Not sure how I should feel about that. It’s highly likely any party engaged in tracking activities will try to grab as much data as they can. So a non-Google device seems like it would be doing twice the amount of data collection.
But considering Google also controls the hardware design of the Pixel, it wouldn’t surprise me if they have some additional tricks up their sleeve.
What we really need is a full open-source phone, including firmware. Maybe we’ll get there one day.
Seconded, depending on what your goals are with transcoding, you might want to reconsider your strategy.
Hardware encoding (with a GPU) is mostly useful for realtime transcoding applications like streaming video. There are definitely some caviats that come with the realtime performance, and you’ll find that NVENC encoded video is almost always inferior to the slower equivalent software encoded variants.
So let’s talk codecs: While h.265 might seem like the holy grail, it is way more computationally intensive than h.264 is. In some cases the difference in encoding time will even be as high as 3-5x. Not really worth it if all you’re gaining is a slightly lower filesize.
Your results will vary by the media you’re encoding, by your encoder quality settings, tuning and encoding speed. As a rule of thumb: slower encoding speeds equal more efficiently compressed video (a.k.a. relatively higher quality for lower file size).
Handbrake is my choice of software for encoding video. It includes pretty much everything you could ever want if you’re not looking for niche codecs and exotic video formats.
I find myself mostly using x264 because it is relatively fast and still provides awesome results. My encoding speed is always set to “slow” or “superslow” (not much difference for my setup). I usually set the quality by making use of the preview function in handbrake, which transcodes just a short section of the video which I use for pixel peeping and checking for any major artifacts that would ruin the content. The resulting file also provides an estimate for how large the final transcoded file will be. If you’re happy with the quality setting, you can opt to mess with the encoder tuning. There are different presets for film, animated content and such. I usually do use film tuning if transcoding live-action media.
All this generally leaves me with pretty compact file sizes for 1080p media. And transcoding usually happens at a rate of 60-75 fps depending on the resolution. Going up from “slow” to “medium” improves fps by about 25% and increases file size by about 10%. The ideal balance is up to you.
Advanced tips: try using VMAF (objective video quality analysis algorithm developed by Netflix) to score and compare your different encoding settings. VMAF is neatly integrated into FFMetrics, which is a GUI for FFMpeg and a couple of video analysis algorithms. I also use MPV (open source media player) with FFMpeg command line arguments for playing videos synchronized in a 2x1 or 2x2 matrix. This helps compare the results for quality.
Anything other than whitelist-type parental controls will likely be insufficient to block absolutely everything you don’t want them to have access to (or want to have access to them, for that matter).
Honestly, the best way to do so would be no internet access without supervision, which is usually not really a viable option in any reasonable real-world scenario.
The second best way I can think of, albeit a slightly technical solution, is to setup a VPN server at home using a raspberry pi or a similar hosting solution and have the phone connect through that. That way you can control internet access in any way you’d like and even block nasty tracking attempts from apps if you so wish. Most android phones have the option to prevent internet access entirely if not connected to the VPN (this will prevent internet access from any WiFi and mobile data networks). In which case they can still just call or text in emergency situations. The only thing left to do is locking down the phone’s settings, and the rest can be dynamically managed from your network.
All of this does require some basic networking knowledge, but it’s actually surprisingly easy to setup.
You might want to consider setting up a VPN tunnel to your own network. Main benefit is that you can access your home network as if you were connected to it locally. Which makes switching between mobile data and WiFi a non-issue.
This requires some sort of VPN server and usually a single port-forwarding rule for the protocol which your VPN software of choice uses. For the simplest default configuration of OpenVPN this means setting UDP port 1194 to point to your OpenVPN server.
Generally, keeping things simple, there’s two types of VPN you can set up:
It is a little more complicated than that, and there’s more nuance to it, such as wether to user your own DNS server or not, but all that is best left to some further reading.
I’ve setup an OpenVPN server myself, wich is open source and completely free to mess around with. (Save for maybe some costs for registring your own domain or DDNS serviced. Those are all optional though, and mainly provide convienience and continuity benefits. You can definitely just setup a VPN server and connect with your external IP adress)
I take issue with some of the statements here. First of all:
I find this whole “right to repair” really pointless endeavour pushed by repair shops wanting to retain their outdated business model.
Right to repair is definitely not just being pushed by repair shops. If you take a good look at the rate Framework is selling devices at (batches instantly sold out until Q1 2024), you’ll see that consumers want this more than any other group. We, as the consumers will ultimately benefit the most from having repair options available. Right to repair is not meant to halt innovation, it is not about forcing manufacturers to design products in ways detrimental to the functioning of said products. It is about making sure they don’t lock third parties out of the supply chain. If you replace a traditional capacitor with a SMD variant, someone is going to learn to micro solder. If you convert a chip from socketed to BGA mount, someone is going to learn how to use a heat plate and hot air gun to solder it back in to place.
The main problem is manufacturers demonstrably going out of their way to prevent the feasable.
The second part I take issue with is this:
It is probably better use of our collective resources to focus on researching technologies that will help us deconstruct these tiny components into their constituent matters
From my 12 years of experience in design of consumer goods and engineering for manufacturing I can tell you this is not happening because no one is going to pay for it. The more tightly you bond these “constituent matters” together, the more time, energy, reasearch and money it will require to convert them back into useful resources.
There is only one proper way to solve this problem and it is to include reclamation of resources into the product lifecycle design. Which is currently not widely done because companies put profits before sustainability. And this model will be upheld until legislation puts a halt to it or until earth’s resources run out.
In terms of sustainability the desireable order of action is as follows:
Wow that’s a cool setup, I’ll definitely steal some ideas.
I’m used to slinging lots of data around and one of the more helpful tools for general purpose automation has been n8n. Though it might have limited use if you’re not trying to glue all kinds of services together. I also host actualbudget to keep track of finances. Both are running comfortably in their own little docker containers.
I’m currently looking into setting up Nextcloud and experimenting some more with presence detection for Home Assistant. I’m considering CO2 sensors, which will either tell me my home is ventilated properly, or which rooms are occupied.
I hate the fact that none of the big names support CalDAV natively. DAVx5 is cool and all, but app developers really need to step up their shit and support CalDAV already. Not just Microsoft Exchange and Google Calendar but CalDAV as well. It’s not like they need to rebuild their apps from scratch.
At this point you might just be better served using a web app instead of a native mobile app. Maybe K-9 Mail transformation into Thunderbird Mobile might bring some good news, but I’m not holding high hopes.
Maybe we should, under the EU’s DMA, force anyone that bundles a calendar/note app with their phone OS to support CalDAV as well as any proprietary protocol of their choice.