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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • Well I thought this was kinda obvious what I meant, but I guess not. What you say is a requirement (sms recovery of a cloud account) is just one of many solutions to your specific problem. I’ll just list off a few solutions below that involve neither SMS (the most insecure communication method in common use today) and only optionally a cloud account. For cimplicity sake I’ll stick to Aegis, where you can create password-protected local backups you can then put wherever you want. This password needs to be very strong for obvious reasons: I would recommend a long sentence (40 characters or more) that you can just remember, like a quote from a movie/tv show/book/poem or something, including normal punctuation as a sentence for example.

    Solution 0: This is more of a trivial solution I wouldn’t actually recommend. You can allow account recovery via eMail and have your eMail not use 2fa, but a long/good password so you can login from memory (see above). This is probably more secure than SMS for the recovery-case, but less secure for the everyday use case of eMail, therefore “not recommended”.

    Solution 1: USB Sticks are tiny, as in the size of a USB port (slightly longer but slimmer for USB-C). If you want to have a backup “on you”, I’m sure you can find a place where it wouldn’t get robbed with the phone/wallet. A tiny pocket somewhere, a string around your ankle, make a compartment in your shoe, or just have it with your luggage at the hotel. I’m sure you get the point. You get your new phone, you plug in the USB, you install Aegis and restore the backup.

    Solution 2a: Dedicated “online” storage. This can be self hosted, or a free account of any cloud provider, but the important part is that it does NOT require 2FA and you do NOT use it for anything else. You have the backup in there. It also needs a very secure password (again: long, but easy to remember, no garbled letter nonsense), but obviously not the same as the Aegis-Backup. So you now need to remember 2 long passwords. You get your new phone, you log in, get the backup and proceed as usual.

    Solution 2b: If not having 2FA is not an option for the solution above, you can have a friend/family store the 2FA on his phone. To log in, you go to the login page and enter your password (which your friend doesn’t need to know), and you ask him over the phone for the current 2FA-Code, which he tells you and you can log in, download the backup and proceed as above. I assume such a high security isn’t that critical, since you have been using something involving SMS. Restore then goes as per usual.

    Solution 3: Store the whole backup with a friend and when you need it he just temporarily puts it somwhere you can access, and removes it again after. Since the backup is protected by a monster of a password, and the accessibility is temporary anyway, this isn’t security critical.

    Solution 4: If you absolutely must, you can find a cloud-provider for 2FA, and use it only as the “first stage”. The only 2FA code in there is the one you need to get access to your main online storage/account where you then have your real Aegis-Backup and/or other files. Obviously this service would need to allow you to login without 2FA, and the usual password rules resulting fom that apply. You can just add the 2FA of your primary service to more than 1 app or service, or if it allows for this, you can generate multiple authenticators so you can also revoke them serperately if needed.





  • The native Android client just can’t do two way sync. Just put a text file or something into any folder (from the web or desktop). Now sync that folder to Android. Now edit it on the web/desktop, and look for the changes on Android (without actively telling it to “sync”). Then change the file on Android, these 2nd changes are never sent back to the server unless you explicitly tell it to “sync” again, manually. That’s what I mean with 2 way sync.

    There are quite a few files where you just need that to work to use them properly, like the database of a password manager as a prime example. Mine can talk to Nextcloud natively, so I don’t need the client for that, but I was incredibly close to just switching to syncthing, if I didn’t have active users that use the web office integration of Nextcloud.




  • Without more information what exactly you want to do/learn, that’s kinda hard. Racing? Acrobatics? Micros/Woops (flying in your home/garage)? Drone as a cinematic camera (DJI-style) or faster camera work (chasing motocross riders for video for example)?

    Also specific recommendations for hardware heavily depend on this and just personal preference, and what else you might want to do with the radio and/or video equipment. As an introduction and overview, like someone else has already commented, check out Joshua Bardewell on youtube. He literally makes everything from introduction, basic tutorial, to advanced guides and deep dives into anything drone-related as his full time job.


  • All of the OpenTX/EdgeTX radios work on Linux as a controller, and generally most radios that support this probably will, because they just appear as a joystick (HID profile). There are also ways of connecting them other than just plugging the radio into usb and selecting “controller mode”, but even those usually result in a joystick device I think? So which radio in particular mostly depends on what kind of drone you want to fly, if you want to fly other things (plane, helicopter, scale models), or drive other things (cars/boats/crawling/scale models). Also ergonomics (size of hands, similar to a classic radio or similar to a game controller?) and just personal preference, mostly.

    As for the Sim, I think Liftoff has a native Linux port, but these days most of the sims should just work anyway with the recent developments of valve for the steamdeck.


  • No matter which kind you pick, you always start with a simulator unless you have more money than sense. There are free ones, and good ones aren’t expensive either. Radios these days can just be plugged into a computer so you’re using your actual controller for the simulator, too.


  • Very short answer: Get any of the opentx/edgetx transmitters (like radiomaster, jumper). go for expressLRS as a protocol for transmitter/receivers (2.4g). The default firmware for flying yourself is betaflight (racing, acro, some camera drones like cinewhoops). If you want the drone to fly itself (gps missions) it’s probably ardupilot, but check legality in your area first. I have no direct recommendation for video for you, sorry.





  • Well to my knowledge there are (or at least were) workarounds to get win 11 to install anyway. It of course worked fine, despite saying it needed a TPM and/or specific minimum CPU.

    From an eWaste perspective Microsofts decision to force literally millions of PCs into fake obsolescence is obviously horrible. And I honestly have no idea what their motivation even was for this.

    As for trying Linux, these days it really isn’t even a weekend. Sure if you want to tinker and learn, you can invest a weekend. But if you want to just use the PC just pick any of the commonly recommended distros and just go. It’s installed in minutes and you can honestly just use the PC for whatever you used to use it before. Just backup/move your data off it and you got nothing to lose but like an hour, if it really doesn’t work as you need it to.



  • You clearly misunderstood my post. Never said it was apples to apples, quite the opposite. I said the change from 7 to 10 was much bigger (and yes, we’re ignoring Win 8 completely).

    And of course will there be an uptick in Linux usage, he says it would be a “big” one, to which I objected to. Linux desktop has been trending up for a while, and while there might be a slight additional bump, I highly doubt it will be far beyond the margin of error for that general positive trend.

    I also said it “barely” moved (it being the market share), which implies it did move, just not a lot.

    More to the expected magnitude of the 10 EoL date pushing people to Linux, it won’t be anywhere near what valve accomplished with the steam deck. Why? Because people buy a gaming console, they can play games on. Most don’t care that it’s Linux, it’s just a tool/toy. It happens to be Linux underneath. On their PC they actively have to change it themselves. If people bought a PC that had Linux on it, they probably wouldn’t overly notice or care either, but they just can’t. Overwhelmingly they just come with windows, it you want it or not (usually there is no option to not buy that license).

    Edit: what is harder to predict (or guess) is the indirect influence of valves accomplishment. Now that gaming on Linux it’s actually viable, this might actually open the door for more people to give it a go. But as per usual with these things, it’s probably less people who actually do it than one would intuitively expect or hope.

    Edit 2: changed Vista to Win8