I did pick the DBrand Kill Switch case (including. skin and screen protector) for both me and my partner. It was on the pricer side, but I’m pretty happy with it. Feels quite good to hold and certainly rugged enough to protect it. The skins also stop us from getting each others decks mixed up.

As for a dock, I picked up the Anker one and it’s alright. Would have preferred the official one, but everywhere was charging a hefty price for importing it.

I already had a hefty battery pack for travelling. Haven’t needed it much myself, but my partner recently made good use of it for an international flight.

I bought some gray imports a couple of months ago. Cost me about $100 more than Valve’s official AU prices, for the 1TB OLED.

My partner and I have been playing them both pretty much constantly since then. Very happy with them.

I’ve got a few old PCI cards around somewhere. I should pull one of them out and give them a try at this.

I’d say it’s worth doing this regardless to help determine if it’s an application or system issue causing them not to go off.

It’s a good game. Just don’t take the content warning at the start lightly. I’ve tried to finish it twice but haven’t been able to get more than a couple of hours in.

My bonus just came in today. Was planning to order one of these this week. Not sure of I’ll wait to see what’s happening at PAX. All they’ve said so far is that Steam will be there.

It’s a bit similar. However this goes a bit further than I understand those projects do. They’re creating a game like the original. With this decompilation project, if you use the N64 compiler you will get a ROM which is 100% identical to the original.

The ROM in this case is only used for game assets, like maps, models, and textures. All the game logic in native code. This allows is to be easily modified to add in new features without trying to hack it into a 20 year old game/console.

I haven’t played it properly either. But there’s a community mod called Deus Ex Revision (It’s also on Steam). Which improves some of the graphics, and looks to include a bunch of QoL features.

https://www.moddb.com/mods/deus-ex-revision

It’s not that it’s closed, it’s more that none of the exiting email protocols support a server which can’t read your email (as it’s all encrypted). They do offer Proton Bridge which you can run locally which will handle all the decryption and local mail clients can talk to that as the would any other mail server.

I don’t know off hand if it supports calendar syncing though.

Even if it doesn’t look as good, it’ll hopefully include some better APIs that extensions can utilise to improve their experience. E.g. hide the native tabs.

I believe Steve has said that he hates the title/thumbnails too. But Google’s algorithms heavily incentives them, so he reluctantly uses them while maintaining the good quality content.

Droid-ify can auto update apps in the background with root. I’m running it on GrapheneOS without root and it’s doing it just fine.

FYI for anyone interested. Immich is a open source, self hosted system for photos/videos like Google Photos. It uses machine learning locally for facial and general image recognition.

I’ve used it quite a bit recently. It makes it really easy to submit data in small amounts. I usually have it open while walking my dog and enter in basic things as I go. I’ve completed about 1500 quests so far with it.

I wouldn’t be surprised if they made a torrent for it. They probably want a simple download button for the less technically inclined too.

This is what I’ve done too. I’ve tried a bunch of other keyboards from F-Droid, but haven’t been 100% happy with any of them. So I’m using GBoard still with all network permissions disabled.

It’s mostly a power efficiency thing. Before push notifications were the norm, most apps used a polling method. They had the application send a request every X seconds asking “anything new”. There wasn’t coordination between apps, so even every app checked once every 30s, it likely wouldn’t be on the same 30s. This caused the device to wake up a lot and never let it switch into low power mode.

A push notifications system like FCM or UnifiedPush means only a single application needs to run in the background. It maintains a persistent connection to the push notification service and waits for a message. When it receives one it wakes up the relevant app and passes it the details.

The issue lies with Google’s FCM (Firebase Cloud Messaging) system, so it’s not something GrapheneOS can really fix. As far as I know FCM doesn’t offer a way to encrypt notification content. Some apps like Signal work around this by instead of sending the message content, they send a little “wake up” notification. This tells Signal on your phone to wake up and it goes and retrieves the new message.

If you don’t install Google Play Services, you won’t be impacted. But you’ll also not get notifications for most applications. There is an alternative push notification system called UnifiedPush which allows you to choose any server to handle your notifications (and even self host it). But it does require both the service and the app to support it, so it’s not very wide spread yet.