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 A new phone
=============

Finally I have a new smartphone. 3G is being phased out around here
(and apparently around the world, too), 4G is used, and phones with 5G
are finally available, so I was able to get one that may serve for a
while, as my old phone did. Better yet, since official export into
Russia is limited, there is the "parallel import" (contraband), so the
previously unavailable smartphones are available now, including Google
ones (those with plain Android, timely updates, easily supported by
alternative Android distributions); and my new phone is Google Pixel
6a. It's not locally certified, which means that there's no
"fatherland software" junk/malware on it. On top of that, I
accidentally brought the price 10% down, to the lowest I saw online
before going to a store. The only downside is that it has no warranty,
and apparently no spare parts around.

Not using Google services, I installed F-Droid, Conversations, Fennec,
OsmAnd, Librera, Wikipedia client, VLC, and a few more programs so
far. Going to give a try to actually using it as a smartphone (and as
a backup Internet connection, and maybe just a modem to use with a
laptop).

As another bit of fairly good news, I discovered that modern
smartphones--despite being huge--actually do fit into front pockets of
trousers, and don't feel that awkward to carry in those. Otherwise I
had to look for cargo pants in order to avoid carrying a bag or a
backpack, but now it seems that it's fine to pick pretty much any
common pants, notably simplifying shopping for those.

Thought to play Discworld MUD from it, but ConnectBot doesn't support
telnet line mode, which makes it rather awkward. Maybe will figure
something out later, although a mobile phone isn't great for
text-based games anyway.

vCard import worked smoothly (as did vCard export on the old phone).

I was disappointed by the phone not having a 3.5 mm jack (TRRS)
socket, and initially thought to acquire an adapter (to/from USB-C),
but now unsure whether it's a good idea: apparently those Bluetooth
headsets have surprisingly good battery life, and they won't damage
the USB-C socket, so maybe I'll try those.


A few other news:

- Tried making a chocolate cake for the first time, following the
  recipe from <https://www.joshuaweissman.com/post/chocolate-cake>,
  but used half the sugar, and it was pretty sweet still.

- Replaced a ceiling light in the kitchen, now it's nice and bright
  even without the task lighting.

- Work and everyday chores are going on, nothing particularly fun
  there. Finally moving to PostgREST for the web thingy though,
  yay. And finally updated a system on one of the servers (Debian 9 to
  11, oldoldstable to stable), though apparently hurried too much, the
  clients weren't notified, were unhappy with the downtime, and now
  it's called "an incident". And there's plenty of other dated stuff
  to update still.


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:Date: 2022-11-19
