Erik

It isn’t much of a challenge if they suck. Just planning to make them doesn’t mean shit.

Also, why do none of these articles have a summary posted for them? These are some seriously low effort posts.

Corrected to MMS.

I’m an experienced technologist (a software engineer for over 30 years), I used to regularly install CyanogenMod on my phones. While I didn’t find the graphene OS installation to be particularly difficult, I did find actually using it to be too much of a challenge to live with every day. The biggest single problem I can recall is that I could not do any group SMS MMS texts. Many searches and attempts at fixes later, I realized that it was a known bug that for reasons unknown did not seem to affect all users. There were a number of minor annoyances in addition to that bug.

That may reflect more on how Google has locked down things on the pixel phones, or other stuff they’ve done to keep things as proprietary as possible in their software and devices. I switched back because it wasn’t worth the hassle to me.

I came here looking for this.

A break, not a breakthrough.

Trigger warning: I use a lot of big-tech services from Google for work and non-work purposes.

YouTube family subscription. It’s YouTube Music (equivalent to Spotify for how I use it), and ad-free YouTube (which I watch regularly for long-form science content) for 6 people at $20/month. The price hasn’t changed in several years.

Claude Code API account. I use it to keep my Obsidian notes organized, generate summaries, occasionally code, etc. I spend $15-30 / month on it, paid by my work.

Google1 subscription. 2TB of cloud storage for $20/month that I share with my son. Gemini Pro included (for now), which is useful for general queries and text processing, code analysis, etc. NotebookLM is better for some things, and is also included.

Work supplies a ChatGPT subscription that is good for some niche uses, but I could live without it. Once investor subsidies dry up, I’ll probably keep the Claude and Gemini API connections, since their prices probably won’t change.

For those (like me) who didn’t know what it was, Nebula is a creator-owned and operated video streaming service.