Creepy.

Google is using Your Gmail Account to Track Your Purchases www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/goog…

If you have trouble remembering what you ate for supper last night, it wasn’t epic.

Democratic Presidential Candidates:

I think we’re up to a gaggle of 20 at last count. I’m going to seperate out the 3 that I think have potential. (All subject change.)

• Berine Sanders - he’s farther Left than I’m comfortable with, but he’s the only one that has truely new ideas. This is the guy we should have run against Trump the first time. I like his ideas on health care. He would offer a kinder, and more reasoned Populist alternative to Trump.

• Elizabeth Warren - perhaps a little too intellectual for prime time but I generally agree with her. I’m not sure she can capture the public imagination, she’s about as exciting as watching cement set. So far she has not done well in her skirmishes with Trump. Still, she would be way better than Trump.

• Joe Biden - I consider him the “safe candidate” I think Joe, flawed as he is, has the moxie to take on Trump without leaving “The Establishment” wing of elites in the Democratic Party. Which means he won’t step too far out of the status quo and there is a danger to that because we need some bold reforms and I’m afraid Joe isn’t up for that. Still I like Joe.

It’s really early days so my lineup might change. Just thinking out loud.

Brinkmanship with Iran is a dangerous policy. One would think we have had enough of getting entangled in Middle East conflicts as it is, let alone seek out yet another one. I’m sure Iran is a bad actor, but our side ie. Saudi Arabia dosen’t fill me warm fuzzies either.

Underlying all the national and oil rivalry in the region is a sectarian Sunni vs. Shia Islam conflict, which we Westerners would be well advised to stay out of. This Islamic sectarian conflict is something that only the Islamic world can deal with and it will probably be bloody just like The Reformation in Europe was bloody. It’s sad, but lasting peace cannot be imposed from outside the Islamic world.

What the US should be doing is working hard to decrease our dependancy on Middle East oil so we have little cause to get involved. Instead we build bigger pickup trucks and more roads and more fuel guzzling airports. It’s time for a rethink both in the US and Europe too.

A lot of people have become disillusioned with the traditional political elites and parties of both the Right and Left in the Western World. And 2 party systems don’t offer enough of a difference to matter since both end up supporting the status quo.

Supreme Court says Apple will have to face App Store monopoly lawsuit - The Verge www.theverge.com/2019/5/13…

EU will get these first.

e Foundation announced last week that they would be releasing refurbished phones with eOS pre installed in early June.

Now, it appears, that these are only for EU residents. e Foundation did not make this clear in their announcement because they probably wanted to see where the demand was coming from. The Foundation is set up in the EU, plus I think worries about privacy are deeper in the EU, so it makes sense for the EU to get first release.

Still it’s disappointing.

I just hope the US doesn’t get abandoned or frozen out in this.

Anyway, it was nice to see a good line-up of phones for the EU.

Disgruntlement File: McDonald’s seems to have discontinued the Triple Stack McMuffins. They had disappeared from the McD’s cash register this morning. Also the classical music has disappeared. Bummer. Triple Stack McBummer.

Fixing the turn signals on my 2010 Ford Transit Connect is going to cost US $1200.00 because Ford does not make sub-parts for the entire headlight turn signal assembly must be replaced. Good enginnering Ford.

Watching: The Undertaker Mystery series, Swiss in German with English subtitles. Approx. 60 min. Quirky series about an ex-cop who has become an undertaker but still solves mysteries. I’ve watched the first 3 episodes of season 1 and this is pretty good. Has a quirky dry wit about it but it can be dark without a lot of gore. There are 5 seasons available on Mhz and it’s good so far.

Acquired: Ruined by Design by Mike Monteiro

As part of the Indieweb Book Club for Ruined by Design by Mike Monteiro I just acquired a paperback copy of this book.

Just did a fast skim page through: I expect I’ll agree with some of Monteiro’s basic premises about design, I also noticed that the author paints with a pretty broad brush. (That’s not always bad, since I do the same thing.) As part of that he makes some assertions like religions are designed to hate each other and that “cultural appropriation” is universally accepted as being a Bad Thing. I understand that these are not the main thrust of his arguments but his misuse of them undermines his argument and his authority - at least with this reader. The first rule of debate is to examine the other person’s “givens”. If the “givens” are faulty then that weakens their whole argument.

I won’t get into nit picking on these, because that would take me off topic.

This was also posted to /en/bookclub.

My 2010 Ford Transit Connect had to be towed into the dealer this morning. Low miles on it, but I can see time is taking it’s toll. With the hood up I noticed a lot of vaccum hoses are cracking on it and will need to be replaced the next time it goes into the shop.

Two things about fast food, single use plastics: 1. I think the corporate world is sufficiantly on notice that they need to phase these out, 2. I’m pretty confident we can come up with acceptable alternatives from natural sources.

The problem is one of scale. Take plastic straws and think about how many straws just McDonald’s goes through just in the US. I’m willing to bet that all the American paper straw plants in the US right now can’t supply enough paper straws if they tried producing flat out. And of course there is the supply chain: are the paper straw producers suppliers ready to provide enough material for the demand? And the merials also need to be sustainably sourced. Now add all the other US fast food chains: DQ, Burger King, Wendy’s, Hardees all switching over to paper straws. Now add in the mom and pop food joints. In the US alone the demand is going to be tremendous. On top of this, we really have not been making paper straws in the US since the 1960’s - we’ve almost forgotten how.

Plus I’m sure there are other materials we can make disposable drinking straws from besides paper. Equally, I’m pretty sure these are being, frantically, developed.

That’s just straws.

Now add in serving containers, things your condiments come in, disposable eating utensils and changing away from plastics become huge.

And we have not even added in the EU and the rest of the developed and semi-developed world yet. The scale is immense. The opportunity is immense and it boggles the mind.

All this is to say that the problem won’t be solved overnight. It’s going to take a few years, but we need to keep the pressure on lest the food industry will continue using plastics.

I’m on Season 2 of Magellan. Weird French mystery show. They keep changing Inspector Magellan’s sidekick. The house he lives in with his two daughters has changed. The actors playing the daughters have changed, but worse one daughter has gotten like 4 years younger - before she was a tween now she’s a little kid! Last night, replacement older daughter was gone, they said she went to England she only lasted one episode. Magellan’s office set has changed.

Frankly the acting isn’t that good and I don’t care about the characters that much. There is a mystery in each episode which is okay but I don’t think the producers really know what they want this show to be a mystery or a family show. The biggest mystery is how the daughter actually got younger.

The good news is that the police can always drive right up to the door of each destination and there is always a parking space - this is how you know it is fiction. Frankly, you can skip this show and never miss it.

Windows 10 will soon ship with a full, open source, GPLed Linux kernel | Ars Technica arstechnica.com/gadgets/2…

At current count, it’s going to take 20 minutes just to read the list of Democrats running for President on the 2020 primary ballot.

Darling lets you run macOS apps on a Linux computer. (Just like Wine lets you run Windows apps on Linux.)

I signed up for the [Librem One] privacy apps suite. Mainly I wanted a VPN, the Social and Chat apps don’t really interest me. My remarks are about the iOS apps.

1. “Tunnel” the VPN works just fine. Simple to use.
2. Email - for iOS there is no app like for Android. You just set up the email address in iOS Mail like you would any other email account.
3. Social - works well with my Mastodon account. Looks like you can use it on more than one instance.
4. Chat - frankly I have not looked at it and I doubt I will use it. I couldn’t get my friends to try Telegram so I have no chance of getting them to try Librem One. SMS is good enough for me.

What I’d like to see is a cloud file storage app, contacts, etc.

My rule for setting up new phones: keep apps to an absolute minimum of what I actually use. And substiute browser based web apps wherever possible (ie Twitter, Youtube etc.)

Free Software Directory maintained by the Free Software Foundation. A Directory of free software available online with over 16,000 listings.

IPhone face recognition does not like me wearing a hat. This is going to be a problem.

Gmail’s automated spam-filtering is making it much harder to run an independent mail-server Boing Boing

I’ve mentioned other efforts to De-Google your phone (link at bottom) and I should mention other efforts.

e Foundation has made a comprehensive list of the suite of apps they are working on which will run on their fork of Android which has been purged of Google Services. (This means their version of Android has been purged of Google’s spyware.)

Use of the apps for these services (email, messenger, maps, search, etc.) presumes you have managed to flash e’s operating system onto your device or you have had someone do it for you.

As you can see from the link above: e Foundation’s suite of apps and services are much more extensive than Librem One’s. The inclusion of things like an alternative for Google Maps, weather, cloud storage go well beyond Librem’s suite and frankly, better address the things we use our phone for (ie. navigation) in real life.

Like Librem, the e Foundation OS only exists in Beta form, although progress is rapidly progressing towards a ver. 1.0 stable release in 2019. I’m waiting for that stable release to come out before trying it.

Reference: Librem One: Escape Google, Increase Privacy

See also: e Foundation website

In case you missed it: there is a new/forthcoming suite of apps linked to cloud services that increase privacy and help you de-Google your Android or iOS devices. ramblinggit.com/2019/04/3…

Puri.sm is starting a campaign to create a suite of online services and apps to help you regain some privacy. OMGUbuntu Article Here And the Librem One website here. No ads, no tracking. There is a small monthly fee, because free stuff online comes with tracking and ads.

Apps are available for Android, iOS and eventually for the Librem 5 privacy phone which is due out in the third quarter of 2019.

This is a smart move, because:

1. It gives current Android and iOS users a suite of more private alternatives that they can use and get used to right now.
2. It will make it easier for Android and iOS users to switch to a Librem 5 phone in the future and should make sales easier.
3. It reassures Librem 5 buyers, that there will be a core suite of needed cloud services and apps for that device.
4. It eliminates totally depending on the open source community to develop these critical apps for the Librem 5. I’m sure the open source community will develop similar apps, but this takes the guess work out of it.

Android users will get the most immediate if they adopt these Librem One apps and quit using the free apps from Google and others, that they replace. iOS has more privacy built in - Apple does some tracking they just don’t sell their tracking data to others. But still, if you are using third party apps on iOS they may be tracking you. Apple’s App Store privacy guidelines are tighter, but they are not 100%.

I like the fact that they have included a VPN app called “Tunnel” in with the price of the standard suite. That makes the US $7.99 monthly price seem much more reasonable.

I don’t see any mention of a calendar app in Librem One. I suspect this will be a freebie that will come with the Librem 5 phone.

Anyway, this is a good move and well worth looking into.