At the school I went to they spent a certain amount of time going through old exam papers and making sure we’d done all the standard questions that were likely to come up again.
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One of the best grades I achieved at university was on an exam about acoustics as it was the third time I’d studied it.
First at GCSE (doing triple-award science meant it included part of the A-level course), then at A-level, then as part of my music tech degree.
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One year at University I remembered that I’d taken a particular course only when I got my results. That was not one of the best grades I achieved.
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I’m sure I’ve told this story before, but…
When I went back to school to finish my degree, I had to take a silly number of basic classes. One was a macro econ class. I went to class the first day, decided I couldn’t stand the lecturer (he was an adjunct and his politics were not well hidden). I verified that the only component of the course grade were the exams, so I noted them down in my calendar, and stopped going. about a 1/3 of the way through the semester, I was in the CS computer lab, and a buddy asked, about 5 minutes before class time, “hey are you still in econ? There’s an exam today.” “It’s next week”, say I. It got changed, so I went along with him to class. It’s a good thing I did. Not only had the date of the exam changed, but the class now met in a different room. In a different building. I am still mad I missed a question on the exam.
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I’ve been playing some 18xx games on 18xx.games (what a coincidence!)
The turn notification options are pretty slim. You can get email notifications, but they say they’re expensive to send (which I believe), so they won’t send notifications if you have the page open anywhere, or if you’re received one “recently” (without explaining exactly what that means… and I won’t be bothered to go read the Ruby code).
They do have an option to send notifications to the 18xx Slack… but… I have thoughts on Slack that are outside of this, or any other, realm of conversation.
I followed the directions to do Discord notifications and that was slightly better; I could get notified on both mobile and my computers, but acknowledging those notifications was annoying because it’s just a Discord channel on the 18xx Friends Discord shard.
So I looked for other options. Webhooks… okay, so… how do I host my own webhooks?
[google searching… searching… searching…]
Okay, how about this Ntfy thing. I can put that in Docker and configure a subdomain on my reverse proxy, easy enough. Done. Let’s try it.
Well, that’s ugly. How can I make that look better?
[google searching… searching… searching…]
…
[google searching… searching… searching…]
…
[google searching… searching… searching…]
Okay, so, Node-RED. Let’s try this. A couple of hours later (free time thanks to the New Years occasion):
Ooh, much better. The “Play” button is the same functionality as the hyperlink… but I had fun formatting the Webhook JSON to enable “actions” in the Ntfy post.
So now I get Ntfy toast on my mobile and my computers.
I should probably set up some webhooks for, I dunno, critical alerts for my home server. I’ll get around to it – it just took playing a boardgame to motivate me to figure all this out.
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I guess an interesting difference for the “Play” action is the integration on the Ntfy android app, where I can tap the Play button from the notification tray.
Not a huge advantage because I still have to go acknowledge the notification at some point
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Does anyone use /e/OS on their phone? I’m looking at switching to a Fairphone and they offer it as a “privacy focused” alternative to android. Interested in any opinions on whether it’s a good option.
Oh, and the reasons I’m looking to switch phones are 1) my current phone no longer receives security updates 2) Google sent out an announcement today that they would be pushing out an ‘update’ that improves the stability of the phone but degrades the charging performance and battery life to the extent that they are offering compensation 
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Can’t help with that. I have been using LineageOS for a while and that’s great if you have one of the phones they support: Devices | LineageOS Wiki
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I guess the problem I’m going to have with any of these is switching away from the Google ecosystem. I’ve used the same Gmail address for a very long time, plus photos, cloud storage, etc.
It probably wouldn’t be a bad thing to reduce the integration of my phone into every aspect of my life though 
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And a big 
to the “degoogling” guide I was reading that suggested switching to a bunch of Amazon services instead. Feels very much like exchanging the frying pan for the fire…
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maybe first start moving one service after another. i have successfully changed emails in the past and you can always keep the Gmail forwarding leftovers.
once you’ve done that you can remove contacts and use a different service for that. then calendar…
for me a lot of replacements come via nextcloud. which i self host but if you can’t do that you can probably buy some hosted version. whichever way you go you’ll probably need to spend some amount of money because nothing is free. just it’s better to pay with money than data.
next cloud: has calendar, contacts, cloud storage (also for photos), notes . privacy conscious people i know either self host email or use proton mail. (i self host but I don’t recommend that )
I’m still using maps. but not much else.
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In the uk, I find openstreetmap trivially superior to gmap. Doesn’t do live traffic, but that’s usually wrong for me anyway.
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well there is privacy conscious and then there is “just because I’m paranoid doesn’t mean they are not after me”
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Explains the paper in Battlestar Galactica, mind.
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Well, we just added a new device to our IOT network 
(because we don’t trust IOT it is a separated WiFi that is only for IOT devices) If we had a cat, I expect it would be overjoyed. As it stands my dad’s cat is not allowed inside our half of the house and she can’t ride the new device.
I am hoping to have less dust in our bedroom because my dust allergy has been triggered really badly this heating season. We also plan to acquire an air filter. I had been hesitating to invest in all these things until a colleague and fellow dust allergy sufferer told me how much better he was doing since getting these devices.
All hail our robot overlords!
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Omg, I did it. The new certificate to login to the company server wasn’t working, so I filed a support ticket. They suggested I try turning it off and on again, and it worked 
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Question (from my partner): a new mobile will be needed soon. For someone with privacy concerns… what do you do these days? Which phone to buy? Which OS to use? What about security issues? Privacy isn’t the only thing we worry about. Compromised security also compromises privacy…
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I’m using LineageOS but there are a lot of privacy-focused forks.
Note that many people start with a privacy-focused OS but then turn round and install Google services, which seems to me to be missing the point. I have no paid apps, and many commercial apps won’t work for me because the tracking framework they rely on isn’t available.
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That’s what I warned him about. He’ll need to check each and every single one of our home automation things. We have largely managed to rid our selves of direct use of google services. But indirect use is probably still pretty bad on the phones.
I admit to not wanting to go through that much trouble.
I am also “hosting” my work phone on the same phone and I doubt I could do that with a non-standard OS.
And one thing we can no longer do without are banking apps. At the very least the 2 factor app HAS to run.
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