Just a stranger trying things.

  • 7 Posts
  • 181 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 16th, 2023

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  • I don’t care which is better. But I can share certain unique features which make me personally chose GrapheneOS over all other options I know of:

    • it is possible to relock the bootloader
    • you can disable the internet permission
    • the location service is independent on google services, even if you install them
    • you can use mutliple profiles and pipe notifications from one profile to another
    • you control native app debugging (and its off by default)
    • you have storage scope (as well as contacts scope)
    • you get all the latest security patches and really fast
    • and more…


  • I don’t know if you do this already, but in case you are not: GOS offers a convenient way to separate apps between each other, where some may depend on google services and others don’t. The methodology which works best for me is to use the main profile for all my personal apps and which do not require google services. For those few apps that do, I create a dedicated profile, in which I install the google services and the apps which need it. You can pipe notifications from that profile to the main one, in the profile settings, that way you can get the notifications of those apps even when not in the dedicated profile.

    Additionally, if you do not need those notifications, you can disable the profile to run in the background when not in use.

    As others have said, do not touch services and apps you do not recognize. Be very careful as things could turn south. Do not touch things unless you know what you are doing.



  • My number one gripe with organic maps is how fragile the search is. If you don’t write it exactly right, you get no or irrelevant results. Also, it seems to have no clue of what is popular and what people expect when they search for something. I’m not talking about personalized results but for example the following: searching for “Eiffel”, leads me to minor roads, restaurants and all kinds of results unrelated to the Eiffel tower. This is what is troubling me the most.


  • Exactly, this is about compression. Just imagine a full HD image, 1920x1080, with 8 bits of colors for each of the 3 RGB channels. That would lead to 1920x1080x8x3 = 49 766 400 bits, or roughly 50Mb (or roughly 6MB). This is uncompressed. Now imagine a video, at 24 frames per second (typical for movies), that’s almost 1200 Mb/second. For a 1h30 movie, that would be an immense amount of storage, just compute it :)

    To solve this, movies are compressed (encoded). There are two types, lossless (where the information is exact and no quality loss is resulted) and lossy (where quality is degraded). It is common to use lossy compression because it is what leads to the most storage savings. For a given compression algorithms, the less bandwidth you allow the algorithm, the more it has to sacrifice video quality to meet your requirements. And this is what bitrate is referring to.

    Of note: different compression algorithms are more or less effective at storing data within the same file size. AV1 for instance, will allow for significantly higher video quality than h264, at the same file size (or bitrate).