Yarn.social Online Meetup 25th May (See: #fcghsma for details)
prologic
twtxt.net
 (1h ago)
↳ In-reply-to » @prologic Regarding the static URL: The hostname at least is a CNAME record and resolves to something at cloudfront. What I meant was that I, as a user, cannot configure this URL anywhere in the Android UI. 🤔

Oh so it really does hit some stupid arbitrary endpoint at AWS 😱

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movq
www.uninformativ.de
 (2h ago)
↳ In-reply-to » @prologic Hmm, have you used a GPS device 15, 20 years ago? I had one in my car. It would take a long time until it got a first “fix” of your location. That’s because it can take up to 12 minutes until you have gathered all the data directly from the satellites. These days, GPS trackers on smartphones get a fix within seconds, maybe 30 seconds tops, because they get pre-seeded with (approximated) satellite positions via A-GPS.

(The old device I’m referring to was a handheld device. It was not built into the car and was not running 24/7.)

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movq
www.uninformativ.de
 (2h ago)
↳ In-reply-to » One thing I’ve learned from locking down my Android phone (see #pknsrda):

I’ll make an experiment: I’ll keep blocking all the phone’s internet traffic and then we’ll see how bad the GPS performance will get in a couple of hours/days. 😅 (If I got it all wrong and it still works fine, that’d be great!)

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movq
www.uninformativ.de
 (2h ago)
↳ In-reply-to » One thing I’ve learned from locking down my Android phone (see #pknsrda):

@prologic@twtxt.net Hmm, have you used a GPS device 15, 20 years ago? I had one in my car. It would take a long time until it got a first “fix” of your location. That’s because it can take up to 12 minutes until you have gathered all the data directly from the satellites. These days, GPS trackers on smartphones get a fix within seconds, maybe 30 seconds tops, because they get pre-seeded with (approximated) satellite positions via A-GPS.

We also not only have the USA’s GPS these days but also other satellite systems like the EU’s Galileo or Russia’s Glonass. A-GPS helps you get “in contact” quickly with more satellites, which enhances the precision quite a lot.

So, yeah, you can use it without A-GPS. But it would be very annoying and imprecise. I bought a new phone last year and A-GPS was broken on that one (I saw no internet traffic at all), which made it basically useless, to the point where I wouldn’t want to use it at all. I sent it back and bought another model.

To my knowledge, the only way to use GPS without something like A-GPS is to have it turned on all the time, so you get regular updates directly from the satellites.

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prologic
twtxt.net
 (4h ago)

I will be deleting 14 inactive and unused accounts (for >3 years) on my Gitea instance git.mills.io at some point over the next few days. One of those accounts is yours @adi@twtxt.net – If you’d like to keep it, I suggest you sign-in 😅

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prologic
twtxt.net
 (8h ago)
↳ In-reply-to » One thing I’ve learned from locking down my Android phone (see #pknsrda):

I can’t imagine it’s a static URL either, it surely has to be a unicast address of some sort. Relying on a static URL sounds like an utter disaster to me 🤔 I’d have to read the open spec on this…

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prologic
twtxt.net
 (8h ago)
↳ In-reply-to » One thing I’ve learned from locking down my Android phone (see #pknsrda):

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Surely it isn’t as bad as this though right? 🤔 I mean reading the Wikipedia page on A-GPS, it sounds to me like it sends enough data to the nearest tower to give you enough data to warm-up the GPS receivership, presumably with GPS coordinates of the tower itself? I can imagine this data payload would include the Date/Time, IEMI and possibly your SIM details and Phone number (why not). It could be worse 🤣

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movq
www.uninformativ.de
 (15h ago)

One thing I’ve learned from locking down my Android phone (see #pknsrda):

The data for assisted GPS does not come from Google or, better yet, A PUBLIC SERVICE, but from a server hosted by the hardware manufacturer. Without regularly fetching fresh A-GPS data, the GPS performance is much worse (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assisted_GNSS).

This means that the hardware manufacturer has (more or less) direct control over whether I’m able to use GPS or not. This isn’t an Android setting, it’s buried deep within the device, no way to change the URL. If that manufacturer decides one day to cut me off, for whatever reason, or goes bankrupt or whatever, then I’ll have to buy a new phone.

And of course, this data transfer is encrypted as well, so I don’t know what my phone sends to those servers.

All this smartphone business is such a clusterfuck. I should have never bought one of those things.

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movq
www.uninformativ.de
 (1d ago)
↳ In-reply-to » I have a day off, national holiday.

Whoohoo, it’s fixed. 🥳 Now I can look at funny pictures again!

I took the opportunity to remove some dependencies on the internet from my workflow. Actually, outages like these are healthy.

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mckinley
twtxt.net
 (1d ago)
↳ In-reply-to » How To Efficiently Copy Files To Multiple Destinations: https://mckinley.cc/notes/20240508-copy-multiple-destinations.xhtml

@prologic@twtxt.net I know, right? It’s a very elegant solution to the problem using standard command line utilities. It was too hard to find. I went through 3 or 4 Stack Exchange threads from my Web search before I found somebody linking to this answer. People were misunderstanding the question and suggesting all kinds of crazy methods including weird, proprietary, GUI Windows software.

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