As long as the villain is still an extreme close up of George Lopez’s disembodied head I’m in

On a side note but related, https://github.com/kmille/freetar is a private front-end for Ultimate Guitar that’s amazing. Free public instance at freetar.de.

Never went back to UG after finding this, so much better than navigating their awful website.

Why not both??

I switched to Infomaniak when I first started seriously migrating away from gmail. I found it a really clean and almost too good to be true, email is fundamentally un-private and IK seemed like a great balance. Also all their apps were open source and on fdroid! Wow!

I was disappointed to see them take a stance against Swiss encryption law, which ultimately made me stick with Proton (also not perfect, but who specifically took the opposite side of this proposal). This issue seemed to be at the core of what I expected from a privacy focused email provider.

What really made me upset was that when I then tried to leave Infomaniak I found that they lock email forwarding behind a paywall (something not even Google does). It actually became very difficult to leave the small number of services I had migrated over to, and I still have my ikmail in my client by necessity.

This is definitely a positive change. I want to take them seriously and more competition in the relatively private non-American email space is good. But I am still hesitant to reccomend or embrace them. Would be curious to hear anyone else’s thoughts?

Gogoro a moped/scooter company in Taiwan has these. Little stations all over the country where you can swap your battery out, it was pretty amazing.

I recently bought an XP Pen Magic Note Pad that I’ve been pretty happy with. It’s sort of a hybrid tablet/notetaker that’s going for a jack of all trades master of none vibe while still having an overall good writing experience and I think it succeeds at that

Pros:

• bought for $200 refurbished on an eBay sale directly from XP Pen (I think it’s $300 or so resfurbished normally)
• runs an OS based on Android 14 so full play/aurora/F-Droid access easily
• comes with a good pen, small folio case and notetaking app based on Jnotes
• screen is matte with a slightly textured feel. Can switch between a full color, paper color and grayscale display mode with a single button. 90hz, palm rejection while writing is very good.

Cons

• Came out this year but a little worried about continued OS support being a niche item
• built in notetaking app is great except for the handwriting recognition. I bought Nebo for that which is a one time license of $8 which isn’t bad at all and their handwriting recognition is like dark magic it’s amazing
• not a true e-ink, so battery life is more like a standard tablet. I’m usually getting 2-3 days of use wheras e-inks will give you weeks
• not a true paper-like writing experience but better than an iPad out of the box
• overall it’s a mostly fine android tablet with a few tweaks aimed at the note-taking market

All in all I do really enjoy it, and for $200 including a pen, case and software it was hard to pass up. I’ve locked it down a bit but you’re not going to get a totally degoogled experience. At $300 I would still consider it but probably wouldn’t buy new. Let me know if you have any other questions!