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Leisher wrote: EU and many corps want to hammer Google for antitrust.

Fuck EU

The Pixel 4a showed up, and it took me about 30 to switch over my old phone.

Old phone started with a 37% charge. You connect them with a cable for the data transfer... and the new phone also started charging from the old phone, so that 7 minutes (exactly) of data transfer took my old phone battery down to 9%. Yeesh.

The "3 button" system of home/back/apps is gone by default.... now you control those things with fancy swipes. I had to google twice to figure out how to open all apps, and never figured it out.... so I googled how to get into Settings, and turned the 3-button functionality back on.'

I have a lot of "alerts" to deactivate, again. I hate getting woken up at night because I got a text that something in my amazon wish list went on sale.

I bought this for a case, because I didn't need the full waterproof otterbox, since I have device protection:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B08K3Y745T/

I got the red one. It's pretty, functional, comes with the metal tab built-in so it sticks to my magnetic car mounts, and it has 2 screen protectors so in 6 months when mine is getting fingernailed up, I already have a spare. Would purchase again

Was just going through my phone settings. Does having "Google One" give you a VPN service? I just noticed a toggle for that.

GORDON wrote: Was just going through my phone settings. Does having "Google One" give you a VPN service? I just noticed a toggle for that.

Google Fi does.

Assuming only available through the phone?

GORDON wrote: Assuming only available through the phone?

Yes.

That fucking Google commercial for their new music speaker thing, and right in the commercial they give a "Hey Google" command and every time it wakes up my hub. Those fucking assholes.

GORDON wrote: That fucking Google commercial for their new music speaker thing, and right in the commercial they give a "Hey Google" command and every time it wakes up my hub. Those fucking assholes.

I thought the commercials were supposed to have some way of having real ones ignore them.

Commercial: "Hey Google, play" *something*

The hub off my left shoulder: "Ok, I'll play that." *pause* "Sorry, that app isn't available."

Every time.

Apparently I don't watch enough commercials.

GORDON wrote: The "3 button" system of home/back/apps is gone by default.... now you control those things with fancy swipes. I had to google twice to figure out how to open all apps, and never figured it out.... so I googled how to get into Settings, and turned the 3-button functionality back on.'

Honestly, i like having the real estate instead of that bar. It will only take you a few minutes to figure out the swipes. There's 3. Swipe from the side to go back; swipe up to move between open apps, hold and swipe up to see your app drawer.

Let me tell you about my recent "Google Backup and Sync" experience. There are a lot of pieces to this, so you may not want to bother putting them all together. But I'll share anyway.

1. I had a big 3TB drive with a partition, one was my P (Photo) drive and one was my M (Music) drive.

2. Google Backup and Sync kept active cloud backups of that data, in separate folders, of course.

3. I had one more a local backup of those data files on an external USB drive, for Jesus. It was two years old and out of date, but I figured it would save me 500GB of downloading, if I ever needed to, I don't know, repopualte a drive, or something.

4. This drive completely failed. Replaced it with 2 2-TB drives, I called them M and P.

5. Filled in the data from my local backup, to the new drives, respectively. It was out of date, but I also learned half the mp3 files never backed up at all. Everything between Cell Dweller and Lada Gaga was just not there at all.

6. Updated GB&S to point at the new M and P drives. GB&S starts immediately analyzing the drives. I peek in on it from time to time.

7. I realize immediately PLEX can still see the files that do not exist (All music between C and L). Discussed that elsewhere, still don't have a definitive answer.

8. GB&S is not generous with information. I can see it is "Uploading" the local files I manually populated the new drive with. I can see it UPLOADING the files between C & L that don't exist. I can see it Downloading the same. None of it makes sense.

9. When you go to your online storage files, it doesn't give you much information at all. You can't just tell it "point at this drive instead." But somehow it figured it all out, anyway.

10. Took about a week, but as far as I can tell both of my new server drives are populated, nothing missing. Local backup was 2018, I see my vacation pics from 2019 and 2020. So....... all seems to be well.

Again, GB&S could be a lot more user friendly instead of "just trust us it all works." It seems strange to say that, but there was a long week of a lot of uncertainty, not knowing if it was functioning at all.

GORDON wrote: Let me tell you about my recent "Google Backup and Sync" experience.

I'm beginning to organize years of unorganized files and videos.

Here's a thing I don't like: if I have a folder called "Scuba" with a bunch of unorganized videos in it, and I create a new subfolder called "2017" and move a video into that subfolder, then GB&S deletes the old file and re-uploads it from my PC into the new subfolder.

That's dumb. It was already just right there.

Leisher wrote: ↑Thu Feb 18, 2021 1:01 pm FB preemptively attacks Australia.

Backfiring in a big way.

Leisher wrote: ↑Fri Feb 19, 2021 2:11 pm

Leisher wrote: ↑Thu Feb 18, 2021 1:01 pm FB preemptively attacks Australia.

Backfiring in a big way.

I think that narrative is getting reversed. As of now FB allows free sharing of information/news. The australian government was taking steps to pass a law... to "bully..." FB into monetizing and paying taxes on it. FB said "fuck it then, no more news sharing in australia. your legislation is moot."

ANd now the story is getting turned around on them, FB is the bully.

Fuck that.

Australia is already known to be oppressive with their broadnand/internet laws. I think FB has every right to not play their little games. If australians suffer for it, maybe they'll put better people in elected positions.