Category: gadgets

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I’m walkin’, yes indeed…

It’s now a bit over 2 years since I’ve treated myself with some of these “fitness trackers”, and while first checking about and against this “tracking” part, I’m using Gadgetbridge on my phone to keep all of the data locally (versus in some “cloud”, which means someone else’s computers). Means that on January 9th, 2024 I’ve bought that Xiaomi Mi Band 8, and since January 29th, 2024 I am doing 10.000+ steps a day. Each day. Didn’t miss a single one since then. And so, here’s today’s summary on Gadgetbridge:

8.85 million steps including those few first days with mostly only playing around with the device and software, and 8.72 million if you start counting 713 days ago, counting only those where I reached my self-set goal.

That device can be really recommended btw, and if like me you use it as a step-counter only, it still keeps the battery for about two weeks until it reaches 30% charge. So I charge it each and every 2nd Sunday only, which is perfect for me.

Not interested in sleep, pulse, or any other tracking, but that’s just me…

And like always, thanks for reading.

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Heise about TV sets

Someone at heise seems to need a new TV set – they’re examining those since a while, for instance here or here (both links are behind paywalls; sorry).

To sum it up: in the first of these articles, they compared lower-cost OLED against LCD TVs, and the most positive remarks were made about LG’s cost-effective “B5” series.

The latter article seemed to favour Japanese makers like Panasonic and Sony, as most other media both in Germany and in the UK say as well. Panasonic uses LG panels, while Sony has Samsung, and the first comes with Amazon’s “Fire”, and the latter with Google’s software. LG and Samsung have their own software, and for/against all of these “smart” TVs, you’ll need a filter list in your Pi-Hole (or not connect them to the internet at all if you want to avoid being spied upon).

Luckily, our own Panasonic LCD from about 2013 is still a good one – while the on-device “apps” more or less stopped working (due to not enough CPU power and/or memory I guess), its picture is still really good – better than a low-cost LG LCD TV we bought for our dad in my opinion. And even if the original remote control has long given up most of its keys, and the TV sometimes reboots without any apparent reason, we’re still happy with it. A newer one wouldn’t improve the programs, and ours is still too good to use it as a bigger monitor in the kid’s dorm or so (athough it would be awesome together with some kind of home trainer or so) 😉

My sister lately bought LG’s mid-tier “C5” series, which is probably what most people would be really happy with. Haven’t asked her tho what was wrong with her older one (also LG), which looked nice to me on our last visit to hers.

Anyway, and as always – thanks for reading.

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Gadgetbridge 0.86.0 adds initial support for Google Pixel Buds A

What a surprise:

Of course I had to immediately try it, and bingo:

According to Gadgetbridge, it’s only very basic and initial support at the moment, it only shows the battery status so far. But every journey starts with first steps like someone said, and I’m very grateful for every Google app which I *don’t* need anymore (on Google’s phones you don’t need an app for those Pixel Buds, except when you’re running GrapheneOS like me)… so thank you and bravo to the Gadgetbridge team! You rock!

And like always, thanks for reading.

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Oha. If this goes on, then that’s it with secure phones…

This is bad. I mean really bad. And it could mean: no more “smart” phones for me, thank you very much…

So much for “Don’t be evil”. Until now I recommended to buy Google’s Pixel phones to anyone who wanted to hear my advice, but not anymore. And since I equally don’t like Apple (or any other hardware maker of throwaway hardware), that will be it for me.

Shame on you, Google. You *are* bad indeed.

Update, from Friday, 13th of June 2025: See also here (In German), and here (an AI-assisted translation into English of it).

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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.

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RIP DivestOS…

Oh my – bad news from last December which I saw only now: Tavi, lead and sole developer of DivestOS (see Wikipedia EN, DE) announced in his project news that he ends support of the project immediately:

“I believe the projects were highly successful in their goals, however this month will mark the end. DivestOS and its apps will not receive any further updates.”

Very sad news indeed, as this was the one project which saved us all from throwing away our old devices, keeping up updates and thus, security as long as it could. Which means that from now on we have to rely solely on the time span provided by our hardware vendors like Apple, Google, Samsung, or Xiaomi to name a few. And even GrapheneOS, the most secure system of them all only supports (google only) devices only as long as hardware vendors (of the internals, like Qualcomm and others) do. After that, they’re toxic waste.

Maybe it’s time to go back to dumb phones next time, me thinks – for those of us who really need mobile phones at all (I certainly don’t). Let’s see.

As always, thanks for reading.

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2025

A new year has started, but there isn’t that much to report, or so I think.

This is the year that Microsoft will stop supporting their operating system Windows 10, so everyone including the ARD and the CCC are recommending to upgrade rather sooner than later, and if Microsoft thinks that your machine isn’t fit for Windows 11, try Linux instead. I still remember that old joke where someone wrote: “The box said to install Windows 7 or better – so I installed Linux” 😉

Yesterday one year ago I bought a fitness tracker, and started to investigate in free software for it, using Gadgetbridge since January 10th, 2024. You can search this page for the term “Xiaomi” in case you’re interested. The main thing for me is the step counting, and that my data isn’t saved in some 3rd party cloud, neither in China nor in the USA. Anyway, since last year I have now walked over 4.2 million steps, so that’s a bit more than 10,000 steps a day, and I’m planning to continue this. With a step length of about 75cm, that would sum up to over 3,100km so far, so I’d say that I’d have covered Europe by now… and maybe reach my father-in-law’s after some 3 years or so 😉

What else is new? Oh, I volunteered to assist with the upcoming elections here in Germany. In case you’re not sure whom to vote for, from 6th of February you could consult the “Wahl-O-Mat” again. What would also help to reach informed decisions is to stop living in your “filter bubble“, or “Filterblase” like we say here in Germany. So it could help to stop using search engines which belong to giant companies, and also to avoid (a-) social media sites and services which belong to tech billionaires, like my friend Peter just did – bravo to him!

So – let’s hope that this year will be better than the last one, and that we can continue using more and more renewable energy; Germany is on a good way here even if we broke the 1.5° barrier already. So don’t throw away your old PCs which I mentioned above, and also your old mobile phones – use alternative operating systems instead, and save money and toxic waste. I wish us all a good new year 2025.

And like always, thanks for reading.

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Half a year. Two million steps.

On January 9th this year I’ve bought that little step counter, and one day after that, which is now half a year ago, I installed Gadgetbridge on my phone to keep track of everything without sending all my data into anyone’s cloud. The first days I more or less played around with the software to see what it could do, and in the beginning I wasn’t sure how many steps a day would make sense, so I started reading about that. I started with some 6000 steps a day which was the default setting on the device makers’ software, corrected that to 8000 steps a day later which was recommended as the perfect in-between measure for the 60+ year generation. But end of January, I finally settled on a daily minimum of 10000 steps.

And I kept that minimum since 164 days now, so my grand total since I installed the counting software is now a bit more than two million steps, or with my average step length of 75cm, around 1500km:

So in case someone wants to follow that example, expect to have some 4 million steps after the first year – if you can keep up and do this every day of course. And if you look at my last blog post, I think I’ll add some kilometers on a bicycle to that as well.

Anyway, and like always: thanks for reading.