Since Linux seems to be the theme of the week (and if not, I'll make it so *sips Early Grey*), I'll do another post about it.
/Cockney Accent/:
Got an ole mobi/handy sitting in a drawr sumwher with no sim? Chalkin' up dust, cryin in a corner, sippin on to the last drops of it's battery life? Sounds like you need to flash it with a new OS, mate.
/Normal Accent/:
Usually, LineageOS¹ is the way forward here. You'd flash your recovery partition with TWRP², and then flash your root file system with Lineage, and you'd have a modern android OS without any of the google bloat.
Problem is, you're still using google code and you're still dependent on them to not make a breaking change that makes your phone completely redundant.
Enter PostmarketOS. This is as close to pure linux on an android phone as you are likely going to get. It supports only a handful of devices³, but it is surprisingly accessible to build your own image, you just need to write a "pmaport" with flashing offsets⁴⁺⁵ and kernel parameters
As of yesterday, I resurrected one of my phones with one of their pre-built ports, though with great difficulty: the vendor disabled fastboot in the newest over-the-air (OTA) update, so I had to resort to using the fantastic EDL⁶ library to manually talk to the device.
I'm running a desktop flavour called Phosh⁷ based on Gnome which was written for Librem5 phone from Purism. It's a bit cluttered, though it's very easy to switch between concurrent apps.
There's no real email app, so I installed evolution, and that was clearly not designed to be run on a smartphone. Firefox works well. The media player is good. The terminal is built-in.
For my phone with low specs, the desktop might be a bit overkill, so I might try one of the many others (Plasma Mobile, or Sxmo)⁸ later.
Still, it's been fun to have a device I can SSH into, do X11 forwarding, and treat as mini-webserver.
If you've looked at the compatibility list in reference (3) you'll notice that barely any pmOS devices have camera capabilities due to the closed source nature of these devices (a damn damn shame...), but one thing I will try is to hook a USB camera via the USB-on-the-go capability of the device and use it as a mini home security/surveillance device using the motion⁹ tool.
That's all for now!
[Footnotes]
1: https://wiki.lineageos.org/devices/https://wiki.postmarketos.org/wiki/LG_Fx0_(lg-madai)
I have this phone stock as it came out of the factory, rather neat looking IMO but less special with the Nothing phone out now. I would happily ship it to you to mess around with and to archive the software on it.
Woah, a real FirefoxOS phone, back before they went down the KaiOS route and then started their tracking telemetry...!
I'm surprised that they haven't got Audio or Wifi working on it in pmOS, given that these firmware files seem to be readily useable from the userdata partition... though it looks like they didn't try to mainline the device, only run it from stock.
I'd love to have the phone, but not sure how to securely give you the address of my packstation (does private messaging exist? disposable email?), also the issue of paying you for shipping without giving away my id!
All that (including the Update) sounds danged fun and interesting, if I only had a brain.
And I say that sort of analogy-istically, as last Friday "I" wound up groveling around in what might be called a biological substrate zone, some odd seizure-istic state prompting my wife to hail an ambulance - whose ride I don't remember save for something like half a moment what I want to say was about 2/3rds the way down our street.
So I was somehow removed from bed, out the front door, into the vehicle, driven some 10 miles (sorry... don't remember the metric conversion factor at the moment...), into a hospital, and didn't "come to" until, sheesh... not even sure... was it midday?
I dunno.
Somehow it all seems remotely related to your describing old USB limitations, hence my fumbling with da keyboard again in order to make allegedly intelligible text magically appear on your screen.
So much I'd like to write. But then I remember just how private our individual instantiations of a common language are. It's like what for me is an indirection operator might be exponentiation for you. Something like that. Except we're both convinced the other is attempting to mean what we'd mean with the same symbol(s), but just not very good at it, just being intentionally difficult, etc., etc.
Check out this example (he says in his mostly private language):
I applied for some position in weworkremotely.com, and was eventually told it was already filled... but that I should contact some so-and-so because I sounded like I'd be a great assistant for them.
And so I did.
But the reply I received, well, it was a textural nightmare, sort of an amalgam of what I'd forwarded to said person from the person who recommended me, and a string of not-well-delimited thoughts laying half dead in a minefield of typos... and of course the first thing that came to mind was "Holy fucking shit, I'm being scammed!"
So, you know.. a couple more email exchanges.. and I'm maybe sorta kinda thinking the situation might be legit.. but for the life of me can't understand how to trust whoever's communicating with me on the other end. I'm under the impression (clarity has been damned hard to come by so far) they're out of the (i.e. my) country, but soon returning, they're allegedly preparing a list of things for me to pursue on their behalf, but I can't think of a single thing they've sent my way that gives so much as a 50% sense of legitimacy.
About the best they could do to garner trust was to stammer along the lines of why else would they be speaking so candidly from their core - which, of course, to me sounded more like poorly assembled ramble-mania. :-)
Anyway, this is part reply to this thread, part reply to the other wherein the notion of corruption came up.
Am I really to the point where I don't trust anyone save my wife, dad, and siblings? I mean, whoa, holy fucking shit.... And yet that's roughly where I wind up whenever putting more than a little thought into it.
Jee-zus. How're ya doing? And do you know what caused it? What were you doing at the time? I hope you're relaxing a bit and are recovering okay.
As for communication: I guess we're all ships in the night passing each other with confusing signalling equipment, but roughly getting the message across: "Hi / don't crash into me please"
> it was a textural nightmare > garner trust
there was a time when I first joined this forum where I genuinely thought you were a bot, because I wasn't used to the way you communicated and thought: "this is word salad". It was only after a few other exchanges, and you explicitly telling me you were not a bot, did I begin to wrap my head around the way you explained things.
I think intent/trust is a big part of it. Once you know what someone is intending to say, and you trust their experience in the topic, you kind of gloss over how they say it - where how they say it is more of a characteristic of their speech than a measure of the merit of their words.
> Am I really to the point where I don't trust anyone save my wife, dad, and siblings?
Maybe. I'm getting there too. How long do we have until the bots find this place, the mod(s) get overwhelmed with the seemingly coherent requests from new users? Do we close the garden gates and profile any newcomers like bored NIMBYs? Probably we'll have to.
Anyway, I hope you're doing better now healthwise
> Jee-zus. How're ya doing? And do you > know what caused it? What were you > doing at the time? I hope you're > relaxing a bit and are recovering > okay.
I'm somewhat educatedly guessing I spun out at the intersection of age, stress, bodily intake stupidity, and repeatedly dwelling on thought patterns that tend to spiral downwardly.
I was sleeping at the time of overt manifestation - wife heard me making odd slurping-ish sounds from another room....
> As for communication: I guess we're > all ships in the night passing each > other with confusing signalling > equipment, but roughly getting the > message across: "Hi / don't crash > into me please"
Reminds me of a somewhat fun interaction in a doctor's office waiting area.
My wife and I were there with, oh, maybe seven or eight other adults. In walks a mother and young (2.5? 3?) daughter, who soon enough begins dancing about rather joyfully. Not long into her routine, some older codger breaks into verbiage directed her way, but loud enough for the entire room: "Don't worry little girl... you'll soon enough be a zombie like the rest of us...."
<various looks between the other adults>
Well... I can rarely let something like that go (I suffer from tending to want to be the weirdest in a given room..), so I engaged him ala "Huh? What?", which drew a bit of a sermon out of him about how nobody ever talks any more, but just stares at their "fucking phones". :-)
Well... of course I'd been staring at mine too, although merely to play a game of "spider solitaire"... but we talked about that for a while, mostly him pontificating from blatant self-righteousness. Eventually my name was called, and my wife and I got up, headed for the door to the building innards, and just before disappearing therein I turned to him and said, "Hey! You wanna borrow my phone while I'm in there? <wink> <wink>"
The rest of the room fell apart in laughter. :-)
> there was a time when I first joined > this forum where I genuinely thought > you were a bot, because I wasn't > used to the way you communicated and > thought: "this is word salad". It was > only after a few other exchanges, > and you explicitly telling me you > were not a bot, did I begin to wrap > my head around the way you explained > things.
I'm not sure whether to take the bot comparison as a compliment, or reason to seek mental health counseling. :-)
> Anyway, I hope you're doing better > now healthwise
Thanks. Much better. No tests revealed anything of significance thus far.
> "Hey! You wanna borrow my phone while I'm in > there? <wink> <wink>"
Heh-heh, good on you to spin it on him. The stuffier they are, they easier they fall.
Hah no, the bot comparison was just a reminder to me to that there is often enough a human on the other side of the screen.
Anything new? I'm hoping it's just a fainting spell you had. I recall about a decade ago I admitted myself to hospital after I fainted 10 times in a row that morning. Tests founds nothing, I was discharged 2 days later. Nothing since.
> Anything new? I'm hoping it's just > a fainting spell you had. I recall > about a decade ago I admitted myself > to hospital after I fainted 10 times > in a row that morning. Tests founds > nothing, I was discharged 2 days > later. Nothing since.
So far tests have found only my bank account. <blinks>
I'm not surprised. I've seen my dad run down numerous medical rabbit holes that were as pointless as they were expensive. I've lived through what seems like dozens of health-related, allegedly medical-science-backed fads - sometimes reversals of previous fads (e.g. regarding eggs, salt, meat, carbs).
Not a whole lotta trust in this boy when medical theories come out to haunt.
And, of course, not adhering to the beliefs of others on such matters can be paramount to coming off as somewhere between careless and insane.
The main matter of focus these days is whether or not to become gainfully employed again. Being so-called "retired" just isn't working for me. I apparently need to be driven from without by someone acknowledging accomplishment with a paycheck. Decades of habit, I guess.
Well that's good to hear at least. As for employment, I understand the need to be somewhere else other than in the house for large periods of the day.
Even if it's my face under the heel of someone else's vision, being stomped on all the way -- still beats being at home and giving in to the stupors of comfort.
My gosh, do I hear that "stupors of comfort" part thundering in the increasing cloudiness between my ears!
"Someone else's vision" reminds me of how often I've marveled at how ambitious so many others are, i.e. to the point of having businesses where face heeling proceeds at full throttle, which to me implies blindness to full social consequences, leading unto wondering how/why shit happens.
I'm in a different kind of stupor tonight, what with my wife out at some wine and painting event with an older sister. I probably should have grabbed the guitar to keep callouses intact, but instead wander Midnight Pub and various Gemini spaces, mostly concluding I had next to nothing of value to add.
I'd like to believe I still do, and yet there's a dull, hesitancy-invoking numbness in the vicinity of presumptuousness.
The USB-on-the-go (OTG) webcam idea is dead in the water. The problem is that when the webcam is plugged in, it draws power from the phone and the phone just cannot output that much to make the webcam functional.
There are USB OTG "splitter" cables, that split the data into one cable and the power into another, and this *would* solve that problem (i.e. data is plugged into phone, power is plugged into a plug socket)...
Then I realised that there's another problem: There's no way to power the phone when something else is plugged into it. I searched around, looking for micro USB OTG cables that can simultaneously host devices and draw power, but it just doesn't exist for older USB.
USB-C I think can act as both a host and peripheral, but older USB operates under a distinct slave/master relationship.
So now I need to get creative again.
Ooh, sounds like fun. Sadly my experience with PostmarketOS on the pinephone has been a bit too unreliable for me to use it as a daily driver. (Though I'm running it as my daily driver on the pinebook pro and it's been awesome for that.)
Yeah it's a but unreliable for me too -- especially with the battery management.
I plan to turn the phone into a dedicated pihole device in a chrooted arch linux install¹. Given the battery issues², I will probably buy a bluetooth plug socket and use it to the power the phone, where I will then write a little script on the device that manually checks the battery capacity³ and if it's too high, it tells the the plug socket (via bluetooth) to switch off, and if too low to switch on.
[Footnotes]