I have been using Brave Search for a couple of years and have been very satisfied with the results. It uses its own index instead of relying on Bing or Google like most search engines. The summaries are also one of the few cases that I have found AI to be useful for some more obscure questions.

The image results are very poor though, so I still use DuckDuckGo for that.

There is still a lot of tension between Greece and Turkey that occasionally leads to small incidents. Up until Trump started threatening to invade Greenland and Canada, a conflict between Greece and Turkey was one of the largest sources of uncertainty about how NATO would respond to an internal conflict.

Not just any advertisement. An advertisement for something that is likely limiting their job opportunities that they have been studying years for.

I use Eneloop batteries. They are widely regarded as the best quality and I have never had a problem with any of them.

The only controller I have that uses AA batteries is an Xbox controller. I am a fairly light gamer, so I have never measured how many hours they last, but I have no complaints about battery life. I often get more than a month of use before needing to charge them, so I would easily guess at least 10-20 hours of battery life.

There are rechargeable AA batteries. I prefer this over built-in batteries because I can swap the batteries out immediately instead of waiting for the controller to charge. It is also cheaper and easier to replace the batteries when they eventually begin to wear out.

Thunder is not in the official F-Droid repository. It might be in a third-party repository such as IzzyOnDroid.

This works for cases where just being a member gets a lower price, but at least some stores have digital coupons that need to be added to my account. This would not work with a generic card. It is definitely a good tip for stores where it does work though.

Grocery store rewards programs. I know they are designed to link purchases to me, but the financial savings is worth the loss of privacy for me.

While still not as seamless as on Windows, WiVRn works great for VR on Linux in my experience.

I really like Filen. They have an open source app on all operating systems, including Linux, which Proton Drive still does not support. They also recently added support for Rclone.

Signal still requires a phone number. What was added is usernames for contacts, so you no longer need to give other people your phone number for them to contact you. It is a step in the right direction, but it would be great for them to get rid of the phone number requirement all together.

Thunder and Voyager are my favorites on Android, but Mlem on iOS is my overall favorite.

Never. I have latex foam pillows that are a solid block, so there is nothing to fluff. It took me a while to get used to how firm they are, but I absolutely love them now.

AudioBooth is a free and open source iOS app for Audiobookshelf.

There is Synctrain and Möbius Sync. They are not perfect due to iOS restrictions on apps running in the background, but they work well enough as long as I occasionally open them to make sure they sync.

HGST was created after Hitachi bought IBM’s hard drive business. It was then later bought by Western Digital.

I no longer use Nextcloud. I use rclone with the smb remote for my NAS.

pCloud has a Linux client. Both GUI and CLI. But I personally use rclone for all cloud services. It is often even more reliable and offers better performance than official clients. It also allows managing multiple cloud services from the same place. It supports client-side encryption as well.

Valve is being sued because they are forcing others to follow policies that further entrenches Steam as the largest store.

Since Epic bought the game developer, it only applies to themselves. It is much harder to sue someone over a decision that only applies to something they own. How can a company be sued for not selling their product at a store? Should Valve be sued for not selling their own games on Epic or GOG?

Is Epic’s decision to only sell their games on their store annoying for users? Yes. But unfortunately, there is nothing illegal about. There would be a better chance of a lawsuit of Epic paying other game developers for exclusivity, but that would still not be easy as game exclusivity is still a significant factor on game consoles as well. Albeit much less than in the past.

The software is pretty good in my experience. The biggest problem is the hardware was already old when the Pinephone launched 6 years ago. There is only so much optimization that can be done on decade old mobile hardware.