I think piecemeal is a good way to go. Switch from MS Office to LibreOffice, from iOS to android, from Photoshop to Krita, then go to dual booting Linux (probably Mint or similar) with Windows, learn more using both, find what things you reboot to Windows for, find solutions for those using Wine and alternative software, get used to solving problems in Linux land and learn the tools. Once you are comfortable with a mix of both get rid of what you can, use Windows less and less, try CalyxOS or Graphene for your phone if possible, keep making steps. Each step makes progress, and imperfect solutions are a better starting point for finding better solutions.

That said, for the earliest steps a virtual machine is an amazing tool, as is an old laptop. You can learn to solve problems on virtual or real hardware without making your life harder then inch closer to freedom. I’ve been using Linux since 2006 and honestly it has been a constant learning process. The first year was mostly VM learning, then an accidental install on my external HDD taught me about hubris and data protection. Since then I have kept moving towards more open hardware and software one step at a time. Getting started is the key, nothing teaches as well as trying.

What OS do you use? Windows, Mac, Linux? And same for your phone? Android? If so, you should be able to get it set up on your desktop and phone.

First, get it installed on your desktop. For windows and mac go to the Syncthing download page and grab the installer. On Linux you will find install instructing below, but basically use your package manager to install syncthing.

Once it is installed you can start it up and it will open a GUI, most likely through your web browser (probably 127.0.0.1:8384 or similar). From here you will have your Syncthing interface for your computer set up, so on to the phone.

On your phone install syncthing from whichever store you use, fdroid is my favourite. Once installed open it and you should have an option to add another device. You can use this to scan the QR code on your computer Syncthing interface.

Good idea is to use something like Syncthing to copy data between your phone and another device like a laptop or another phone. This depends on the app, for Drip you have to manually export the data yourself on a regular basis.

Another useful idea is if you have an old phone lying around get it connected via Syncthing and back up everything to it. If your current phone dies or is lost you can switch back immediately, a hot backup. If you have root on your device you can use NeoBackup to schedule backups of the data into a folder Syncthing can access and send to backup locations, say a home computer or spare device.

And the fashion, oh wow, such an aesthetic.

Trashing!

Well it depends too on how long things take to settle out. Salt is easily suspended in water, but silt is not, so the water would be salty but not muddy. The water would also probably have lots of photosynthetic bacteria/algae in it, so you would probably have blooms of green, blue, red, and brown all over. Those blooms would uptake light and carbon through that process then as they died drop the content down the long water column. All sorts of feeding below that would create a full eecological web. If there were deep sea vents, volcanic activity breaking through the sea floor, you would have a second source of energy and chemistry at the bottom. That said, the over level of life at the surface would be limited by things like iron, phosphorus, copper, and so on. Any heavier ions would be less available at the surface because there is no surface erosion bringing them in at the top so as they are bound up in dead algae they will drop to the floor.

The rate limiting at the sea floor will be based on energy but not too bad, you would likely see a lot of diverse life around vents and it would have a fairly large complexity over time. That said, the depth would make for less complex life due to the lack of light and associated vision. Some things would make light but it would be dangerous to make and would not be super common.

Another interesting consideration is the geography of the sea floor. Would there be fault lines? If there are continental plates but way under the ocean they would still have movement, so subduction and so on would play out, so you would probably have chains of vents along the diverging or merging plate boundaries. Life would spread along these lines, so life would be closely related at nearby vents but distant over the surface of the planet. I would anticipate a fairly heterogeneous population over the surface of the planet in the deep, but far less so at the surface.

It depends on the composition of the planet. If it is just a massive ball of water floating in space then it will be whatever purity that is, plus whatever space dust and impactors bring in.

If it is basically a terrestrial planet with water on top, say earth plus a lot of water, then it would be salty. The thing with salt water is contact between the water and rock. If there is sufficient heat it will circulate, so salty water from the bottom of the ocean may be heated by magma or similar and then it will be less dense, floating upwards to the surface. Along the way it will mix and cool, leading to dispersal of the dissolved salts.

The only way I can imagine a planet with a solid subsurface completely coated in freshwater would be if the planet snowballed hard, no radioactive materials left in the core making heat, no significant tidal pull on the core, and then after reaching a very cold temperature having slow addition of clean water from comets. That said, comets are dirty, they have lots of stuff, so you would need somehow clean comets. Still, at that point once sufficient water has hit the surface it could form a thick enough layer over the salty ocean below and start to melt, maybe from greenhouse effects. As soon as it runs away and keeps heating enough it will start to melt the core ice though, so you could have a short lived window in that freak occurrence but it will be very temporary and not at all likely.

What I have always wanted from a phone since Android came out is what I had with my HTC Dream (the first android phone, slide out keyboard, trackball, oh god, I loved it). I had a super chunky extended battery which made it last multiple days on a single charge, or for someone such as myself made it last the full day. My current phone has a 5003mAh battery and is 8.9mm thick. I would happily take something that was 20mm thick to have all that space taken by a battery, which based on the dimensions of the battery is about 0.17Wh/mm^3. The remaining space should provide enough space for about 23500mAh which would bring the total to just under 29000mAh. At my current usage of charging twice a day from about 20% up to 100%, so around 4000mAh x2, and assuming we want to work between 20% and 80% for extended battery longevity, that would make about 17000mAh or just over 4 days of usage. That would be a delightfully chonky phone with the easy ability to keep the charge within the healthy range, not to mention the ability to have it stand on its side or upright without a stand in many cases.

Ah, sorry, missed that. So the missed alarm notification is happening way later, like hours later, than the alarm time? That sounds like the background process is being killed in some way. In Android when you set an alarm it uses the intent system to wake itself again later. If this is failing for your alarm app only then it could be an issue with the app, but this looks like the default clock application, is that correct? It looks like you maybe installed it from the play store but it may just be an update, so just checking.

That all said, if the clock is the only app with this problem then I would address it by replacing the app. If this is impacting other apps I can only think of a few ways that it could be caused but it should be fairly obviously problematic for other apps and solving that is beyond my understanding.

I would recommend trying another alarm clock app from a source you trust. I would install something from IzzyOnDroid on FDroid but your milage may vary.

Is it leaving a missed alarm notification?

Also, have you checked for battery optimisation for the clock app?

Do you have a smart watch? I have a client who had no notifications coming in sometimes but not others and it turned out it was his watch taking over notifications. Disabling it was done from the watch and took effect immediately.

If everyone has the same amount of starting capital it is a fair game assuming both can opt out at any time.

That said, the house appears to not be able to opt out (they definitely can, you just don’t think about that part), and the house has more capital. For them each time someone plays a round there are only 3 possible outcomes. Half are the player loses, then a quarter are the player wins and plays another round, and lastly a quarter are the player wins and ends the game. The only case where the player wins is option 3, in all other cases, so 75%, the house wins because the next round has another chance to make the player lose directly at a 50/50 chance or play another round.

OK, so good, a clear starting point.

First, adding muscle is a fantastic way to go. Muscle burns energy and new muscle is not insulin resistant, so it lowers your overall insulin resistance. This is key to liberating fat and burning it for energy.

The other big key is diet. Your current diet is overwhelming your body’s ability to burn without storing as fat. This means you are gaining body fat and this will get worse over time. Gaining muscle can help a fair bit but your existing muscle tissue along with other things like fat cells and other organs are all at the point of damage from high sugar levels in your diet. The fact that you can make yourself go to the gym is great, it means you have caught this before it has gotten too bad.

So to make progress on your diet you probably need to do a couple of things. First is check for other symptoms like swelling around the jawline, fat build up over the spine between your shoulders, rash and skin discolouration, pale gums and lips, and any sort of weakness in nails and hair. These are all potential indicators of an acute deficiency and may need medical support. That said, all of these are generally helped by dietary work, so if nothing massive is presenting like a goiter or anaemic gums you should probably just move forward with diet and reevaluate later.

So what to eat. The biggest problem seems to be sugar, followed by the sugar/fat/salt hyper palatable mix, then hyper processed, and lastly problematic plants. If you eat meat, which I would strongly recommend, then paring everything down to very simple meals is the best option. A kilogram of meat per day is a reasonable base for basically everyone. If you start there and can make it a week without anything else you will have a good starting point for completing an exclusion diet. If you can’t jump directly to that then dropping out the worst items is a good step.

Dropping the worst means getting rid of the most packaged and insane foods, like cakes that last 6 months on the shelf or items with ingredients lists longer than The Art of War. If you keep eating sugars but they are in simple forms, for example honey or while fruit, you will avoid most of the worst stuff. It would also be good to learn more about cooking meat properly, so learn how to fry steak, cook chicken wings, and maybe roast a leg of pork. Learn to make basic stuff that tastes good and you will find reducing other crap easier.

Ultimately trying to hit numbers of grams of fat, protein, and carbs is a losing game. You don’t know all the internal systems you have and how they allocate energy, but you do have a handy system they operate with, hunger. We should fix your hunger to make it work properly and that is what the above is for. You have simple foods, your body learns what they provide, your hunger becomes more accurate for what you need.

Once your hunger works properly you will do something like work out and you will feel more hungry in the day or two following it. Then chasing numbers won’t be needed at all and you can relax.

You’ll get a lot of contradictory answers with this question because of two major issues.

1. There is more than one way to make your scale number go down.

2. Your scale number going down can be for multiple reasons.

For example, dropping a bunch of body fat is a way of posing weight, but it does not look any different on the scale than losing muscle mass or losing a leg. You can have more healthy recomposition where you drop a bunch of fat slowly over time and gain some muscle but overall lose absolutely no weight on the scale, and you can also gain weight without changing fat but be in a better position.

So what would you aim for? It depends on your goals. Do you want to be jacked? Maybe you have early signs of type 2 diabetes and want to stop it there. Or maybe you just really want to get rid of your skin issues like acne and dermititis.

Nobody benefits from being insulin resistant. That is the state that pushes you towards weight gain, diabetes, heart disease, and many other issues including dementia. Fixing that is a central goal for a lot of people and it actually helps with most other health related goals. If I were starting somewhere that is where I would probably try to start.

That said, if you have very little muscle that may be better to work on.

Can you give more detail about your goals?

First, start big. Get the basic shapes right with large lettering. Ideally you would have something you are comparing to like a stencil or grey printout so you can see the difference between your writing and the target.

After you have the shape fairly good large you can shrink it down. You can take your time getting to that and just make a little progress at a time.

If you find it impossible to shed your current handwriting consider using grid paper to force spacing and maybe try your non-dominant hand.

Indeed, it was a really clear case of election interference through the falsification of business records. It is a good result and now we just have to wait and see how people react. Will he beat Biden in the election? Will he be clearly rejected? I hope things end with him not being in office, but no matter what happens he cannot pardon himself for state crimes and if he wins the election and New York sentences him to prison time then there will be a novel set of issues to resolve from there. Ideally he loses, is sentenced to prison, and spends the remainder of his life offline.

To be fair, it would only have taken one jury to hang it and worrying about that makes sense. Happily thus has worked out in favour of justice, but it was not a given and people were right to fear that outcome. Hopefully we will see the predicted change in likely voting outcomes from unaffiliated voters and thus can be the end of MAGA over the next couple of election cycles.

Yeah, meds are not the solution to all problems. Some meds can at some times be useful for some people, but it is not appropriate to just blanket the population with benzodiazapines and consider the population to be mentally healthier. All sort of other stuff like improving social connection, reducing working hours, building skills, and so on can do a lot more to reduce anxiety and depression, but where is the funding for a local community garden or woodworking class?

Australian healthcare is actually pretty amazing. I had endocarditis last year and had two collapsed lungs with my blood oxygen plummeting and no clear reason for the infection. The bacteria ate one of my heart valves so my heart had to do 4 pumps to have the effect of one, pushing my heart rate up to around 140 bpm while sleeping. I was flown from my regional town to the best hospital for the job and had an emergency valve replacement. I was up and walking 2 days later and I was flown home a couple of weeks later. I now take Warfarin and will for the rest of my life, along with a beta blocker. My biggest healthcare costs involved with this whole thing is my monthly medication cost of about $30 from 5 prescriptions including ADHD medications.

That all said, mental health care is not as good here as it used to be nor as it should be. We had a conservative government for 12 years and they absolutely gutted the mental health care system. They cut funding for extremely effective programs and did some real harm to vulnerable people (if interested look up robodebt). So yes, mental health is not great here. It is way better than in the US or in the UK but it is not in line with best practice research.

The fact that we can do better does not eliminate how we we do. I didn’t die from something that should have killed me, and this is the second time I have had a really major injury that required surgeries and so on. Well, third technically. Still, I have never paid a cent at the time of use for any medical care and I have paid for the medical care of others with my taxes. Am I coming out ahead of my costs? I hope not to be honest. I hope I have contributed more than I have cost the system because I care what happens to other people. I hope I have paid my way but I will be sure to honestly file my taxes every year knowing the system I am paying in to is the same one that has saved my life. Again. Man I am stupid.

Root your phone and you can manage which APN is used by tethering. If you can’t do this consider trying a connecting to a VPN before enabling tethering, the connection will on some devices remain active on the normal APN because changing would disconnect the VPN and keeping connected is higher priority than updating the APN. Also USB tethering and WIFI tethering may behave differently.

In the end this is a good argument for better regulation. When you buy a car they don’t get to extract more money from you because you drive out of state or use it for business. The fact that telecommunications companies have so much power and access to basically monitor what you are doing and bill accordingly is insane. You should pay for a service with a simple and clear contract and all this crap should be made illegal.