These last few weeks a lot of things have happened. The Fediverse is growing, I did a Science Fair project, the last days of school are ending and I have some free time to mess up my phone.
I have a lot of things to say but not much to say about a single one, pretty much the same thing as Scott Banwart’s weekly journal posts. Of course its been more than a week since my last post here, regardless.
The Fediverse is growing, but it has a long way to go
Fosstodon now has more than 40K users, that alone is insane, since I remember being impressed back in April at the amount of growth seen during that first wave of Twitter users migrated.
I think its important to bring up that the amount of users is still insignificant, Twitter is already the smallest of the big social network, even though it feels like a lot is shared and talked about on it, the reality is different.
My country, Mexico, is still big on Facebook and Instagram (lately, TikTok too) by an order of magnitude, that’s just how it is.
If you recently joined Mastodon or any node of the Fediverse, please do it for the right reason. I don’t like politics, I joined Fosstodon because I like software, coding, technology and the like, and I wanted to meet some like-minded people in that regard. I am not there to read about politics of foreign countries. Thankfully Mastodon is pretty useful at filtering stuff out, and I myself don’t care if I end up reading it, since I just forget about it.
I have hopes that Fosstodon will stay afloat and won’t lose its focus, some people are worried that the Twitter culture may stain the status quo of the overall community, but I think this is just momentary. And contrary to popular belief, trends and behaviour is not the same everywhere in the Fediverse, its tons of different communities interacting with each other, but there is still some independence, which makes this place more resilient than some may assume.
Besides, even though its userbase is not as big, I honestly prefer it that way.
Some Science Fair shenanigans
For my Fuzzy Control class, the teacher challenged us to design a Fuzzy controller for our science fair project. I have to say, I am quite a fan of how fuzzy logic works. Being able to understand the magic behind it all was quite interesting.
We decided to use Matlab to design our system using the Fuzzy Logic Toolbox, and we also found a program online that would allow us to export that directly to code for Arduino.
We built a Temperature and Humidity controller system, be it for a room or maybe an incubator. I actually spent more time building the hardware to house our circuits and sensors when compared to the code itself.
I feel like we kinda cheated the system, but the teacher allowed us to use Matlab in the first place rather than coding from scratch, so we only expanded our toolset a bit and did it all in like, a couple hours.
When the event started we had to sit around in a place assigned to us for around 10 hours, explaining our project to whoever passed by, it was quite entertaining for me, but I couldn’t help but notice how everyone around it was tired already, I guess I like talking about stuff I like with strangers a little too much.
In the end the winners were some girls that attracted everyone’s attention, they combined extracts and chemicals to make colored markers to draw and stuff. Our place was right beside them and everyone went and drew stuff in pieces of paper that got given away by the end of the event. Some of those drawings were actually awesome, not gonna lie.
Google is on my Android again
I unexpectedly started to use Discord more often, I joined a couple of interesting servers and I wanted to talk there a little more. However, notifications don’t work on a degoogled phone and I decided to try installing the Google Apps again on my device. I got told that it would work fine despite already having a ROM and apps installed. It was a lie.
I got stuck in a bootloop, thankfully a simple Factory Reset kept my internal storage intact (thanks to latest versions of TWRP being able to decrypt storage on Android 12) although I lost my app data.
Recovering from data loss
Thanks to the power of being kinda careful, the biggest loss of mine was a dozen of Newpipe subscriptions and my list of read books and bookmarks (which I had already forgotten until I recalled them while writing this blogpost)
My manga progress is kept on Anilist, and I had backups enabled anyway on the Tachiyomi reader, so I didn’t have to build my library from scratch, I just imported it and logged in to my trackers.
WhatsApp Backups were enabled and since internal storage didn’t get wiped, reinstalling the app recognized the backup immediately, which was a couple hours old.
Signal Backups were enabled and no data was lost.
Passwords and 2FA were perfectly safe on a folder synced with Syncthing, but again, no data was lost anyway.
Pretty much all other apps required me to log in and stuff. I had a backup of my email accounts of K9 Mail, so readding them was not hard at all.
The saddest and biggest failure, is that I lost all my Wi-Fi passwords. Can someone tell me why is there no way to back them up already?
Google being annoying
I decided to log in to my Google Account since I wanted to access some paid apps that I quite like. Sadly this also synced my contacts, which I had on my Nextcloud DAV already, and were annoyingly duplicating my list. Thankfully, @konstantin helped out and I quickly removed the dulplicates from my phone.
I am now waiting for Android 13 roms to become more stable, so I can degoogle my life again. Or maybe not, notifications are quite nice to be honest.
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So, I have the Miyoo Mini Plus, and I have games, and I've restored some save files, and I put more games, and cover art, but what am I even playing on it?
