mantlepro

I don't see evidence of the boards being modified by a 3rd party per se (other than a poor soldering job when compared with the rest of the board).

The most obvious modification appears to be passive capacitors (1206), wire, and globs of solder.

It would be more probable that the supplier made a mistake or wished to improve the circuit and did a hack job instead of iterating the PCB, which would be a more expensive operation for the supplier.

^ This is exactly what I started doing three years ago and love it. No more tiny rectangle screens stealing my attention; no more endless scrolling, notifications, tiny keyboards, or app stores; no more feeding the data monsters or being forced to upgrade when things fall out of support. Tons more time to think more deeply about things. Still very well connected via email, www, and VoIP, and I do have a work phone, but it's only used for work-related calls and SMS.

I opened an account with voip.ms after ditching my smartphone last year and was pleasantly surprised with the reliability and interoperability. Works decently well with Linphone, ATA devices, forwarding to a dumb phone, land line, etc. With it you can also receive SMS messages (and reply to them) by email.

mu4e (and occasionally gnus)

Email has increasingly become my preferred method of communication over the past few years.

As the popularity of other instant messaging platforms ebb and flow, email has remained one of the few ubiquitous methods for discourse, messaging, and notification.

In addition to its ubiquity, I like that email enables slow thinking / maintaining focus and doesn't require an always-on internet connection.

I also like that it's decentralized; though some of the bigger players have certainly gained enough users to control the ecosystem a bit, Fastmail, ProtonMail, Posteo, Gandi, and others, as well as self-hosting are all available.

In terms of client software, mu4e has been absolutely fantastic for searching, and indexing (via mu), threading, marking, replies, etc. making email work even better. mutt was also a favorite MUA for many years before my journey into Emacs.

For responding to SMS messages via email, voip.ms gets the job done as a SMS/email gateway, helping to consolidate the majority of my asynchronous messages into the same platform.

i3 has been a favorite window manager for a number of years, though I recently started using EXWM and greatly enjoy the translation layer (simulation-keys) that allows Emacs key bindings to be used in other applications.

Cloudflare's business has never involved selling user data or targeted advertising

The cloudfare site calls googletagmanager.com, marketo.com, linkedin.com, and bizible.com. Do any of these sell user data or support targeted advertising?

Productivity increased greatly for me after ditching my smartphone for a dumb phone and using a bullet journal when I'm away from the computer. That plus a disciplined regimen of daily planning, execution, and migrating tasks to the next day if not finished; learned from "Time Management for System Administrators" by Tom Limoncelli.

Check out organice https://github.com/200ok-ch/organice for mobile

Would there be a desktop or browser version of the software in the works? It'd be nice to see first-class support for free/libre operating systems so admins, shop owners, and customers alike wouldn't be forced to use walled-garden smart phone ecosystems.

Definitely glad that the Kindle hasn't succumbed to app store peer pressure.

One feature I would really like to see is a decent hyphenation engine for improved typography.

If an encryption back door exists, one can assume that it will be exploited. The same applies to private key encryption where a company holds private keys instead of individuals holding their own.

In addition to HTML, extra care should be taken for plain text rendering as well. Many users disable HTML and images to minimize tracking and malware. I'd definitely prefer a well formated plain text email with the option of viewing in the browser or email client if desired.

Yikes! How in the world did I lose 2 of my 3 karma points on this?! Somebody please explain and upvote? Linux user since the 90s but totally new to Hacker News. I'm good with constructive criticism, opinions, etc. but not a fan of downvotes without explanation.

A well-written, thoughtful article, worth the read.

Nerds have a complicated relationship to change; it's awesome when we are the ones creating the change, but it's untrustworthy when it comes from outside.

XMPP should be listed as an alternative for chat

For native looking tkinter, there's ttk (themed tkinter).

I wouldn't mind seeing an ActivityPub-based (http://activitypub.rocks) comment system. It would enable a decent self-hosted, experience that works with other AP-based platforms. The landscape for such a thing should be forthcoming given the popularity of Mastodon, PeerTube, and others supporting the protocol. Doesn't seem overly hard to implement for a comment system.