Yep! Most of my “apps” are just web app shortcuts or self hosted PWAs

Cat S22 Flip. Not without it’s quirks, but I like it well enough. Had to digital detox, and it was great for that.

The problem is most apps are just low-effort web app conversions.

If only that. Web apps are relatively well sandboxed. Most dedicated apps (that should be websites) are designed to harvest as much data as they can and spam you with notifications/ads.

Not gonna lie, it was. lol. That’s one of several reasons I decided to keep it as my daily driver. It’s technically a smart phone, though, I just had all the smart stuff disabled for that challenge. I’ve since enabled those back, but it still looks enough like a dumb phone that I can convincingly bluff with it.

That’s what I used to do, but a good portion of the time they’d continue their spiel to try to change my mind. Have only had to brandish the dumb phone once, but so far it’s got a 100% shut down success rate.

My favorite part of the 30 day dumb phone challenge I did recently: I couldn’t install your crappy app even if I wanted to.

A little over halfway through the challenge, was paying for my order at a local eatery, and the cashier started plugging their new app and rewards points and digital coupons and shit. I was like “I’m gonna stop you right there: flip phone.” and pulled it out of my pocket and brandished it like I was the sheriff of Luddite-ville.

Kinda like this, but “Flip phone!”

It’s the default page for a Windows Server running IIS web server.

Genre Shift

I wish my backup was symmetric or that a symmetric-capable backup provider was even available here. lol. I used to use cable internet as my backup, but the provider kept cutting the upload (used to be 40 Mbps then they incrementally cut it to 20 and finally 10!) Currently using TMobile’s 5G home internet as my backup, and that performed better than the cable last time I had to cut over to backup WAN.

Yeah, I had a similar fallback issue. When it failed back over, some routes got “stuck” on the backup path and continued to pass over that until I toggled the interface. Have since added a step to my failback script to up/down the backup WAN interface which should fix that on the next outage.

I’d usually start with my suite of cleanup tools, do some manual cleanup if needed, apply all the software and security updates, and then give it a day with some light test usage. Then I’d re-run the tools to see if they picked anything back up. If not, I released it back to the customer. If anything at all came back, I’d backup their data, pull all the product keys I could (Office, Photoshop, etc), nuke the OS, and reinstall what I could as close to the original as possible.

And then of course, the least fun part of that era, the guys who would bring their machines back weekly despite very stern warnings to stop visiting “those sites”.

Hey, they were good for business lol

Cannot recommend Aurora Store enough. Play Store has been unusable for years and is only getting worse.

Can confirm 100%.

During Vista’s heyday, I worked in a PC repair shop. All the ones that came in because “Vista sucks” were all Walmart specials with the bare minimum 512 MB RAM and crappy, bottom-of-the-barrel Seagate HDDs.

The thing would start thrashing as soon it booted with the default assortment of bloatware. By the time they brought it in, the HDD was in rough shape which made the thrashing even worse.

Fix was always to upgrade the RAM and, most often, replace the dying Seagate drive with a good one. Removing the bloatware helped as well once the root problems were addressed.

The UAC stuff was also annoying, but those could be tuned.

Observational humor. lol. Was definitely serious, though. I have a similar windowless bathroom that has proven to be quite inhospitable to every low-light plant I’ve tried to put there.

Artificial lol.

My upstairs bathroom is windowless (technically it does have a window, but previous owner covered it up), and I tried several low-light styles, and none of them did well even leaving the light on all the time.

If you are able to put a grow light in there with it, you may have some luck. Ferns would love the humidity.

Updated for 2024:

In mobile FF, yes, it works natively. The “Add to home screen” works the same as it does in Chrome. Later versions, or at least Fennec, will open them as “apps” even if they don’t have a PWA manifest.

On desktop, lack of PWA support in FF continues to be a thorn in my side as well. I’ve resorted to using Web App Manager which is part of Linux Mint (you can install it on any distro, though. I’ve got it working fine in Debian Bookworm).

https://ubuntuhandbook.org/index.php/2021/01/install-linux-mints-web-app-manager-ubuntu-20-04/

Yeah, I read that the other day. Wish it would do more than that, but it’s a start I guess.

New fear unlocked.

I can’t wait until a Senator or comparable “it’s not a problem until it happens to me” lawmaker loses access to their digital library and goes on the warpath. That’s the only way out of this “you will own nothing” hellhole we’re in and moving deeper into.