Cell tracking is external to the phone. It’s done by the towers - they know signal strength, and by using known tables of that data, cell providers know pretty accurately where your phone is.

To block this you’d need a device that lacks any cellular technology whatsoever. Wifi only.

And that has the same issues, especially with companies like Comcast/Xfiniti using their cable modems to track all the devices around them, even if you don’t connect to them.

Texting uses http over the data channel for MMS.

I’ve had good luck on a number of subjects by getting DVDs produced by The Teaching Company from my city library.

I haven’t looked for math stuff yet, so not sure what they have.

Snikket seems to be it for iOS. But it does work pretty well, I haven’t run into any issues with it.

For Windows well, nothing does voice as far as I know.

Rockauto.com

But parts quality can vary a bit. Still, it’s so much cheaper than anywhere else it’s worth a little risk.

Tailscale has the Funnel feature, which can funnel traffic into your Tailscale net for you.

Years ago it was relevant (like 15 years ago). I had a BT mouse then, and it was a power hog. So much so it was rechargeable with its own charging dock. And yes, when you walked away for the day you better dock it!

But I’m sure it’s far, far better now. Logitech advertises some of their’s as having 1 year battery like, on a single AA battery

I wonder if that’s from power saving with BT mice.

The ones I’ve had would sleep much sooner than say the Logitech Unify ones, which I’ve always found really annoying.

Ubiquiti?

You can’t give me that garbage. I despise it, after setting up a single access point (plus also watching friends deal with it at client sites).

Besides the discovery issues and slow performance when trying to manage it, I had a random open network on it after setup. This network didn’t appear anywhere in the control panel. I could turn off the access point and the network disappeared.

It didn’t show up in the guest network config (which was turned off anyway). It had the same name as the WPA-protected network, it was just open - no security at all.

I had to reset the access point to get rid of this weird random open network.

What kind of garbage product does that?

Now let’s look at cloud keys. One has a hard drive in it. Just one drive, 3.5", which besides storing data also stores the OS. What? Why is the OS not on some firmware or at least an M2, since the drive is really for storing surveillance data (did I mention it’s a single drive?), what a joke. Why would I bother with such an expensive device that has zero fault tolerance, when I could simply buy a cheaper real machine, run multiple drives, and host the software there?

I lack the vocabulary to describe how bad Unifi is.

If you can, just do one pot of something that makes leftovers that hold well and are easy to reheat. After you get one thing, it gives you some breathing room for the next couple days.

I try to make a big pot of something on Sundays, so I don’t have to think about cooking Monday, maybe Tuesday. That gives me a little breathing room. I also make stuff I can portion and freeze - again, gives me a little breathing room.

Last week I was under the weather for 4 days, I just grabbed stuff out of the freezer and threw it in the toaster oven. Zero effort for my sick self. Now I need to restock what I used.

Some people don’t like leftovers, I can only figure their experience with leftovers has always been bad.

I love having leftovers around, but I make a pot of good stuff with plans for the leftovers. Some things are never leftovers because they don’t hold well (anything with leeks or tarragon for example).

Your health says avoid pre-made mixes as much as possible. I’m no salt-phobe (insufficient salt is a greater concern for 99% of people than too much), but even I shy away from the insane amounts of salt/sodium in anything packaged. Some stuff has more sodium in it than anyone should have in a day.

Plus, pre-made mixes often aren’t anywhere near as good as making something yourself, and usually more expensive, even allowing for your own time.

There are exceptions of course, but I have spreadsheets to calculate costs of mixes, meals, you name it, and it’s rare when something is cheaper to buy pre-made.

Dishwasher detergent powder is the same cost as making myself. As is onion soup mix, gravy mix powder, etc. Most other mixes I make as I go along - making chili uses a mix of different spices which I keep on hand. And I have 3 different chili recipes that use different spice mixes, and the end result is very different. I have a few recipes like this (creole/Cajun for example), that technically use the same spices, but not the same mix, and are very different for it.

I don’t understand people like your wife (or one of my siblings) that seem to view eating as just something necessary, (bless their hearts 😁, as my southern family would say)…good food is crucial to me, it’s not just something I do to get by. I mean it’s something we have to do a few times every day of our lives. I want that experience to be as good as I can as often as I can.

You first! 😁

It still exists! (Or did about a year ago).

When I got my first Android (2009 ish), I searched high and low for a way to run Hamachi on it. There have been solutions, but always clumsy and difficult to implement.

I miss Hamachi, it was so simple to use.

Tailscale is wireguard (it uses the wireguard protocols, even says so on the box), just with a centralized resolver to make things easier to setup and manage.

I’m not sure what you’re saying with the rest of your comment, as Tailscale is a mesh network, not a VPN as most people think of it.

It encrypts your traffic, but only into the network of which your device is a member. You can’t even see any devices, or networking, outside the Tailscale network, unless a device is configured as a Subnet router. Then you can see devices in the network which the Subnet Router links together.

For example, you have 3 machines, a laptop on mobile data, and 2 desktops on your home LAN. One desktop and the laptop have Tailscale, they can communicate over Tailscale to each other, but the laptop cannot connect to the second desktop because it’s on a different network, since there’s no routing between Tailscale and your home LAN.

You then configure Subnet Routing on the desktop that has Tailscale, now your laptop can connect o any device on the home LAN, so long as the desktop is running and Tailscale is up.

Think of mesh networks as Virtual LANs in software, configurable on each device (mostly, sort of). Twenty years ago Hamachi was the go-to for this, it was brilliant, and much easier to use than today’s mesh networks, just far less capable/manageable/configurable.

I’d consider 5% to be trivial, for what it does.

My battery consumption really depends on how much traffic I send over it.

It definitely gets better once it’s all caught up.

But it’s still much harder on battery than ST when folders have changes.

It’s kind of not Foldersync’s fault, it’s really because of the protocols - it’s all connection-based, and FS has to compare each file at sync time.

Syncthing keeps an index so it knows what files have changed. Very different tools with different use-cases and approaches.

I used FS for years until I found ST, and had to do a lot more tweaking to get sync to work the way I wanted with FS. FS doesn’t have sync conditions like ST, so I had to use Macrodroid to trigger it when on WiFi, for example.

FS can be a solution, it’s just a lot more work for anything beyond basics.

It’s stupid easy to setup, even has a built-in photo backup job.

I use Syncthing-Fork because it moves all the sync conditions into each job.

So my photos sync regardless of charging state or network (I’m willing to pay for the data to ensure photos are instantly synced). While other things only sync while on WiFi and charging (e.g. Neobackup).

Only one I can think of is Resilio, but it’s hard on RAM and battery for large folders.

That takes a lot more effort.

With Syncthing, I don’t have to setup a server, poke holes in my firewall/expose ports, etc.

Plus Foldersync is way harder on battery, I’ve experimented a lot.

And I’ve used Foldersync since at least 2010 - it’s great, really has it’s uses.