The official one doesn’t. I’ve used a couple others that didn’t.

Ahh, that’s where that went… I couldn’t find it in my apps and figured I’d removed it.

There are a slew of Android TV remote apps that do all this and more, like including home/back buttons, integrated search etc. They also pair easier. The first party Google TV app covers this smoother than a BT keyboard/mouse app.

This is one hundred percent sensationalism. Just because the app pulls it doesn’t mean that it’s being used to track you down. It’s probably just for crash reporting etc.

A lot of these are just standard things that things like crash reporters pull. In other words, Discord probably included a crash reporter in their app, and it pulls things like memory usage, device state, os version, what orientation the device is in, etc so that when a crash happen, it can tag those to the developers. Those are all useful variables to the developers to understand what is causing the crash.

Tons of apps use crash reporters to keep their app stable. I’m sure most apps will pull the vast majority of this information. That doesn’t mean that they’re using it to track you.

IMO the thing is that people don’t care about their privacy. Sure, some people around here do, but your average person owns an Alexa, has a FB/Instagram account and constantly posts their location, uses the same password on many sites, uses TikTok, doesn’t block cookies, etc etc etc.

Most people don’t actually care. Some claim they do, but then can’t even be bothered to stop using Instagram etc because of the “inconvenience”… So do they really care?

Some companies (Apple, etc) push their products under a narrative around safety and security, and people will repeat that point as a way to justify a decision they already made, but if they actually cared, they would be doing other things too. But they don’t.

The number of us who do actually care about privacy and security is actually very small.

My point is these are just making you feel better at best. Even a perfectly efficient split system running off a perfectly efficient power source which was manufactured out of thin air without having any effect on climate change is still moving heat around. None of these address the core problem with the climate. Even at perfect efficiency they’re just building you a small bubble to feel better in.

Or, put another way, this is the coldest summer in the entire remainder of your life.

Together we can fight at least 1% of the carbon emissions from top 100 corporations in the world :)

I wish our choices had a 1% impact… That seems extremely generous.

Aircon plus solar panels for the win? Other than the initial manufacturing cost, it’s a fairly good solution.

Can’t tell if you’re thinking this is anything more than an emergency stopgap for people that can’t bear living in their home, but… All A/C does is spend energy to move the heat back outside, and also produce some more heat on the side. So it isn’t a sustainable solution or fix, even if your energy generation is somehow perfect.

And swamp boxes are basically just a fan with extra steps that puts a miniscule amount of heat into the water. They feel a tiny bit better, but they’re not really fixing anything either. That warm water still needs to go somewhere etc.

As mentioned in other comments, tracking logic is going to be so negligible at those sizes that it’s not even worth talking about - it’d be like 100kb at worst.

The problem is Meta is extremely inefficient in writing mobile apps. They solve many problems by just chucking libraries at them, but those libraries are “jack of all trades” type libraries. They use React which is abysmally large, and tons of their own monolithic garbage.

When you write an app from scratch, you only use the pieces you need. Meta is an absolute monolith with years and years of code that’s been added over time and it’s easier to just “copy/paste” most stuff they’ve ever written than to start over.

I’m genuinely curious - what do people find confusing about Mastodon? What could be improved?

I was a little confused by Lemmy at first, but downloading and setting up the Mastodon app seemed super simple and straightforward. I’ve never been interested in short form text content like this, and couldn’t find anything I thought was interesting on the platform, but I didn’t feel confused.

Would love to hear what people find annoying/confusing as I’d love to be able to help create content etc for anything that’s holding people up. Twitter owns too much social/mental weight for people and Meta is no better - would love to find a way to help move people towards something like the Fediverse.

Most of them you don’t have a choice. There are fans that light up when the fan has any power at all. Motherboards have integrated lights. GPUs have internal LEDs…

Sure, you could desolder some of them, but that’s harder.

Googles already been doing this for years.

Pretty sure this is root only. Normal apps don’t have access to the charge controller and I’ve never seen an app that claims to do this without root.

I don’t know why Google hasn’t put this feature directly into Android. It’s honestly one of the biggest pushes away from Pixel devices for me and it’s absolutely silly.

Honestly, this is more bad “charging hygiene” than anything else. I thought this was the case too until like 10 years ago when I learned how Li-on batteries worked, and since then, I’ve had negligible battery deterioration after 3+ year old devices.

The TLDR is don’t charge your phone past ~80% except on rare days you need the extra juice, and by extension, definitely don’t leave your phone on the charger overnight. Most people do exactly that and it absolutely murders your battery health.

If you’re on Android, AccuBattery is helpful with charge alarms and detailed info if you want to learn about it.

If you have a Samsung with the “protect battery” quick option, it’s a god send and makes this all super easy.

Foldables are the only interesting thing to have happened to smartphones in the past like 6-8 years. It’s kind of sad.

I used to think this was unlikely to happen, and didn’t like how fragmented streaming services were… And I don’t watch enough TVs/movies to justify one or more subscription services.

So I’d just buy everything on YouTube. Figured I’d only buy it once so I paid extra for the 1080p. Then they decided to stop supporting anything over 480p on browsers that aren’t Safari. Watching 480p movies is a joke.

Apparently you’re only allowed 720p/1080p on phones/tablets (lol at watching a movie that small), smart TVs (why would I own a TV with this little TV consumption) or Safari (lol Macs).

I don’t even know what to do at this point. Go back to collecting DVDs? Think I’m just done watching movies.

What the heck does that mean?