• YouTube Premium
• Netflix
• Torguard VPN
• Google One for storage

That’s about it. I don’t use ChatGPT often enough to sub. I sometimes subscribe to Canva Pro if I have a project ongoing.

I will be the devil’s advocate here and say that having the 8 Gb ram config on their cheapest machines (MBA, Mac Mini) is perfectly fine, but having it as the base config on the MBP is borderline false advertising.

I have a Poco X5 5G which was the cheapest phone they had with a headphone jack and 5G support. I use it daily with my wired IEMs. The sound quality is better and I don’t have to worry about battery for long listening sessions. I do have a Soundcore Liberty 4NC for calls though. It gets pretty awkward using wired IEMs for calls nowadays.

I use Firefox exclusively on Desktop and Brave exclusively on mobile. Firefox on Mobile still has performance issues for me.

I would be excited except it’s 2023 and Google has not made it available in my country (Indonesia), with the 4th biggest population in the world. This is a country where over 80 percent of the population uses Android phones. It seems Google is just not that serious in trying to sell us phones.

As I said in an earlier post, better get out now and migrate while the communities are still intact rather than slowly bleeding out due to these policies. There is going to be one kind of content on Reddit and that’s the ad-friendly, corporate supported kind.

It’s probably gonna turn subscription based. As in, you have to subscribe to not only send Thank-Yous but also receive them. What Reddit wants are paying customers for their IPO, not “users”.

I basically quit Reddit cold turkey. Rather than watch the slow, sad decline of its communities by going along with Reddit management, I’d advocate them to make the transition to the Fediverse now rather than later. The /retrogaming/ community (I need to drop the /r/ for obvious reasons) did this and is doing quite well for itself on Lemmy and Mastodon.

I also have a S20 FE and can attest to the bloatware they install with each software update.

Samsung is pretty much notorious for this, especially in developing countries where they bundle in every third-party service, PayLater app, shitty mobile game, etc alongside a new device. The only reason they are seen as preferable is that other companies are doing worse (see: Xiaomi).

No joke, the answer is for her to stop watching YouTube. I drastically reduced my YouTube consumption from like multiple hours a day to max 30 minutes. The algorithm takes into account how many hours you’ve watched per day.

So far:

• Aeropress. Extremely convenient, easily replicable coffee making. I use a Timemore C2 grinder with it, and buy coffee from local roasters.
• Nintendo Switch. I’ve played more games on it than any other console, it’s just so convenient.
• Zojirushi Rice Cooker. Best investment into daily living I’ve ever made. It makes the best rice, bar none.

Yes, and Bitwarden. Strong master password, with 2FA, and randomly generated passwords for the rest. For deeply personal apps such as banking I do have another localized system though. I moved on from LastPass and never looked back.

It’s funny that many small FOSS apps get flak and are hated on because of minor changes to their privacy policy, and then Meta/Facebook basically says they own your entire presence online when you use their app, it’s seen as meh.