Ive done that but just wifi. It works. Its more of a "for fun" kinda deal. I cant get rid of my smart phone because of a couple of necessary apps for work.

The CPAP lockout is something I went through. The company behind my CPAP does not allow you to get ANYTHING off the device. But there is an SD Card that you can get all the info you want from your old system. Its arbitrarily locked out.

You are also unable to repair anything on the device without insurance getting involved. And insurance is often at OEM prices (think 200+ for a basic mask). Thankfully, people have illegally added STLs/chips/parts/etc... online that you can basically reverse engineer the entire device nowadays. As long as you use medical safe materials, it saves you literally thousands of dollars. Ive replaced quite a few parts and the device is still working after many years of usage.

Im not sure what you mean.

Itch.io and GOG are great alternatives.

Nice! I hope they go down in price at some point.

Apologies but what am I looking at here. Looks cool, some kind of AR glasses with the steam deck? Im a bit lost.

Sega genisis if we are talking real hardware. Followed by Gameboy.

Lately I've been loving my miyoo mini plus and steam deck combo. They are both retro game powerhouses.

It has had a huge increase according to the statistics. I wonder where they are getting their numbers from. Both fedidb and other sources say the number of users are only going up.

Note, different websites have different total user counts. fedidb kinda goes up and down and I dont understand why.

But for example fedidb states 7,494,053 total Mastodon users whereas https://mastodon.social/@mastodonusercount states 15,467,187 accounts Pretty big difference. So there is probably much more accounts than what fedidb has. Or other counts are off by a large factor. Either way, lots of new faces in the fediverse! If anyone knows why theres such as discrepancy, let us know!

Lemmy is almost at 400k users alone. (391,247 ATM of writing). Its probably higher as there are servers that dont federate.

My last bastions of Google are:

1. Email. Its rock solid stable, but I know they are using it to mine data. This is a good service...but im still looking at proton at some point to make the switch. Or coming up with a solution myself.
2. Maps. Maps is also another really good service they give out for free. I have tried a huge number of alternatives, but still have no real alternative. OSM+ is the closest and works really well in emergencies but its pretty terrible at searching for anything specific to get to.
3. Youtube. This is the one I think I can possibly remove at some point. Some creators have their videos on other sites so it might be a mishmash for a while. But the best ones dont. I might just get into audio-books or some other sort of entertainment. Peertube is also a great alternative. And throwing money at !tilvids@mstdn.social might be better in the long run.

Ironically their search has taken a turn for the worse, so other sites are much better in my opinion.

I pay other sites for creators. So for me $$ isn't the issue. Not when premium is less than 20.

The biggest issue with YouTube for me is that their ads are very intrusive/track quite a bit about what you do/can actually be malware. On addition, there's a good chance that money is mostly going to YouTube and not the people creating their works. There's a reason patreon is a thing for most successful creators. I also hate ads. I don't hate people getting paid, I hate YouTube for shoving ads down my throat and then turning around not paying people their dues. And in my opinion the worst way possible.

Once server side ad blocking makes its way into mainstream, ad blocking I think will get interesting. Closer to the old ad blockers for cable television.