on Asian feature phones)

Before today, mailbox.org's 2FA mechanism was unorthodox. In the login screen, you typed in the TOTP in the password field and then added a 4 digit static pin at the end. This got people confused, as it's different than the usual login+password then TOTP. Now it's just like that.

There's also other goodies, like separate passwords for IMAP and SMTP, WebDAV, CardDAV/CalDAV (one password for both), Exchange Sync. Before today, you'd be using your main mailbox.org password for all of the above. Looks like IMAP access is not even possible without creating a separate password https://kb.mailbox.org/en/private/account-article/how-to-use-two-factor-authentication-2fa/

There doesn't seem to be support for the YubiKey TOTP anymore. No passkeys or hardware webauthn either for now.

mailbox.org is based on OpenXchange.

From a post here I realized Bitwarden (the password manager) is an US company. I also noticed when I login into bitwarden, I login into the bitwarden.com domain.

There now seems to be a bitwarden.eu domain too. Did anybody try to migrate their account from the .com (US) to .eu (EU) region?

Is the process really so weird? Do you really have to create a separate .eu account then migrate your passwords by exporting/importing from account to account manually? And then closing your .com account? This also suppsedly involves cancelling your subscription in the US region and rebuying it in the EU one.

I am aware I can use keepass or vaultwarden and self host rather than paying to the US, I just don't trust the resiliency of my own homelab as I am abroad a lot and can't afford for my passwords to be unavailable. So I'm doing this as a half measure

https://bitwarden.com/help/server-geographies/

EDIT: I created a .eu account with the same mail as my .com account, exported an encrypted json from my .com account where I have premium, imported into the new .eu account without a subscription, then wrote to support using https://bitwarden.com/contact/ (sent to billing department) to transfer my subscription. They replied very quickly with an automated e-mail to which I needed to respond "YES MIGRATE MY SUBSCRIPTION - [bunchofnumbers]" and they moved my subscription.

It took like 30 minutes from my initial e-mail to complete the whole process.

I'm currently traveling for months at a time and my homelab has become unreachable to me over VPN due to a unknown complication after a power outage.

Just as a learning experience for all, my mistake was that I set-up my VPN very far down the stack - as a wg-easy app inside TrueNAS SCALE's apps ecosystem. My very important reason for doing it was that way was that wg-easy allows for setting up client devices with a QR code...

Anyway, the NAS is not booting back up nor do the TrueNAS apps. I should've set my VPN up right at the front of the network - on my MikroTik router that also supports Wireguard. The funny thing is I was so happy that my NAS has IPMI and whatnot but now I can't even access it.

For now the NAS is kept powered on from what I know, it just doesn't boot. This should help prevent bitrot until I'm back. All important files are backed up on a 3rd party service.

It's a shame my Jellyfin and Navidrome inaccessible, but I'll live.

Now I'm thinking about buying an UPS so that this doesn't happen in the future. I'd like the UPS to be fanless and rackmount, so that limits me to ~700VA territory.

Devices in my homelab pull about 65W idle and spike to say 150W when everything is booting. ISP modem, router, POE+ switch, AP, NAS. I might add another 20W due to a Lenovo M920q in the future.

I only really care about NUT and graceful shutdown instead of long runtime on battery.

I was thinking about this: https://www.apc.com/us/en/product/SMT750RMI2U/

In my country I can get it with new batteries (no front panel) and a network card for NUT for a total of 180 EUR.

Would that work? Would you be afraid of leaving an UPS (it is kinda like a bomb after all) unattended an leaving your home for 6 months at a time?