I run a shield for Plex and have never logged into my google account on it. I’ve disabled play store and most google services. Also I keep the android on the stock version.
So it’s possible to run it without signing up. Thats good news. All the reviews seem to say it’s a requirement for the initial set up
Are there any special steps to get your set up? I imagine you need to side load your apps because the play store won’t work, but is there anything else?
I side load Plex from the direct download links in the forum (Plex pass is required for this I think but there are def other ways to get the apk). I do not run the shield as a sever as I have a dedicated box for that.
Nothing special about the setup at all, I just prefer a minimalist approach to software so I disabled everything on the shield that wasn’t necessary to run Plex.
It is a great device though. Requiring a Google account to initially setup the device is one of my two only complaints, the other being the lack of a HDMI 2.1 interface.
I’m not sure about using it without a Google account, but you can definitely minimize their involvement. I installed flauncher, then disabled the default “leanback” launcher. Plex is installed from the play store but I side loaded an ad-blocking YouTube app. On a normal day I don’t see anything from or about google on my screen. I’m not sophisticated or, to be honest, concerned enough to know if there’s tracking or other telemetry going on. I mostly just want to avoid ads and moronic suggestions from them.
It looks like there’s a Lineage OS build for the shield, so if you want to eradicate google, there’s an option. It loses a fair bit of what makes the shield great though, since some of the audio and video playback stuff on the shield is proprietary to Nvidia.
SmartTubeNext (STN) is the Android TV equivalent of Revanced.
I did end up making a Google account just to get mine set up and for syncing subscriptions between STN and Revanced on my phone. I don’t use it for anything else.
As others have said, replacing the launcher with something like Sideload Channel Launcher 4 is a good option.
Other useful apps are Button Mapper (for killing the netflix remote button and for mapping the home button to your new launcher) and Send Files To TV to easily sideload apps without a ton of setup.
I suppose I could use someone else’s account for initial set up. I’ve had a look and it seems nextdns allows different profiles per device, so I’ll just block as many google domains as I can that way
The creator of the Simple apps sold them to an advertising company, which has since added trackers into the apps. The fossify project is forking all of them to keep them tracker free and to continue development.
I have been using them and Gallery was a bit buggy at the beginning, so that is the only one I have not switched yet but otherwise, they are all working as expected. I expect to fully switch shortly.
If you don’t mind paying to use a search engine, Kagi is actually pretty good. Not as good as Google was 20 years ago, but significantly better than any other search engine I can find today.
github.com/FossifyOrg/Keyboard It’s there in the org, not sure when it gets released to F-droid, but I think they’re just going 1 by 1, so hopefully shouldn’t be long.
I have a doubt here, these apps from fossify are actually forks from the original open-source repo.
Now, say the original repo is closed. Would fossify face some restrictions. Because the base code is actually from the repo will be owned by closed person.
any code added to the repo from now on can be closed sourced but any code from before the purchase will always remain open source so the base code that the new apps are using will always remain open source and cannot be closed and any deviation will have to occur from now on.
Edit: the F-Droid team has also halted all new versions of the base apps since they no longer comply and they will eventually be out of date and removed.
I’m transitioning to self-hosting via Immich and someone created an importer called immich-go that allows you to bulk upload your takeout files w/ the Google Photos feel (complete w/ previously created albums, tags, etc).
There’s an additional step if you exported via .tar files but it’s pretty straightforward ime.
Check out exif tool. You could also incorporate jq a command line json parser, to extract data from the json file. If you are trying to do higher level sorting/organization, you may consider using a scripting language other than bash/zsh. Guaranteed there is a Python package for reading exif data.
As I recall working with EXIF is generally a pain in the butt. In js the best you can hope for is a wrapper around some CLI based thing that I can’t remember the name of right now.
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