Money and time.

Tons of people build cool projects during their time in university, but the vast vast majority of people don’t because they are eating beans and rice and ramen and pizza and studying, not spending 500€-1000€ on iterative prototyping and the equipment to test everything.

ICs, passives, and transistors. /thread.

There are 2 big IC designers in Europe: Nordic and ST, but I believe all of their production is in China and Taiwan. If trade crashes, we have the IP, but no way to manufacture at scale. IMEC here in Belgium has 4 small fabs, but there isn’t that much else and the workforce is expensive as fuck which is why they do research IC’s almost exclusively.

We have a lot of camera IC designing in the EU also, but they are almost all fabless. Luckily we have ASML who know everything technical about IC manufacturing.

We have less knowledge on how to actually mass produce ICs anymore efficiently even though we create all of the tools and methods here because everything is done in the east that will see any volume production. PCBs and assembly are already 2-3x as expensive.

In my opinion, we need huge subsidies to get component and IC scale fabs here.

The few things I don’t like about flatpaks (which become a problem on atomic distros that use almost all flatpak by design):

• Some types of embedded development is essentially impossible with flatpaks. Try getting the J-link software connected with nrftools and then everything linked to VScodium/codeoss

• Digital signing simply doesn’t work, won’t work for the foreseeable future, and is not planned to get working,

• Flatpaks sometimes have bugs for no reasons when their package-manager counterparts don’t (e.g. in KiCAD 8.0, the upper 20% or so of dialog boxes were unclickable with the mouse, but I could select and modify them with the keyboard, only the flatpak version)

• The status on whether it is still being actively developed or not (at least I hear a fair amount of drama surrounding it)

But besides those small things, it seem great to me.

How it works for some people is the chest strap would be detected by the fitness app (polar, strava, run keeper, opentracks, etc…) and then the activity would be recorded with the chest strap. Then the activity is either synced with google health connect or google fit, apple health, etc… So it shows up in your watch app overview.

“Smarter” smart watches I think can also connect themselves to the chest strap instead of the phone and the heart rate from the chest strap would “override” the watch’s that it then sends to the app, so you don’t have to sync with an external app. Though there might be more problems with compatibility even though all chest straps should use the standard Bluetooth “Heart Rate Service” to be completely interoperable.

Withings has barely better than a guess heart rate correlation during activity sadly, so not great for sports. But they look nice!

What you can also do (that many people do) is get whatever fitness watch that has the features that you want, then get the Polar H10 chest strap for working out, which is the gold standard for heart rate measurement and much more accurate than PPG measurement.

That’s interesting because there are a lot of European companies with huge foreign investors (Spotify I think falls under this) where a giant share of the profits are going to foreign oligarchs and hedgefunds.

But then companies like Nothing (phones) who literally only have a sales office and are registered in London, but the entire business is carried out in China (design, manufacturing, coding, etc…) So the business is basically 80% chinese. I guess technically the profits are registered to a European country, but the CEO getting the profits was born in China, is a Swedish citizen, and has exclusively worked in the Chinese phone industry in China until this. (I don’t know if he is a dual citizen actually)

I think profits are only one part of the puzzle. Manufacturing being within Europe is very important also because the loss of manufacturing means you are completely reliant on others for basic functions (smartereveryday on YouTube actually has a good example of this but for America), also the wages for workers is another piece.

It would require an entire separate TPM chip, integration of it on the main PCB, and all the the firmware and software handling that comes with that, and collaboration with the GrapheneOS team (which I hear on forums and people who have worked with them, is often not a pleasant experience) for an extremely small percentage of their sales.

Doing /e/ or calyx would definitely be significantly easier.

I’m sorry. There are people who go to an adult hardcore porn site and then type in “Suitable for work”??? Like do you think the site wouldn’t get flagged at your work?

Especially because virtually all high megapixel country cameras have smaller physical pixel size and use pixel binning and combining to try to recreate a better image through computation where smaller megapixel cameras can have bigger pixel sizes and absorb more light, leading to better raw images. (Of course there are great and bad implementations of both ideas)

Don’t get a tablet if you already have a Linux laptop or a dedicated workspace.

Get a drawing pad. They are better, more cost-effective, have a better feel (non-display versions), have better pens, and you aren’t restricted to neutered programs offered on android/iOS.

Wacom is traditional, but expensive and their pen tech is kind of aging at this point, but they always work flawlessly.

XPPen is the great value alternative (with even better stuff on the top end). i have an XPPen Deco Pro Gen2 and it is an absolutely great pad with the texture of paper, and their little macropad with a scroll wheel works well. The downside is that you need a screen, but it is quite ergonomic.

The few actual artists I know use the XPPen Artist Pro series which is a drawing pad with a screen, and then they just plug it into their laptop and close the lid. Not as portable, but generally as good or better experience

XPpen also has good Linux drivers. They work in the kernel by default often, but the macropad and pressure sensitivity customization won’t work globally without their drivers.

XP-pen has much more cost-effective options that are just as good nowadays since wacom hasn’t innovated in like 15 years lol.

They also work out of the box in Linux, but for all of the shortcuts, they also have driver packages for every distribution and if it isn’t available, support will package the newest version for you (in my experience) in your chosen format and then send it to you and update the driver downloads.

The XP Pen Deco Pro Gen2 is an absolute beast for a drawing tablet.

XPPen also has a android drawing pad but that is normal android I think.

If OP wants the drawing tablet experience with a screen, they can also get XPPen Artist Pro display tablet series which of the few artists I know in real life, are what most of them use.

An actual drawing pad is much better than even an IPad for drawing, and you can also use whatever program you want (like Krita), not just the neutered programs that come on iOS or android.

Do you think your ISP and cell phone providers aren’t companies?? 😂 in america it was made fully legal like a decade ago for them to spy on you 24/7 and sell all of that information to the lowest bidders.

Here in the EU it is better, but still not great…

Also, privacy conscious? SMS, MMS, and cell calling is like the least private you can get IIRC.

And you are often paying 140-200 for a pi nowadays to make it have the same usability as a laptop (pi, power supply, sata hat, data drive because SD cards simply fail after a while under server IO) while you can get cheap used laptops for 0-100.

So unless you are running it for more than half a decade (which rarely happens with selfhosters for a main server), you are probably spending more in total on the pi.

Some people need the space if they don’t live in a city and have lots of children or dogs or tools and then an electric SUV is much better than a ICE van or truck.

Especially if that home had terrible bus and train connections because of the decades long fight of the country’s right wing party to defund and dismantle the public transportation network in order to privatize it for their corporate interests.

I would be interested in how things like MATLAB and octave compare to R and python. But I guess it doesn’t matter as much because the relative time of those being run in a data analysis or research context is probably relatively low compared to production code.

We get a lot of advertising for it here in Belgium and tons of webshops support it, sadly. What a trash company.

Yep, you can get an m.2 NVMe to USB3 converter very cheap and stick any m.2 nvme drive in it. (Also sata versions exist for m.2 sata)

Much safer solution for your data.

Different person, but I have had my Xperia 5ii for 4 years. It hasn’t gotten any updates for 2.5, but in Belgium, bank apps and a national identity authentication app HAVE to work because the national ID reading software doesn’t work on atomic linux distros so I can’t risk putting Lineage on it to extend its lifespan. The fingerprint sensor stops working 4-12 hours after a reboot due to a prolific software bug and the battery life has degraded quite a bit.

Maybe the FP6 would be a good successor. FP5 actually got 3rd for me when I took the MKBHD blind photo test after the pixels, the camera seems quite good now.

I’m sorry but this is a pure BS cop-out.

1. Most low-end cheap phones still have a headphone jack, they wouldn’t do this if it was a cost burden.

2. A headphone jack plus a driver chip is literally pennies at their production scale. Making the hole in the housing and putting in a gasket after the fact would be more expensive than the headphone jack itself

3. They have custom bodies anyway due to their repairability. Changing the body mold to include the hole for the headphone jack is trivial as they already have to make holes for the antennas

4. “The standard” of the phone industry literally 5 years ago was that every phone had a headphone jack. Only after Samsung followed apple in 2019 with the note 10 did companies think for the coming years “I can make slightly more profit and sell my wireless earbuds if I remove it”

Guess what year Samsung put out their first wireless earbuds? 2019, the same year they removed the headphone jack

Guess what year Apple removed the headphone jack? The exact same time that they released their wireless earbuds.

Guess what fairphone put out the year they removed the headphone jack? Wireless earbuds.

It is, was, and always has been a money-grubbing ploy to sell wireless earbuds for greater profit. That is just the truth and there is no way to spin it that removes history that the only actual motivation behind it is to sell more wireless accessories.