If it turns out to be the former, I don’t blame them.

• Not every <input type="text"> is suitable for political opinions.
• Political opinions are like assholes: we all have them, they all stink, we all think our own doesn’t stink, and the world is a better place when everyone doesn’t have them on constant display.
• People who inject politics into everything are generally insufferable and there’s a reason major communities have rules prohibiting politics.

Personally, I love that layout.

I’m always at a loss for what to put up as wall decorations, and I hate rats nests of cables. Win-win!

Trash? None.

Clutter / work-in-progress: No comment.

Gonna be a bit nippley this weekend.

Not really about myself but in general: “Not dwelling” on things doesn’t mean ignoring them.

That is what subscriptions and the local timeline are for. The “all” should show whatever is getting the most attention.

“All” is what new users typically see. Or see immediately after clicking from “Local” if that’s what the instance is set to default to. New users do not have any subscriptions, and if they’re just browsing as guest, they literally can’t subscribe or do any kind of curation.

First impressions are important. Someone comes here brand new and the first impression is typically that of an angry mob.

So to get a bigger userbase, the “default, guest experience” needs to provide a good first impression. This…preachy/angry/politics/news flood is highly likely to just turn them away and not even bother trying to curate to find the good bits.

Ooh, nice. +1 for your admin team. Maybe my instance would consider doing something similar. It is a topic-based instance after all.

Less politics, less news, less “I’m mad about this so you should be mad about it too” rage posting/armchair activism, less “ist’s and ism’s”. Less preachy shit about capitalism bad, communism good (or maybe .ml should just be blocked by default?). Less bitching about Reddit (I swear, I’ve heard less about friends’ exes than some people bitch about Reddit here). Less “hurr durr power tripping mods” circlejerking.

More content about cool stuff, hobbies, amazing feats, movies, books, TV shows, etc.

This place has much of the latter but it’s completely overshadowed by the former to the point you have to almost dig for it. Even blocking the overt news, politics, and political “humor” communities, it still seeps in to comics and memes and unrelated communities.

There’s still plenty of good in this world, but you’d never know it from looking at what’s always topping the feed here.

And a new user checking this place out is going to be immediately hit in the face with all of the former and probably not even see the latter.

Yeah, I’ve got all those turned off. Actually, they came disabled by default (one of the OS customizations Minimal does in their base image). I usually turn those to at least .5x on my other phones to make things feel faster, lol, but in this case, they were already off.

But there’s still subtle transitions and some animations that aren’t affected by that. One of the latter is the animations on the lock screen when you’re entering your pin. Those have to be disabled separately in the security settings (and weren’t disabled by default by Minimal).

Quite possibly. I don’t think I have anything running below A11 that still functions so that’s been my baseline. Most recent was my OP3 that had LineageOS’s A9 but the battery finally gave up the ghost a few months ago.

Yep, to all of that.

disable that annoying “you haven’t used those apps in a while so permissions were removed” thigny

AFAIK, you can only do that on an app-by-app basis.

Settings -> Apps -> {App} -> Permissions -> Pause app activity if unused

That’s on Android 14, so YMMV if they took that away or made it worse since then.

AFAIK, it’s just the base Android UI because it’s the same in LineageOS and vanilla builds.

• The quick actions have gone to hell. There’s nothing quick about them anymore and customizing them is even worse than it already was.
• Every UI element is oversized and seems made for the hot doggiest of hotdog fingers
• The organization of the settings, especially the network/mobile settings, somehow makes even less sense than before
• You can’t configure a wifi profile without a gateway. God forbid I want to do anything on a local network.
• You can’t disable the connectivity checker and Android treats not being able to reach Google with not having internet. And if there’s no internet, you have about 5 seconds to catch the prompt to stay connected otherwise it’ll disconnect.
• Even if you do catch the prompt to stay connected to the no-internet wifi, the DNS resolver will not use its DNS server unless you’re in airplane mode. I’ve got a RasPi-based “internet in a box” mobile server that’s useless when accessing it via my phone (unless in airplane mode) because I had the sheer audacity to configure it to use proper DNS hostnames and SSL certs.
• The wallpaper / background config is just awful nowadays. I don’t know if that’s “Material You” or what, but just let me pick an image or no image or a solid color. Don’t present 3 different apps to handle changing the background, two of which do nothing.
• On the Google side, they’re shoving more Gemini shit in
• Now Google is gatekeeping even the apps you want to sideload
• Even with animations disabled, there’s still too many animations/transitions. I’m using an e-ink phone and this alone just destroys the experience.
• Gesture navigation is just terrible but at least you can dig through the settings to re-enable 3 button nav
• A litany of other small gripes

Apparently I said “Joe Dirt” sometime earlier in my life and my wish came true.

Every other post being “Promoted” bullshit, the slow-ass web UI, my former favorite app no longer working, and the bloated and track-y first party app. I was never a fan of “old reddit UI” , so that wasn’t a crutch like it was for others.

The humidity and enclosed space.

In environments where there is a high level of humidity, odor molecules can remain in the air for longer and spread out less. Combine that with the closed space and they linger a lot longer.

I remember the individual was frustrated because without the app, you couldn’t modify anything on the device…which seems very bad.

Sadly, that’s how this one is but the defaults are sane enough that you could get by without it. I didn’t buy it for the features that need the cloud service, so if those are unavailable, that was fine for my use case. The consolation is that configuring it can all be done with just the app over Bluetooth.

I’m hoping someone reverse engineers the Bluetooth protocol. I did a HCI dump while it was connecting and streaming data, but I can’t make the slightest bit of sense of it.

Literally that one, but I have the Gen 2 version.

Smartphone is not necessarily required, but if you want to change any of the settings (AC charge rate, maximum discharge depth, etc), you’ll need to use the app. You can use the app to connect to it via bluetooth directly. That said, it’s possible to use it without any app at all with the default settings and it works fine.

The app tries to steer you toward making an Anker account and connecting the unit to wifi (some features like WeatherGuard, time of use charging, etc require that) but you can use it without an account and connect locally via bluetooth. That’s how I do it, so no issues with a cloud connection as it’s not even using it. Though I did complain to support about how the app treats that use case as a second-class citizen. (When you open the app, it always lands you on the signup/login page and you have to click “Skip” in tiny text at the bottom to use the app locally via BT). The app also nags you that Google Play Services is required but it works fine without it.

I do use the app for remote monitoring and once to set the max discharge depth from 1% to 15% but otherwise it works fine standalone. The only thing making me slightly consider setting up the cloud connection is the HomeAssistant integration; there’s a module to tie it into HA, but it uses the cloud API rather than connecting over bluetooth :(

Locally, there’s nothing (not even scammers). I got 4x200 watt panels from Amazon and am using those with an Anker Solix C1000.

For the expansion in the spring, I’m probably going to order more of the same PV panels. For the combo inverter/charger, I’m looking at the ones from SungoldPower currently as well as a few others. Battery is still in the research phase, but the inverter can auto switch between solar and utility without the battery.

The wiring I can handle but will probably have an electrician do the wiring from my main breaker to the subpanel that’s fed from the solar inverter (grid tie is too caught up in expensive red tape to bother with here).

Not really an event, but I installed a small trial solar setup (800W with 1 kWh battery) this past autumn that I am quite pleased with (despite the utter lack of sun since November).

In the spring, I’m planning to expand that to something like a ~7 KW solar array, 10 KW inverter/charger, and hopefully around 16 kWh of battery.

Screw you, AEP and my rate nearly doubling year over year