u/lukmly013 💾 (lemmy.sdf.org)

I like computers, trains, space, radio-related everything and a bunch of other tech related stuff. User of GNU+Linux.
I am also dumb and worthless.
My laptop is ThinkPad L390y running Arch.
I own RTL-SDRv3 and RSP1 clone.

SDF Unix shell username: user224

  • 9 Posts
  • 287 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 17th, 2023

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  • Slovakia

    Notify my employer that I won’t show up, go to doctor and wait in the waiting room. When the nurse shows up, give her the insurance card and wait for your turn. They’ll check you, and if it’s nothing special (requiring a specialist), you’ll probably get prescription for some meds to pick up.
    Then you get those in a pharmacy. Either it’s electronic, or if the system is once again broken, you hand them the Rx paper that the Dr. gives you in that case. And then you figure out what you’re about to pay. A lot of things will be fully covered by insurance, but potentially you’ll have to copay. There’s also a chance the Dr. tells you to get something that isn’t covered, like some specific eyedrops, cough meds, probiotics (if you have antibiotics for example), etc.

    The pharmacist may recommend a cheaper alternative, will likely tell you recommended dosage, tell you that once again this specific Dr. prescribed something that hasn’t been manufactured for the past 30 years, and in the rare case, tell you the prescription seems dangerous and to contact the Dr.
    And also decrypt any handwriting/encoding.







  • Advanced versions can even instruct your phone to change important settings under the hood and expose you to significant vulnerabilities.

    The scariest thing for me.

    At one point I got something along the lines of “Your carrier has changed some settings, tap to review.”, once again showing me that my phone isn’t mine.
    In this case it was emergency alerts, but I don’t know what all they can change. It wasn’t a carrier phone, by the way.
    I also found apps related to (I think) multiple carriers, just disabled by default on Moto G52 5G. Orange was definitely one of them.





  • Unfortunately, when buying a phone I always have to make some compromise. If I aim for hardware or very specific feature, there’s going to be a compromise in software.

    If I was looking for software, Google Pixel with GrapheneOS looks quite nice.

    To be specific with the key features/functionality of my phone:

    Software: Surviving high DPI without the software falling apart (I hate how large everything is on phones by default, plus >=600dp the tablet mode is awesome), OMAPI (needed for external eUICC), manual band mode selection (indoors and in vehicles this can sometimes make a huge difference, like from 35Mbps to 150Mbps based on my tests), manual cell tower selection (I haven’t yet made much use of this apart from figuring out that towers in city seem to have 1km limit), and a lot of other stuff in Engineer Mode that I don’t yet understand so I won’t touch (some settings can persist factory reset).

    Hardware: 85.14Wh battery (22,000mAh for the more marketable way to write it, and for comparison, my ThinkPad has a 45Wh battery), Dual SIM + SD card (not hybrid), IR blaster, headphone jack, custom button (short, long, double click), 1,000lm light that sucks up 6W (I don’t have a way to measure that though), night vision camera (IR), FM radio that works without earphones (still works better with them).







  • I honestly just fear updates at this point. They always seem to break more stuff than fix, the only exception to that for me has been PixelExperience custom ROM (discontinued).

    Edit: Android is simply missing proper backups. Bad update on my laptop? Timeshift. Bad update on stock Android? It is what it is.

    First Moto G5s Plus which got high battery drain, sluggishness and crashes after Android 8.1 update. This was bad enough I had to fix it with custom ROM. Then Poco X3 Pro which reportedly had issues with performance after MIUI 13 update, so I stayed on older software. Now my Ulefone Armor 24, which only has one update primarily to fix Google pay, but also brings a newer security patch, reportedly causing many crashes that make the phone unreliable and a bad experience.
    Also many Samsung phones had an update that removed access to manual band mode selection, and if I recall correctly, that update didn’t even revert them to default.

    It’s not the best for security, but I basically now just fear any updates. If everything works, then it can only be broken.

    Maybe I should at least somehow start checking known vulnerabilities. As of recently, I should probably stop using applock on my outdated Ulefone

    Exposed ”com.pri.applock.LockUI“ activity allows any other malicious application, with no granted Android system permissions, to inject an arbitrary intent with system-level privileges to a protected application. One must know the protecting PIN number (it might be revealed by exploiting CVE-2024-13916)

    https://cert.pl/en/posts/2025/05/CVE-2024-13915/

    Though my device has AppLock v14, so I am not sure.


  • This makes me worried about the ultra cheap Chinese manufacturers. I mean the likes of Unihertz, Umidigi, Ulefone, Doogee, Oukitel, etc

    Usually these don’t get updates at all.
    Even weirder, for example I have Ulefone Armor 24. They used to ship with Android 13. They still advertised it with Android 13 when I bought it. Mine like a few others have said arrived with Android 14, but the earlier ones aren’t offered A14 update.
    Someone on Reddit contacted support about this and they replied that they don’t provide cross-level upgrades because Google doesn’t allow them to release those to end users.

    Anyway, point is, they save on everything possible, starting with software updates. And I have doubts about them changing this, unless EU is a large market for them.