I installed FakeStore and set the app’s installed_by* property from Package Manager to FakeStore (com.android.vending, the same as Google Play Store), which was enough to fool the public transport app I’m using. Is this the workaround you’re talking about, or does it require MicroG too?

* Not what it’s actually called, can’t remember that

It’s the apps that prevent themselves being sideloaded. Presumably, their devs will enact similar policy on EU iOS too.

There is a correlation but please don’t draw the same conclusion as that one weird guy who has 12 children and ran out of pronounceable names that include his favorite letter.

It was advertised as “2 TB (64 GB Extended)” at a local clearance sale (not AliExpress), which was basically correct though I would prefer “64 GB but misprogrammed so everything can get corrupted at any time”. When buying it, I didn’t yet know if I could reprogram the chip but the low price was justified for the pretty aluminum case with a USB-C port and place for a custom PCB. I decided to buy it also to prevent another, less technical person from using it and losing their data. The store was getting rid of inventory for very cheap and would close soon so no more fake drives would be ordered.

Well, depends on how much you’re OK with some problems. I knowingly bought a “2 TB (64 GB Extended)” flash drive, tested its sectors and reprogrammed it to 32-in-64-GB for wear leveling and bad sector avoidance because it was still a cheap 32GB USB drive. I made sure to label it for “non-critical use” such as movies.

As for camping lanterns, ones charged from mains might have a nasty habit of shocking their users. (The YouTube channel contains a huge number of cheap Chinese charger teardowns and most don’t meet safety criteria. Usually, there is just 1 or 2 layers of thin tape between mains and the output you can touch.)

Sometimes, counterfeits or unknown brands are so similar to the real deal that it barely matters. I’d say that basic electronics (alarm clocks, kitchen scales, calculators, SD security cams) or even RAM is fine. With appropriate expectations, parts like video or USB cables, hubs etc., small home improvement items (hooks, screws) are fine too. Avoid categories where a lot of items have fake specs (storage devices, LED bulbs, anything that claims a runtime on a Li-Ion battery). Power electronics (especially if using mains or non-tiny Li-Ion batteries) can be downright dangerous. For novelty items and electronics modules, it’s usually easy to find text or video reviews on other websites because they’re easy to uniquely describe. Remember to consider ways in which the product can be utter crap despite high reviews citing good first impressions; it also helps to have practical knowledge of testing the properties of the items and fixing common issues.

Mustela is the Latin name of the weasel genus, which also includes stoats, polecats, ferrets and minks but not sables. The pictured animal is probably a stoat, wearing her natural winter ermine coat.

Well, I’d like to know if Arwen’s screentime/mention ratio is 2x or 3x that of the Frodo baseline. This arbitrary scale makes it impossible. It would not hurt to add more values to the axes, and perhaps a faint grid.

Every time a number doubles (or increases 10×, or 𝑒×, whatever), it moves a constant distance on a log scale because its base-whatever logarithm increases by a constant amount. Hence my expectation of equal distance from 500 to 1000 and 1000 to 2000. I am ignoring 1500 here because it does not form a geometric sequence with any two other numbers so it can’t easily be used for this check.

make it look like

Data processing isn’t about making it look like something unless you are purposefully manipulating it.

Logarithmic cannot start at 0 and would have equal spacing between 500, 1000 and 2000.

I am confused because the font seems to be Aptos, the current default in Micro$oft Office, but Excel does not allow any other type of scale on X-Y plots.

The scale is neither linear nor logarithmic. What?

Well, this is how a large part of how carbon credits “work”. You can pay someone to not cut down their tree, for example, and get a certificate in return. However, the demand for wood will likely just get satisfied elsewhere and there is little stopping people from selling multiple carbon credits per tree, or just including trees that would not get cut down anyway.

In the best case scenario, actual carbon gets stored so that it won’t decompose (like dead trees or other biomass in oxygen, maybe even plastic someday) or burned (like coal that future people can reach); however, that’s energy-intensive (hydrocarbons release energy when turned into oxides and vice versa) and difficult. Obviously, such carbon credits are expensive and they would probably cost an airline as much as fuel for your flight. Sealing an oil reservoir instead of using it, as I suggest, would be the easiest way to effectively accomplish this but oil producers don’t want to miss out on the fields they operate.
Unless the “carbon neutral” option for your flight ticket is a large percentage of its price, they are probably using dubious carbon credits - in the typical case, they are like saying your crypto mining rig is zero-emission because it’s next to an existing hydroelectric dam. The energy from that could have been used to offset some carbon-intensive production elsewhere (unless all your energy demand is already satisfied by clean electricity and you cannot export, like Iceland some islands).
At worst, it’s a pure scam that offsets no carbon and is pushed by Big Oil to prevent buyers from considering systemic changes to their carbon-heavy operation.

Edit: Iceand indeed has an overproduction of clean energy and they use it to extract and export aluminum, which is energy-intensive. Still, as long as there are gas furnaces and combustion engines on the island, there is room for improvement. However, small tropical islands (which cannot host aluminum factories) mostly use solar panels and some storage solution, and computationally heavy tasks are a legitimate use for any excess electricity production.

US and Russia are the only countries exempt from the ban on new territorial claims under the UN Antarctic Treaty. Drilling is also banned but thanks to carbon credits, you don’t need to drill to monetize oil: you just need to threaten that you will.

“You know us: we have violated international law before. You can pay us $5/ton to leave some of the oil behind on the off-chance that we do it again. New low for carbon credits!”

The industrial revolution resulted in climate change that makes it borderline impossible to be active outside in the summer.

Series

Please edit that (you can) or I’ll keep thinking of puns instead of what I tried

Thanks; I thought “his town hall” meant that the town’s administrative building (Rathaus) was named after Trump.

The pattern-seeking brain would be driven crazy trying to predict when the next tick is going to happen, as this pattern is not easy to analyze without tools. Experienced musicians could figure out that the shortest time between beats is half the second-shortest, and perhaps figure it out from there.

Anyway, you could make a website that simulates this or generate a long YouTube video, send a link to unsuspecting people and see what they think. If you want to be extra sneaky, use rain sound as background and “close-up” recordings of single drops for the beats. If you can’t code, make sound files of all the different possible measures in Audacity and use a media player with seamless playback and naïve shuffle.

They are purposefully slowing down old.reddit.com. Expect a lot of refugees when its inevitable shutdown happens.

Anyway, infrastructure mismanagement is typical for late-stage enshittification. Value of the company goes down, and execs who have sold their shares high are quietly stealing equipment from the datacenter to get some value out of it. (Not literally, they just fire any techs who suggest overdue upgrades and give themselves a bonus for making such a difficult decision.)

…Like MS-DOS getting open sourced. It’s pretty much worthless unless you need to use some really old device.