Hacker News: sir_brickalot

New comment by sir_brickalot in "EU now one step away from reviving private message scanning rules"

sir_brickalot — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 21:24:10 +0000

I did.

New comment by sir_brickalot in "Scrcpy v4.0"

sir_brickalot — Wed, 13 May 2026 22:13:56 +0000

I had a dead screen on a phone, so I was able to enable screenreader mode, used that to navigate to enable USB debugging and allow scrcpy screensharing.

That process cost me a couple of days and a similar working phone for testing, but it worked and I could save all the data on the phone.

New comment by sir_brickalot in "The creative software industry has declared war on Adobe"

sir_brickalot — Sun, 19 Apr 2026 20:25:22 +0000

So, no one here is a professional creative? In the print industry you can't avoid Adobe for one tool: Acrobat.

You need professional PDF creation with profiles, preflight tools, editing capabilities abd form creator tools.

Oh and there is InDesign which is an industry standard. You need compatibility with your clients' pipeline.

So until there is a real competitor for Acrobat and a change in the whole industry, Adobe is unavoidable.

New comment by sir_brickalot in "Signal Secure Backups"

sir_brickalot — Mon, 08 Sep 2025 19:43:13 +0000

To your point: What I am missing with Signal:

Choice to always store media locally on the phone.

What I miss with most messenger apps: Archiving old stuff and offload it to a remote device.

Right now Signal is 8GB in size and doesn't stop growing.

New comment by sir_brickalot in "Why are banks still getting authentication so wrong?"

sir_brickalot — Tue, 13 May 2025 21:19:12 +0000

Counter: Backups for TOTP are easy and you can use multiple devices/services for a single TOTP login.

New comment by sir_brickalot in "Android developers no longer need Windows USB drivers"

sir_brickalot — Sat, 30 Dec 2023 21:06:51 +0000

I just had a strong use case: a broken screen.

A combination of Google Assistant, Talkback, USB-C-to-USB-A-Adapter and Keyboard, a Bluetooth keyboard, scrcpy, Anydesk and a new Pixel phone for practicing helped get some data off the device and even do a migration to the new phone. Needed all of the above and a lot of trial and error and time!!

New comment by sir_brickalot in "Fixing the volume on my Bluetooth earbuds"

sir_brickalot — Sun, 29 Oct 2023 17:08:13 +0000

I would need the opposite:

The volume on my Airpod 2 are waaaaay to low on my Samsung phone.

No problem with the Airpods on an Ipad or with my Bose QC II on my mobile.

Bluetooth is such a pain.

New comment by sir_brickalot in "First Impressions with GPT-4V(ision)"

sir_brickalot — Wed, 27 Sep 2023 18:07:32 +0000

If AI or LLMs or similar would be everywhere... how much more renewable energy do we have to produce, for very little to no gain in so many cases?

Madness!

New comment by sir_brickalot in "Organic Maps: An open-source maps app that doesn't suck"

sir_brickalot — Thu, 21 Sep 2023 18:59:51 +0000

I love OrganicMaps but lacks in certain situations.

When I want to be able to zoom into any and all of my bookmarks, I have to keep the map data of all countries I've ever been visiting. Thats tens and tens of GB of data on a mobile phone.

And everytime there are maps updates I have to redownload all of it. Tens and tens of GB of data.

When you're traveling and forgot to DL everythibg beforehand and have to use some WIFI hotspot you might not be able to get your maps downloaded. Happened to me multiple times.

So, my feature request:

- smaller maps data

- incremental updates

- online maps

...oh and better search of course. ;)

New comment by sir_brickalot in "Google is already pushing WEI into Chromium"

sir_brickalot — Wed, 26 Jul 2023 16:02:14 +0000

Isn't this already the reality in the mobile space?

I own a rooted Samsung device and have to jump through 100 hoops to be able to use my banking app or Netflix or some rando game (which I don't actually play). SafetyNet broken, hardware fuse blown, Magisk Hide + some other havks just to still be able to do online banking.

I just want to be able to ssh into my own device or install a real ad blocker, like Adaway without losing access to real world applications.

This is all very depressing.

New comment by sir_brickalot in "Mozilla Standards Positions Opposes Web Integrity API"

sir_brickalot — Tue, 25 Jul 2023 14:51:28 +0000

One option is for sysadmins and IT shops serving SMBs to preinstall Firefox on workstations. That way users get used to the browser and might use it privately as well. Bonus: Preinstall uBlock Origin.

Thats what we do, anyways.

New comment by sir_brickalot in "PhotoPrism: AI-powered photos app for the decentralized web"

sir_brickalot — Tue, 11 Jul 2023 18:48:34 +0000

> so I'm hoping to find a Photosync system that will only upload when on my home wifi and charging. Any suggestions there?

Syncthing

New comment by sir_brickalot in "iOS 17 automatically removes tracking parameters from links you click on"

sir_brickalot — Thu, 08 Jun 2023 17:49:57 +0000

I would like to test that but when clicking different links I get mixed results. The URLs get modified alright but a lot of referrer info seems to not get removed.

I guess its just Google collecting one more metric.

New comment by sir_brickalot in "iOS 17 automatically removes tracking parameters from links you click on"

sir_brickalot — Thu, 08 Jun 2023 17:18:25 +0000

Question:

When I click in my Gmail android app on a link from a received E-Mail, the opened Firefox browser opens a google domain for a second and only after that the domain from the link opens... any idea what that is? Tracking?

New comment by sir_brickalot in "Wine 8.0"

sir_brickalot — Wed, 25 Jan 2023 19:58:48 +0000

I'm big into archiving. It's almost autistic how perfect I want my media to be named and tagged and bpm'ed and with fitting cover art and so on Foobar with the that wealth of addons helped a lot:

- Buttons to search for images with artist and album name

- complex renaming patterns

- replaygaining

- batch editing tags...

There is so much I love (ed) about it!

Haven't tried navidrome yet but was planning on installing a multiroom soundsystem with navidrom and snapcast. But that just serves a different purpise :-)

New comment by sir_brickalot in "Wine 8.0"

sir_brickalot — Tue, 24 Jan 2023 22:26:11 +0000

Ha, I even moderated a german IrfanView forum back in the day until I switched to Faststone Viewer. Almost forgot.

New comment by sir_brickalot in "Wine 8.0"

sir_brickalot — Tue, 24 Jan 2023 22:19:26 +0000

I tried to use Wine on MacOS for 4 beloved Windows programs I still cant live without 10 years after I moved away from M$:

- Foobar2000 (unfortiunatly very CPU heavy with audio problems, some incompatibilities)

- Subtitle Edit

- Advanced Renamer

- Faststone Viewer

All fairly ordinary tools but I didnt find suitable alternatives in all these years. Especially FB2K. Hope the Macos version will soon reach feature parity!

New comment by sir_brickalot in "Chaos Computer Club saves the German healthcare system 400M Euros"

sir_brickalot — Sat, 15 Oct 2022 15:03:46 +0000

It is a little more problematic than that:

The Gematik GmbH is in part managed (owned?) by the German ministry of health [0] and some health organizations like the Association of Statutory Health Insurance Agencies.

That says something about the 'risks' the Gematik takes (Hint: none).

Similar story: Earlier this year some health card readers, certified by the Gematik had a bug. They wouldn't read certain cards that supposedly were electrostatically charged. The solution was a grounding device connected to the USB port of the card reader. [1] This thingy cost the doctor's practices another 100 bucks even though this clearly is a design flaw by the manufacturer.

They can do pretty much what they want at this point and the physicians and hospitals just have to cough up the dough.

[0] https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gematik

[1] https://www.borncity.com/blog/2022/01/16/problem-mit-statisc...

New comment by sir_brickalot in "ZFS 2.1.6"

sir_brickalot — Tue, 04 Oct 2022 14:00:08 +0000

Using it on MacOS for years (not for system) and fairly recently for ZFS on root on Ubuntu.

I love it but two problem I ran into on Ubuntu:

1. Docker failed bcs of the custom implementation in Ubuntu (Don't remeber the specifics).

2. I repeatedly run into the problem that rpool (root) or bpool are supposedly full and automatic snapshots break.

I hope those problems get fixed soon.

New comment by sir_brickalot in "Bitwarden raises $100M"

sir_brickalot — Wed, 07 Sep 2022 08:01:38 +0000

Stupid question:

How to mitigate loss of phone, lets say on holidays?