Yup. Looking back I wish I had location data on some of the photos I took. Can't share them but can't also remember where I took them. Unfortunate.

This why I have my phones track themselves (started with Moostrax on the Blackberry then iOS, Moves on iOS until Facebook killed it, now it's OwnTracks on iOS logging to my server + Arc Timeline + Gyroscope + some others, I think) - even without the "where was this photo taken?" helpfulness (for camera shots + phone shots with stripped location), it's also good for "where was that cafe / coffee shop / craft shop / whatever?" kind of questions (obviously assuming you can remember vaguely what date and time...)

I should get better at taking contemporaneous notes, really, but since that hasn't happened in 30+ years, I doubt it's going to stick now.

Yes, as another privacy "aficionado" many years ago I had taken so many photos that I don't remember where I took, and I can't ask around either :'(

Apparently AI models have gotten decent at geoguessr... Might be worth a shot?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43724935

There's nothing about a digital ID system that would inherently require the use of a pre-approved OS.

Some countries went with SmartCards that you can use on any platform that can communicate with a card reader basically.

Hah, you wish. See how maintainers of a reference implementation resist removing Google dependency here: https://github.com/eu-digital-identity-wallet/eudi-app-andro...

You'd imagine they'd just reuse and verify the Authenticode signature the very least.

Wacom does the same CRC-32 BS in their updater.

I blocked HTTP connections from my local network years ago and you wouldn't believe how many driver installers and auto-updaters break. One should never trust a HW vendor's (auto-)update implementation.

> [...] it seems likely they also have enough to maliciously chug the hardware sufficiently to degrade capacity over time and otherwise impact system integrity. I hate the thought of some random website writing and overwriting random bytes in a tight loop in the background while I'm browsing elsewhere to find the cause of my slow disk subsystem.

Absolutely. Things like IndexedDB get fsynced super frequently. There's no way to tell Chrome that some web apps do not need to make it do the physical disk this often.

It's really difficult to reliably separate temporary and persistent browser storage. I tried at some point to reduce HDD noise. But given how neither Firefox or Chrome properly follow the XDG spec, it did not yield the results I wanted without a lot of handcrafted mounts.

In the end I'd guess you can also use some aspects of persistent storage to achieve similar results, even if the rest is actually tmpfs/RAM.

Indeed. Apps do always seem to keep adding new cruft to the filesystem layout. For a while my entire home directory was tmpfs on a few machines just to stop some of the tracking. I would commit my bookmarks back to persistent storage but that was it. It was a manual process and sometimes I would forget to commit but that's just my laziness. I'm sure others would automate this process.

I installed Syncthing on it to make syncing new books onto it much easier. That's the biggest and primary value I got from it.

It also works with time domain video files like audio visualizers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E3gf88rSzqo

Nothing extremely surprising though.

BeepBerry is awesome, my only issue is the relatively low resolution of the screen. But it is very readable in bright light. Tradeoffs, I guess.

> As an online store you don't want to ask customers to manually input a payment reference into a SEPA transfer. It's all about ease of use (and safety).

How? With a SEPA transfer I can actually see who I'm paying. With a CC or equivalent it's a lottery.