This has nothing to do with defense anymore – we should be ashamed that we don’t speak out against it far louder…
Gadgetbridge 0.85.0 is very very nice…
First I only read about it in their blog, but today I checked. And although my fitness tracker (Xiaomi Band 8) doesn’t have GPS built-in, it can still get it from a compatible phone, like my Pixel 6a with OsmAnd+ installed. So now you can see the workouts which contain GPX data directly in Gadgetbridge, like here:
And, like also described on their blog, if you click the picture you’ll get it bigger and zoomable, like this:
And you get all of this *without* sending anything to either Google, or to Xiaomi, which is very cool indeed.
Our daughter “drowned” her Mi Band 8 in the Mediterranean – it doesn’t come back alive after being in salt water, so we ordered a 9 Pro for her, which has built-in GPS. Should be even easier then, either with the Mi App, or better – and like shown here – using Gadgetbridge. She has that on her phone already, just waiting for the device which should arrive soon.
So bravo to the Gadgetbridge team – you guys & girls are great! Thanks!
Also thank you for everyone who might be reading this. Like always.
Klartext, finally
The German AfD – this time the party as a whole entity – is now considered “gesichert rechtsextremistisch”, which means without leaving any further doubt, right extremistic:
This took too much time in my opinion – it was too obvious in case you ever heard them rant against minorities. And thanks God, their voters are a minority themselves! Although, in my opinion, the sheer number of those is frightening as well, and a reason for what we call “Fremdschämen” (something like “cringeworthy”, or better: not wanting to be identified with such a group).
And “Klartext reden” means to not paint things more positive than they actually are… it’s a bit stronger than the translation into “plain text”.
Maybe we should really consider to finally forbid that party. Out of Bundestag with them, that would make plenary sessions much quieter, and a lot more enjoyable to listen to. You’d have my vote for this…
See also in The Guardian, who can explain it in English much better than I could.
A great Linux laptop
Michael Larabel writes about the newest Framework 13 with AMD Ryzen AI 300 “Strix Point” CPUs. Thanks for letting us know about it, Michael!
About cycling, walking, and photographing
Du Pham has a nice essay which she calls a declaration of love to her bicycle (in German, in case you understand that). In it, she describes the happiness she feels on her daily commute of 3 kilometers, or the visiting of her mum’s, which are 72 km – that’s more than your average Joe would cycle, so brava to her! I also love my (non-electrical) steel bike, and I should use it more often indeed.
In the same medium, Alke Wierth writes about walking, and about her difficulties of doing it. She thinks that the metaphorical meaning of someone “being gone”, either physically or mentally, might influence her and be the cause of it, but is also mentioning that she’s a smoker. I was, too, until August of 2017, and according to my doc that was the main reason of developing an atherosclerosis, my known cause of pain while walking. I didn’t have an operation, but early last year started to count my steps with one of these little fitness trackers, and I don’t want to brag about it, but that little thing does keep me motivated – and I take the time to walk, and so to care a bit of myself.
While I was still working, I used to walk with a colleague during our lunch breaks, until I became a really much slower walker than him, so I was always asking for a cigarette break, or for a short stop to take a photograph – signs of developing pAVK, or as we call it in German, “Schaufensterkrankheit”. You ask for breaks to window-shop, so to say.
A propos photographing: Mike Johnston has a nice article featuring Paloma Dooley who is photographing landscapes in and around L.A. using an 8 by 10 inch film camera. That is not a camera which you could carry around for excuses, and 50 dollars per “shot” also means that you wouldn’t take as many – she says that sometimes she takes two photographs in a month. But it’s still a nice article and video about her, and it also pays to look at her web page. I would love to see one of her contact prints, but at 100$ each, couldn’t afford it.
As always, thanks for reading.
Bunch of fools…
… who don’t even see the risks they cause, and who are constantly sawing the branch they’re sitting upon, as we say in German…
Reminds me of a song of which Mitchie said it was from Homer Simpson. Something like “Look at all these idiots – what a bunch of morons!” 🙁
Edit: found it:
So it was Mr. Burns who was singing the Blues about an office full of morons, and a planet full of fools. I guess that’s us all, aren’t we?
Never trust only one source
While heise.de praises a TV from LG as the best buy ever, arstechnica tells more of the real story, namely that our TVs now also spy on us. Reminds me of what my grandma said about her parents – they believed they had to dress properly when sitting in front of a TV, because “they” could see us, too…
And while we all were chuckling with our grandma about this, it seems that times have moved on, and while we don’t (yet) have that Orwellian “Big Brother”, we now seem to have many “Little Brothers” in all of these big global tech companies – no matter where they’re from (like in the case of LG and Samsung, South Korea).
And no, switching off both LAN and WLAN from your “smart” TV is no option, since that would cut off all streaming to and from the device as wll, which would mean: no “Mediatheken“, and no more content even from your computer to the TV. So I want my TV to be as dumb as possible; thanks.
Like always, thanks for reading.
In English *and* (mostly) in German: IT News
We have to get a bit more independent from Big Tech IT – now everyone seems to agree. The German Heise Verlag, which thankfully now produce most of their content in both German *and* in English, reports about Palantir and openCode for instance, which deal with that topic. I’ve recently seen a two-hour-long discussion and expert hearing about it, which I can recommend in case you understand German and have those two hours for the topic. The Linke party even invited an expert from FSFE, the Free Software Foundation Europe (.org), who deal with that since long before someone started a topic like #UnplugTrump on Mastodon.
Another more or less important topic from IT: Google just stopped support for Android 12, see the heise topic here, so think about changing your OS which is mentioned in the comments – or better, get something like GrapheneOS on a still supported device. I’m still happy with that on my Pixel 6a as long as it will be supported; too bad that I can’t change to the now deceased DivestOS after that period…
As always, thanks for reading.
Update, same day:
Seems like the EU Commission is extra careful regarding the US by now – and maybe we all should be.
MAGA, as I read somewhere, means:
15 months in, the Xiaomi Smart Band 8 battery is still impressive
It easily holds enough power for more than 2 weeks – so I recharge it when I see some 30-40%. See here in Gadgetbridge:
Screenshot is from my phone (Google Pixel 6a running on GrapheneOS) while charging my little step counter. Still very happy with it.
As always, thanks for reading.