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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 16th, 2023

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  • Might regret it but I just ordered an S23 after trying it out at BestBuy. I saw that Samsung had a Black Friday deal for $200 off with trade-in of an old device. I have an old Galaxy S7 just sitting in a drawer and was amazed to see it on the list of accepted devices.

    I’ve really been wanting a smaller phone as my OnePlus 8T gets really uncomfortable to hold after a while. Love everything about it except the size.

    I also looked at the Pixel 8 but the S23 felt like the better choice with less compromises. Pixel 8 Pro is even bigger than my 8t, so no-go there.

    Really wish the S23 was rootable (in US at least). That’s prob the biggest drawback for me. Will see if I can live without that.





  • For the technically skilled, there is BlueBubbles to get iMessage on Android. I set this up recently and it works quite well. I’m running a MacOS Ventura virtual machine using docker-osx on one of my personal servers and pretty much all iMessage functionality is available. I modified the Android (flutter) project locally to get my own push notifications working using my self-hosted ntfy instance as a UnifiedPush provider instead of needing to use Firebase.

    There is also Beeper which bridges iMessage and many other chat services in one app, but I wanted something fully open source that I can manage myself, plus I think there’s still a wait-list and I didn’t want to hand over my Apple ID to a third party.

    It’s hard trying to convince people (esp. iPhone users) to use a cross platform solution because they perceive us Android users as the problem and they know iMesssge just works. And for the non- technical, that’s understandable even if frustrating. So as a software engineer, I am the one making accomodations so they can still use iMessage. But it also made for a fun project for me to learn about.


  • This time over telnet.

    telnet is an insecure protocol. Ideally you should use ssh instead but most which some modern BBS’s support both. Of course if you want to dial in on legacy “authentic” hardware then SSH isn’t possible.

    💡You can SSH (or telnet) from your phone using Termux and it works pretty well (though admittedly not as good without full ANSI support). It doesn’t use full height of screen but is still usable. BBS’s could be enhanced to support that though.

    Here’s an example of how one looks on my phone:

    ssh NEW@bbs.bottomlessabyss.net -p 2222 -c aes256-cbc

    Screenshot_20231010-174323_Termux