There are cameras and physical buttons that you might want to use on the phone, and the fold might make it nicer to hold in one orientation. Also, the limitation exists because splitting the apps across the shorter side can make very awkward layouts, at least on small phone screens - no such problem with a square. I see no reason not to have the option of both layouts no matter its physical orientation.

I’ve never used a foldable though, so take my opinion with a grain of salt.

Yeah, even the TLDR makes it sound more like Qualcomm is yielding to the pressure from OEMs who want to be able to offer longer updates

Right, now get a borderline computer-illiterate person to connect to your network, ensure their firewall isn’t misconfigured to block all incoming traffic (with TeamViewer, this configuration would still work because the device just connects to the TV server) and open and set up a completely separate screen sharing program.

I know none of these steps are difficult if you have any idea what you’re doing, but I’ve met plenty of people who would most likely need assistance going through the motions. Funnily enough, the best way to do it remotely would probably be to get them to install TeamViewer to then set this up for them remotely.

By the way, as far as networking goes, Tailscale does the same thing TeamViewer does, just for a VPN instead of a screen sharing application - it will try to do all the NAT punchthrough techniques and IPv6 connection and fall back on tunneling through relay servers if all else fails. It’s not any more of a direct connection than TV.

Convenience (after you install it, all you have to do is enter the code and you’re connected, no other setup required), familiarity (it’s the default name people will think of or find if they want remote access - that alone means they can get away with pushing their users slightly more) and - IMHO most importantly - connectivity: if two computers can connect to the TeamViewer servers, they will be able to connect to each other.

That’s huge in the world of broken Internet where peer to peer networking feels like rocket science - pretty much every consumer device will be sitting behind a NAT, which means “just connecting” is not possible. You can set up port forwarding (either manually or automatically using UPnP, which is its own bag of problems), or you can use IPv6 (which appears to be currently available to roughly 40% users globally; to use it, both sides need to have functional IPv6), or you can try various NAT traversal techniques (which only work with certain kinds of NAT and always require a coordinating server to pull off - this is one of the functions provided by TeamViewer servers). Oh, and if you’re behind CGNAT (a kind of NAT used by internet providers; apparently it’s moderately common), then neither port forwarding or NAT traversal are possible. So if both sides are behind CGNAT and at least one doesn’t have IPv6, establishing a direct link is impossible.

With a relay server (like TeamViewer provides), you don’t have to worry about being unable to connect - it will try to get you a direct link, but if that fails, it will just act as a tunnel and pass the data between both devices.

Sure, you can self host all this, but that takes time and effort to do right. And if your ISP happens to use CGNAT, that means renting a VPS because you can’t host it at home. With TeamViewer, you’re paying for someone else to worry about all that (and pay for the servers that coordinate NAT traversal and relay data, and their internet bandwidth, neither of which is free).

As others said, configure your browser to store as few cookies as you can tolerate (because some actually useful stuff will break without them) and forget about these banners.

Although I do enjoy the ones that have actual usable toggles for “legitimate interests” - how nice of them, giving me an option to disable even cookies they can legally store with just a notice, and definitely not just hiding non-essential cookies into a vaguely defined category.

So I always go through the list and disable them one by one. It does nothing but waste my time, but I do it out of spite. Oh, and when I feel like really wasting my time, I send a bug report to whatever support email I can find on the site, about how the cookie banner accidentally let me disable essential cookies and should probably be fixed.

Are you sure you didn’t set DNS directly on some/all of your devices? Because in that case they won’t care about the router settings and will use whatever you set them to.

Also as the other commenter said, DNS changes might not propagate to other devices on the network until the next time they connect - a reboot or unplugging the cable from your computer for a few seconds is a dirty but pretty OS agnostic way to do that.

Oh sorry, I understood your comment as saying that you couldn’t get weather info with GadgetBridge because of its somewhat unique architecture. If you’re using a different companion app then apps for GadgetBridge probably won’t work.

Also I’m not familiar with Pebble, I’m just assuming it works similarly to other GadgetBridge-supported watches / bands like the Mi Band I use.

GadgetBridge is not really against supporting online-only functions, it just can’t be part of the main app. Weather Providers is what you’re looking for.

You get a special unique(?) cryptographic token

I might be nitpicking, but IMHO it is perfectly reasonable to read this as questioning whether the token itself is unique, which is how I read it. The idea of non-unique NFTs then made me write a short quip about it, that’s all.

unique(?)

Now introducing: fungible NFTs

It’s somewhat hidden if you don’t know where to look. You have to switch to Night sight mode, turn on astrophotography in the settings, and then set the phone down on a stable surface. After a few seconds without any movement, the capture button will change from moon to three stars and pressing it will start the 4 minute capture.

The astrophotography mode on Pixels (the only way to get 4 min exposure in the default camera app) works by taking quite a few photos with shorter exposures and then matching them up in post processing.

You even get a short animation at the end where every captured photo gets processed using the rest, so you can see stars moving around during the capture.

Mandatory XKCD

Source for alt-text

I’m pretty sure all of those entries are in the same /12 network - 172.16.0.0/12. Apparently there’s nothing wrong with it, but I think you can significantly simplify that config by just removing all the extra ones

Only if you consider ROMs like LineageOS to be stock Android and ignore the many things they do to make the user’s life easier.

AOSP never had internet access as a toggleable permission, and it never will as long as Google is calling the shots and wants ads to work the way they currently do.

Because of the built-in SSD, I could also sell the external SSD and buy an 8-12tb HDD instead.

If you’re going for a 3.5" HDD, then you’ll most likely have to look for a bit bigger form factor than TinyMiniMicro (Lenovo Tiny / HP Mini / Dell Micro series) - these computers can’t fit a 3.5" HDD.

If size isn’t a major concern, I’d go for the SFF variants of these computers - they are often cheaper than minis for same specs, but probably have a bit larger idle power draw and take up more space. As a bonus upside, you get some small PCIe slots in these computers, so yay for expansions.

Letting you disable or limit internet access to apps would go pretty strongly against Google’s interests - how would they get their ad money if half the users were running most apps offline?

Some vendors provide a way to do this (Xiaomi has an internet access toggle per app, or at least it did in the KitKat era), but it’s never making its way into stock Android until Google integrates AdMob into the system.

Cool, so it’s like two years ago

Oh…

Oh no

It is, and it’s the reason Pixel 6 and 7 series had so many issues with poor battery life and weak modem. Although it appears that the third generation Tensor CPUs in Pixel 8 have major improvements on both of these pain points.

Still, that probably brings Pixel 8 only to the cheap-ish midrange standard when it comes to cell signal, as the Pixel 7 phones were atrocious and 6s were apparently even worse.

On the other hand, it’s also worth noting that newer RAM generations are less and less susceptible to this kind of attack. Not because of any countermeasures, they just lose the data without constant refreshing much quicker even when chilled / frozen, so the attack becomes impractical.

So from DDR4 up, you’re probably safe.