The plug-in waterpik ones are worth it in my opinion. Finally got into a routine of flossing after buying one.

A few more things to think about if you plan on buying a cordless unit and using it frequently though. If it takes AA batteries, it will eat through them like nothing else and the battery compartments tend to get gross and slimy, worse if the AA batteries leak. Also avoid the cheap off-brand units that take just 2 AA batteries. In my experience, those don’t produce nearly enough water pressure.

Only major gripe with waterpik’s cordless units are that their water tanks are a hassle to clean and keep clean due to the narrow openings and nooks and crannies. Later got one from Guru Nanda where the motor sits atop a wide-mouth reservoir, which is much easier to clean, or even just keep separate from the motor after use so everything can dry out.

Have you thought about writing and publishing your experiences from life and hobbies that other people could learn from?

I don’t think mine ever do, but they do sublux on occasion

Would like it more than Signal ideally. But it’s hard enough already to get people over to Signal. Couldn’t justify how much battery its notification service drained for the few contacts (all nerdy close friends) I had there. That was over a year ago so I’m interested to hear if they fixed the power consumption issue.

Many moons ago I’d struggle to fall asleep quickly, but now I can whenever I want. Even more effective if I think about a task on my todo list I’m dreading.

I don’t want to say that it’s due to the pandemic, but it definitely became a thing for me during the pandemic.

Side-effects: does not imply that I use this ability to establish a good sleep schedule. Zero productivity on trains and planes; first-class service is wasted due to being conked out.

For anonymity alone, no. You ought to at least aspire to live the nomad lifestyle first and put up with its challenges, then enjoy whatever anonymity comes from it as a bonus.

If you don’t mind apartment living, you could consider the arrangement I had at one point. Private landlord who didn’t run background checks, accepted payment in any reasonable form, many tenants, communal mailbox without apartment numbers or names required. Internet, utilities, etc. all rolled into rent and not individually metered. Might be harder to find but they exist.

To clear my bucket list of food I want to try. Many items require travelling abroad, so I don’t think it’ll be completed anytime soon.

As others have said, no because Google’s components have very good backward compatibility and will come for your device on its stock OS.

I had other vendors in mind when I first read your question. In a sense, older ones could spy less as a side effect of vendor telemetry servers going dark over the years. Samsung also wasn’t as rampant with their spying back then. But either way, such phones would have been long without any security updates.

As someone who has used X11 and Wayland, it doesn’t matter for the typical user. If you, like me, have a penchant for some smaller desktop environments like XFCE or window managers, you will be stuck with X11, but many are already working on porting to Wayland.

Couple edge cases for gaming, namely screen tearing on some X11 configurations and certain Nvidia hardware running into issues on Wayland. For multi-monitor or high DPI users, Wayland handles per-monitor DPI and fractional scaling far better than X11. Maybe a couple more edge use cases for remoting into the desktop, but Wayland support is also improving quickly on that end. In any case, Wayland is by design more secure than X11.

Yep, ever since I saw them in popups on hosting sites or gatekeeping downloads behind some shady .exe, I’ve associated them with malware and adware.

Trying to get coreboot to run on the nvidia variant of the ThinkPad T510. I guess it boots now, but I’m probably going to shelve it if I can’t get rid of the random freezes this weekend.

Eating one of those mini pecan pies

Anything that requires PII in a separate browser that doesn’t clear on exit. General browsing on my main browser, which clears data on exit, except for a small list of exceptions. It doesn’t defeat non-cookie fingerprinting, but I at least get rid of all the cookies that I don’t want.

I’m happy that you are at a point where you find life to be stable and well-paced. For a lot of people, whatever comforts they might be enjoying are riding on a razor-thin margin. Holding together well at first glance, but only one financial, health, or other incident away from a world of hurt.

Also, whoever downvoted me right out of the gate could you please take a moment to explain yourself. The thought I had of someone in an ivory tower dismissing my comment first thing as I’m commuting to work wasn’t sitting right with me. Yeah, I’m stressed.

Nearly everything that both requires a phone and disrespects my privacy has been work-related, so using 2 phones has been a solid choice for me.

The work phone has a sim from a mainstream carrier and only gets powered on while at work during work hours. Maybe I’m spoiled that my workplace tolerates this arrangement. I couldn’t imagine having to be reachable any time of the day. I didn’t intentionally buy a separate phone, it’s just my old phone repurposed.

The personal phone has an “IoT” SIM which can be purchased non-KYC where I live. All FOSS apps and a personal number via VoIP.

I know it isn’t by any means airtight, but it gives infinitely more peace of mind than just trusting whatever sandboxing mechanism available on one device will be sufficient.

Whatever the choice, there will be trade-offs. From a technical standpoint, there shouldn’t be anything wrong with the upcoming Motorola phone with GrapheneOS as long as the bootloader is still unlockable and relockable so that the user can install a known good copy of GOS instead of trusting what Motorola put on it.

A laptop that I use every now and then today was already manufactured when I was 10 years old.

As much as I trust them with passwords. Which is not too much trust. Implementations of passkeys also tend to be frustratingly bad.

As long as you have a strong backup strategy, I would recommend full disk encryption during installation, especially if for a laptop. Peace of mind with negligible cost on modern hardware. Even accessing the encrypted disk from a live USB takes only two extra commands compared to an unencrypted disk. As long as the LUKS header doesn’t corrupt, hence the need for good backups.

My schools in the US:

Only English for all of elementary school. Starting in middle school, students can choose to take Spanish, French, Latin or German (in descending order of popularity). A bus would take you to one particular high school in the county for Mandarin, Greek, Russian, Japanese, etc. For the advanced diploma, you needed to take 3 years of a foreign language course. The full sequence offered for Spanish, French, Latin, and German takes 6 years.