Step 1 of installing GrapheneOS for de-googling your life: Buy a Google Pixel phone

Look - I know, I know. I get it. Google allows you to unlock the bootloader while maintaining the phone’s unique and excellent hardware security features. The argument makes sense. It is compelling. Other manufacturers do not give you this freedom. I am not arguing about that. I have a Pixel phone running GrapheneOS myself.

However… It is just so very obviously ironic that one needs to trust Google’s hardware and purchase a Google product to de-google their life through GrapheneOS. I think that it is a perfectly valid position for someone to raise their eyebrows, laugh, and remain skeptical of the concept either because they do not want to support Google at all, or because they simply will not trust Google’s hardware.

The reason why I think that this is “controversial” is because I have seen multiple instances of someone pointing out the irony, followed by someone getting defensive about it and making use of the technical security arguments in an attempt to patch up the irony.

What if houses just lazy?

sry no fair fights for me

La lechuga del diablo.

Mr Beast went through four controversies in a short amount of time:

In response to both of these, Mr. Beast cut Ava out of Mr. Beast.

(3) There is a “Beast Games” show being produced by Mr. Beast for Amazon Prime. It turns out that putting 2,000 people to compete for 5 million dollars in Las Vegas was a recipe for organizational disaster. People had issues getting their medicines and underwear. People were fed low-calorie meals like a small amount of cold oatmeal and an egg spread at irregular intervals. Some people had seizures and the local hospital reported several injured visitors from the games. It was reported that the team invited people of all ages and then made them compete in physical games for which young men had a very significant advantage over the old players that were also cast. You can see an article about this here, and in the comments you can see many players sharing their bad experiences: https://www.casino.org/vitalvegas/mrbeast-shoots-beast-games-in-las-vegas/

(4) A person who has an employee for a short amount of time released a video in which he claimed a lot of Mr. Beast videos are faked/rigged. He also mentions multiple examples in which Mr. Beast broke lottery laws.

The IP is dynamic, but for my self-hosted services that require a static IP I make use of a WireGuard tunnel between my raspberry pi and a virtual private server. The VPS has a static IP, so my domains point at the VPS and then the VPS re-routes the packets via the wireguard tunnel. In a wire guard tunnel only the server needs a static IP, so the VPS can route packets to the client even if the client’s ip is dynamic.

Also in the Netherlands and I have recently extended this concept to my home internet. Since 25 Mbps download / 10 Mbps upload is enough for my use, I no longer have an internet subscription and I make use of $25 LycaMobile unlimited data sim cards for home internet using a sim router. The IMEI of the router can be easily modified, which is also a plus.

Sounds exhausting 😅

I would think that that this is generally true when we zoom into a local economy. But is this true when we consider a global scale? If we were distribute the world’s wealth to people in proportion to the value generated by their labor, what would the spread be like?

Does a worker in the US or a wealthy EU country receive less than the economic value/profit that they produce when we spread value fairly across the international supply chain? I suspect that workers in rich countries are able to receive more than their “fair share” for their labor by benefiting from their country’s exploitation of resources and labor in poorer nations.

I am not stating this as fact. It is what I suspect, but I don’t know the numbers, and I am curious to learn what others think.

I have a habbit of searching my own name a few times a week and sorting by new, to check if my name appears somewhere. It makes sense to me, but I would be self-conscious about it if someone asked me why tf I am looking myself up so often as if I’m famous

Yeah, it is written funny. But what it means is that the Linux kernel already comes pre-packaged with the drivers necessary to communicate using the protocol used by this device (UART or USB). These Linux drivers (and by extension Raspbian) are natively capable of interfacing via the GPIO pins or via the USB connectors. It is not true that the device is “driver free” as you always need a driver for this, what they meant is that it is not necessary to install any additional drivers for Linux. So “free from installation” I suppose.

Windows does not come pre-packaged with these drivers, so you need to install them if you want to interface with the device via USB. The chip that the board uses for the UART -> USB conversion is the CP2102. This chip is a common chip used in some ESP32 boards, and I think it would work fine with the standard CP210x driver. But on their site they do provide a specific driver for free (SIMCOM_Windows_USB_Drivers_V1.0.2.exe)

The board finally arrived and it is indeed the SIM7600G-H, which is the global version.

I tried it on my raspberry pi 5 and struggled a bit because there was a change to the UART interface between the PI 4 and PI 5 and the documentation on this board describes the PI 4. But, after some fiddling around I figured out the correct setting and got it to work. The main difference is that the “UART0” needs to be explicitly turned on because the default debugging UART now uses the UART10 interface that is somewhere else on the board.

You are in the perfect position to help your brothers out!

This makes me think of those who design the US immigration forms.

“Are you coming here to commit crimes?”

( ) Yes ( ) No

Thanks for checking!

SMS for 2fa is deprecated here because of insecurity and TOTP is generally preferable. Can you use that instead?

My first choice is a YubiKey, second choice is the Aegis Authenticator app, and the phone I only use for services that force me to. A few still do, unfortunately!

I understand about DIY and am interested to hear how this goes for you. I might like to try it myself.

If I manage to set up something that I think is interesting and functional enough, I will post about it 😄

If you can use those sims in mobile phones then I’d call them mobile plans. Can I ask what country you are in? Here in the US, mobile service costs a lot more. I have been getting SIP service from vitelity.net but twilio.com and voip.ms are better known here. I don’t know about jmp.chat.

The Netherlands. I just checked and it is €10 for 5GB/month or €8 for 5GB month if one pays for a year: https://www.lycamobile.nl/en/bundle/monthly-plan-xs/?m=12

But in the shops they have signs with deals and you can get often get codes for cheaper. They print out the codes for you and you can top-up by issuing a USSD code when needed. I buy a stack of codes, type them into my notes app, and use them when I need them. Since I commonly have WiFi available I sometimes go months without activating them.

In the home base I wouldn’t need data, as it is interfacing through the raspberry pi. Most of my phone activity is getting codes for 2FA for some important services that force me to. Since I rarely make calls, I can top up €5 of credit when needed. I need to make sure to top up every 6 months so that the SIM does not get deactivated. That’s why estimate ~€10 for every 6 months.

This works for me because I do not use the standard phone features (SMS and calling) often. If it were up to me, I would not have the phone functionality at all and simply keep the data. But sometimes I need a phone number. The purpose of this project is to keep the convenience of having a phone in the rare cases I need it without constantly having on me a device broadcasting unique identifiers. As for why go self-host route… I think the same can be said for many other self-hosting projects, it is nice to have more control. It is not really about the money. Saving money is part of the fun, and that is an easy way to “justify” what I’m doing… but the reality is that any savings argument probably gets thrown into the BS pile when we account for the time invested, failed attempts, and the extra stuff I buy for trial and error. Ultimately for me it’s really not about money, it’s about being mindful, learning, and having fun.

I haven’t had trouble using a hosted number for banking and it feels better to me than using a mobile number. The cheap mobile providers (MVNO’s) I use here are sketchy, mobile numbers change all the time, etc. I use a VoIP number as my permanent stable number and forward it to my mobile. So if I switch mobiles, I just change the forwarding. In theory you can port phone numbers between carriers but I’ve had significant hassle doing that. That’s just here though. It may be different where you are.

I have found VoIP numbers from Canada and the US, I am not sure if it is easy to get one from the Netherlands. I have experience being banned from sites immediately after registering with the VoIP number because of “suspicious activity”.

Thanks, I will look into those.

Is there a reason you don’t want to just use a SIP service by the way? It would certainly be cheaper than that board plus a mobile plan.

At the moment I am using a SIP service - at least I think I am. Is JMP.chat a SIP service? It works to a degree for me but there are many drawbacks. I can’t get a number from my country, many services recognize and block the phone number as a VoIP phone (for example, telegram), and I have to trust an additional intermediary to get my unencrypted SMS and 2FA codes. I do trust the service providers to a reasonably high degree, but I don’t think it is wise to associate their numbers with sensitive accounts such as my bank account.

The VoIP idea is not the reason why I began playing with these boards in the first place, though. It is an idea that I thought of while playing with these modules. And I don’t use mobile plans. I use sim cards that I can top up when needed, so the cost is about $5 every 6 months or so for the home base, and about ~$5 a month for the data I use for my mobile router. The reason why I want to control the device through the raspberry pi is that then I also have more fine-grained control over the top-up process and I “own” my phone number without an additional intermediary.

I agree, it looks like a nice board!

But… after ordering it I noticed that while the pictures in the website show the “SIM7600G-H” chip - which supports global GSM and LTE bands - the text description specifies that the chip included in the kit is the “SIM7600CE-T”, which supports the Chinese bands. I am not sure I will get the correct version now 😅 But there are other “SIM7600G-H” modules and USB dongles available out there, and from what I have found this chip is a nice option for GSM/LTE projects.

Thanks a lot for digging! This is a very useful

Ooh, thank you! This looks exactly what I am looking for.