The internet when it wasn’t overtaken by a few major corporations.

That would be terrible for worldwide peace and stability. US has too much power and influence for an implosion to not cause worldwide chaos. Trump would mean US siding with other dictatorships, like Russia, China, Iran. Russia would likely succeed in Eastern Europe. Taiwan would likely be occupied by China. NATO vs an alliance made of US, Russia and China would be very uncomfortable.

The RPI400 is basically a full solution. You just need a display and a mouse, and you have a fully functional desktop computer. Not very powerful, but good enough for basic tasks like writing documents or browsing the web, coding etc.

Low end phones aren’t that bad, if you are willing to make some sacrifices, like an uglier screen, worse camera.

For example, the Samsung Galaxy A05

A full working computer, more powerful than what we used to go to the moon, and using less power than a light bulb.

It can take many forms, like smartphones, SBCs or older PCs/laptops.

The tape head is basically a small and really sensitive electromagnet. Magnetized tape creates small disturbances in the magnetic signal. Amplify those disturbances and you get sound. Similar to an antenna, but only works in close proximity.

This also works in reverse. Feed an audio signal through the electromagnet, and the electromagnet will create the disturbances in whatever is next to it. You can do this to record to a tape, or you can do this to pass sound to another tape head, which is how these aux cassettes work.

You can build one yourself really easily. Just take the tape head from a broken player and solder to an aux cable. Take a cassette, remove the tape, and put the tape head in the middle portion so it comes into contact with the player tape head.

Lights. 15 years ago, everyone was using incandescent bulbs which were terribly inefficient and neon lights which had their own inconveniences. Today, LEDs have mostly replaced them, can produce better quality light, and use a fraction of the power.

Displays. Even the cheap TVs and monitors look incredibly good.

That’s how you end up with the bigger evil.

It could have been worse. The romans had the day divided into 24 hours, like we do, but the hours varied in length so that from sunrise to sunset, you would always have 12 hours.

Imagine if that was the agreed upon time system, and we had to program that into computers.

I’ve read a lot of reviews before buying, and that was my expectation as well. I had a Nexus 5 before and it was a great phone.

Maybe I got a lemon that had some hardware fault, I don’t know. I’ve been wanting to get a newer Pixel just for GrapheneOS, but that experience was so bad, I’m having a lot of doubts

Pixel 3A. Constant bugs, camera would stop working or had a long delay starting up, system would randomly stop responding, constant crashes, lock screen would bug out preventing you from unlocking the phone. Dialer would bug out preventing you from answering the phone. Random reboots. Screen scratched really easily.

Phone crapped out about a month before warranty expired, wouldn’t boot any more. Luckily, it was still in warranty and they returned the full price.

The worst most unreliable phone I ever owned.

And I also don’t want programs to throw all their crap in the documents folder. AppData is made for that.

Make a plan. Think about how much storage you need, whether you need redundancy and backups, and what server applications you need to run.

Here you also need to consider how much time you want to spend on maintenance. Premade solutions like Synology are set and forget. Using NAS operating systems mean having to do regular updates. Using just Linux is also an option if you want full control and are confortabile with the command line, but it’s more work.

Then step 2 is getting the hardware.

My recommended route, if you want to spend the least amount of money, is to get a 2nd hand PC, preferably not pre-built (dells and hps have proprietary parts like power supplies). A 4 core cpu from the last 10 years should be fine, and 16gb of RAM is more than enough for most applications. SFFs or MiniPCs might be ok for nvme SSDs only, but if you want hard drives, get one that has enough HDD bays. Depending on what you find, you might need to replace a few things, like the power supply or case.

Servers are good and reliable and have nice features, like network management, redundant NICs, redundant power supplies, but are usually pretty noisy.

You end up stranded on a foreign planet. You need to build a rocket so you can go home, but unfortunately you have to build a whole manufacturing facility to do that. As if this wasn’t hard enough, the inhabitants of the planet are environmentalist assholes and will do anything in their power to stop you.