I agree. I use Proton and I have exactly one service which supports GPG. It’s a cherry on top but it’s not all that useful.

The big thing is to use a trustworthy service that you pay for. It’s not bulletproof but at least the incentive is there to keep your email private and away from advertisers.

Ah, it might be a regional thing. In the UK, the cheapest Vitamix is almost £400 where the Magimix was about £200 at the time. They might be pretty comparable but the prices don’t quite work out the same here.

Totally agree though, I was getting through a £50-75 blender each year for really silly breakages with no spares available.

A decent blender. Not anything industrial like a Vitamix, it’s a Magimix which was about half as much but still durable and has replaceable parts. It’s fine for what I need and is lasting much longer than the pile of crap I had before.

Vacuum pack bags for clothes is another one. I like to keep my wardrobe seasonal but I don’t have much space, so packing it down helps.

Also anything reusable: PTFE/silicone baking sheets, rechargeable batteries, reloadable floss handles. All of these have saved recurring purchases, money over time and reduced waste (which made me feel good.)

Funny, that’s in line with the $1 a year WhatsApp was going to charge.

Sounds like just $5 will pay for me and 4 others, so that’s nice.

Have you seen the Star64?

Nice try, boss.

Yeah, I think that comes from the developer having high standards for hardware security. The effort put in is a waste if the hardware fails. I would have thought Samsung would have been suitable too, though.

What about /e/OS or plain old degoogled Lineage? I like it as a phone OS, it’s just a shame the app ecosystem is so dependent on Google’s services.

Just wanted to add a bit about Proton since you mentioned it and I use it quite heavily.

Pros:

• All-in-one platform for storage, mail, VPN, password manager and calendar. Usually works out cheaper than multiple providers.
• E-mail aliases built-in to the password manager makes it a breeze to manage. (Tutanota also supports aliases.)
• Personally, I think the UI is more polished. Not important for privacy but it’s a plus for the non tech-savvy.

Cons:

• All-in-one platform. I’m acutely aware that I’m going to have a headache if Proton is enshittified.
• If you’re not looking for all of the products they offer, it’s just expensive. Tutanota is cheaper for e-mail alone.
• The Drive app needs improvement. Migrating my files was painful and I want automatic Camera uploads. You might be okay with the Windows desktop app.
• The Calendar app has issues when not connected to the internet.
• The password manager doesn’t have a desktop application and managing it through the browser extension or app isn’t great.
• No subject-line encryption support (and other PGP interoperability issues on the free version) but… unfortunately, I don’t get many PGP encrypted e-mails anyway.

Otherwise these two are largely like-for-like for e-mail. There’s no benefit to Proton being hosted in Switzerland and I didn’t move to be warrant-proof or anything silly. The idea is really just moving emails away from an advertising company and paying for a quality service.

I need to get into NixOS but I have a similar variation on servers: ansible for state of systems, Borg + Borgbase for data (kept in /srv) and code (including ansible) are in Git.

The separation between data and state is really great. You want to be able to go from a base install and only bring in everything which makes your setup different.

I don’t even mind the shortened arguments too much, though it doesn’t help. It’s more that every example seems to smush them together into a string of letters.

I would have found

tar -x -f pics.tar ./pics

to be clearer when I was learning. There’s plenty of commands which allow combining flags but every tar tutorial seems to do it from the beginning.

If we can travel faster than the trolley, we could adjust all switches with one person who continues to travel to the next junction before the trolley arrives!