Adding to what others here have already said, I’d definitely download Signal and see if you can get any people to move from WhatsApp/Telegram/whatever to Signal.

I don’t know much about iOS apps, but you could look into more privacy focused YouTube clients, and possibly 2FA clients too (although that’s a bit of a controversial topic on iOS AFAIK).

I saw you mention in another comment that you use Amazon Alexa for smart home appliances. Depending on interest in selfhosting / time / motivation to move away from Amazon, you could look into using Home Assistant instead. It even has a Lemmy community: !homeassistant@lemmy.world.

Yep my mistake, I confused ShadowSocks with Cloak.

I’m afraid your best bet here will be using WhatsApp.

Edit:
FindMy (for Android) might also be usable for that, but honestly if you just want it to work I’d still vouch for WhatsApp.

Signal supports a single momentary position, but not live location.

i use miracast where I can (my TV and Samsung phone support it natively), as it pretty much just works and is a decent protocol. Sadly every phone manufacturer that isn’t Samsung seems to have abandoned it right now, but it is still widely supported in TVs. On Linux, there is the app gnome-network-displays (yes it also works on KDE) to cast your screen over miracast.

Miracast is an actual local streaming protocol (closely related to WiFi Direct). For content streaming the only FOSS standard I am aware of is FCast, but sofar it only is implemented in the GrayJay Android app.

Edit: There is also Deskreen for casting a PC screen.

For casting mobile to PC there is also scrcpy.

This isn’t really casting, but I often find that an HDMI cable (often paired with a USB-C to HDMI dongle) is the simplest and most reliable way to display a phone screen on another monitor (as long as the phone supports DP altmode).

What worked for me at my old school was using a ShadowSocks proxy. Basically what this does, is it takes all your traffic and just makes it look like random https traffic (AFAIK). ShadowSocks is just a proxy. The description fits the Cloak module, mentioned below.

I believe multiple VPNs support this, for me with PIA VPN it’s in the settings under the name “Multi-Hop” (PIA only supports this on the Desktop App, not on mobile).

This technique is pretty much impossible to block, unless you ban every single VPN ShadowSocks Proxy IP. If that is the case for you (chances are practically 0), you could also selfhost ShadowSocks in combination with the Cloak module, however this method is a lot more complicated.

If the main battery isn’t “meant to be replaced”, it will often act as the CMOS battery (e.g. MacBooks have been doing this since roughly 2008).

I find it even more puzzling as surely it has to be a decent increase in server demand to constantly be streaming video. How can that be worth it??

+1 on OnlyOffice, it has 1:1 formatting compatibility with Microsoft Office. Unlike LibreOffice, it doesn’t have to translate documents between odt and docx in the background.

In the same vein, OnlyOffice has poor compatibility with odt files etc.

Quite a few cars also still have a SIM card hidden somewhere, which can be removed. The location of it varies widely though and they’re usually pretty hard to find.

That’s incorrect, Graphene OS has Android Auto support.

I was very disappointed with the (default) Camera after switching to Graphene, luckily you can just download the Pixel Camera (including all the Pixel optimizations) from Play Store on Graphene OS or download it as an APK bundle from some other sites (downloading the normal APK won’t work, it has to be the bundle).

Yesss fcast looks incredibly promising. Sadly the only app implementing it seems to be GrayJay, I really hope it will catch on more.

Not OP, but this instantly made me think of the worst-case scenario PDFs I stumbled upon on Lemmy recently.

TVHeadend is the way, I’ve been running it with a USB satellite tuner for 5+ years. Setting it up can be a little confusing, but once it’s running you pretty much never have to touch it again.

As for clients, there’s a Jellyfin plugin, however it seems to not work for me right now.

My client of choice is Kodi with the TVHeadend plugin, and that works great. If you still want Jellyfin integration, you could just add your recordings folder as a library in Jellyfin.

Could I purchase two different brand drives and use them with btrfs?

I don’t quite remember the source for this, but I believe I read some time ago that it’s actually a good thing to have separate drives. The reasoning is, if you buy two identical drives (at the same time), the likelyhood of both drives failing around the same time is severely higher.

This is then amplified by the fact that rebuilding a RAID puts a lot of strain on the non-dead drive, so if ie. drive 1 dies and drive 2 is about to die, the strain you put on drive 2 in order to rebuild your RAID onto drive 3 might kill drive 2 before you even finish rebuilding your RAID.

Again, this is just from my memory, it might be worth doing some more research on.

The Pixel 8 and onwards technically support DP alt mode again. I’m not sure about stock, but I believe I read about some people having it just work in Graphene OS.

Incase you’re still searching, chech my other comment here.

Slightly old post, but hopefully still helpful to someone:

I managed to read out my analog water meter using the following ESP32 image: https://github.com/jomjol/AI-on-the-edge-device

It uses an ESP32-CAM module that actively reads your meter, using machine vision. The data is then published via MQTT. There are even some stl files for cases/mounts for common energy meters.

Once setup properly (with a 3D printed case from the provided stl files), I found it to work quite well. I have a pretty clean standard German water meter though.

Public transport in Magic Earth mostly works for me. It’s not as good as Google Maps, but it’s better than nothing.