Spoons are pretty safe

The Brax phone raised some extremely serious red flags when I saw they put on their banner it was promoted by Joe Rogan and use Brave as their primary browser.

Having two scammers featured makes it feel like a scam.

Buy? That’s where you went wrong.

The less you buy, the healthier the society.

Trade with neighbors instead, make your own.

Use FOSS!

Smartwatch: Garmin (Fenix 6 gen and above if you want sleep monitoring) with gadgetbridge on android (preferably GrapheneOS) and selfhosted Endurain. Seeing as this is c/Selfhosted you can also roll your own dashboards with Grafana.

You’re thinking Garmin, really? Privacy? Actually Garmin’s T&Cs are IMO the best of the big names privacy wise, especially if you’re in the EU, but they’re publicly traded and subject to the ‘I have altered the deal, pray I don’t alter it any further’ changing terms at their whim, or just getting bought out and drained dry.

You know what’s better than OK T&Cs? Not giving them any data at all. On gOS I can pull the network permissions for Garmin Connect and still use it to set up the watch, do custom activities and so forth. When finished disable it and enable GadgetBridge. If you want watch faces do that with Connect IQ and then uninstall. Without gOS it’s just a little clunkier, but GB will pull the files off the watch so that when you fire up Connect there’s not data to report. If you didn’t make an account there’s nowhere for it to go anyway.

There are other gadgetbridge compatible devices but none with the build quality, feature set and quality health data. It’s been running for GB for more than a year and they haven’t sicced their lawyers on it.

Also, given their spectacular battery lift (14-20 days or so without hammering music or GPS), 500 charges for the battery to decay takes 10 years+, so secondhand ones are good value. The battery can even be replaced fairly easily (4 screws and a bit of glue), although you might not want to go diving afterwards.

You can also just connect it via USB and use any software that handles GPX etc. files.

As for laptops, there are a lot of other options like Tuxedo, NovaCustom, and Slimbook

I would avoid the Brax phone, they haven’t fulfilled orders and are super shady + social media influencer platform is never a great look. I would prefer the Fairphone, they’ve been around for ages, and you can install mobile Linux on their devices too since they let you unlock the boot loader. postmarketOS on the FP6 is developing rapidly and very exciting! Other pmOS supported devices like the OP6 or Pixel 3a series could be considered too, as well as the custom Android ROMs (Graphene, Calyx, etc.)

AsteroidOS is Linux on smartwatches, what more do you want? You also have Pebble if you’re into e-ink and that sort

As for TVs, it’s tricky, but just look for the non-smart ones (there are quite a few!), and I know Sony makes the Bravia TVs where you can set them to be “basic” non-smart mode. You could also go with a projector instead, those usually don’t have smart TV shenanigans. You can also use a Linux mini PC running Plasma Bigscreen and/or Kodi as an alternative to Google TV.

Mini PCs running some form of Linux (Bazzite, CachyOS, Fedora, Mint, whatever) are always awesome. You also have emulation stuff, like the MiSTER Pi mentioned by another user, but you could run emulation stuff on any cheap hardware (running Linux) just fine.

OpenWRT is supported by lots of routers, and GL.iNet makes routers that have it preinstalled. You also have the MikroTik routers, which run the Linux-based RouterOS (+ they are based in Latvia 🇱🇻)

Reolink cameras w/ Frigate and Home Assistant is the best combo.

The only wireless headphones I would recommend are the Fairphone Fairbuds Gen 2, since they won’t die in a few years w/ replaceable parts and battery, and even then, for 99% of usecases, I would rather go with IEMs + some wireless dongle (I use the Fiio BTR11, but others exist too, in particular, the Fiio Snowsky Retro Nano has replaceable batteries of an esoteric form factor). You get the convenience of wireless as well as all the benefits of wired: harder to lose, better audio quality, WAY cheaper (seriously, I spent less than $30 on my kit), longer lasting, etc. I would recommend the Kiwi Ears Cadenza and Truthear Gate, and I’ve heard the Hexa/Pure is great too. Moondrop’s Chu 2 are awesome too with a metal shell for a ridiculously low price, but the brass nozzle oxidises and clogs in humid environments (I am in the humid land of HK, so no go for me)

As for printers, the Open Printer is crowd funding and looks really neat! You of course have the Brother laser printers too, but not sure about their telemetry and tracking.

I am moving to Piefed at scallisto@retrofed.com (https://retrofed.com/u/scallisto)

I would remove Brax Phone altogether, that guy is fearmongering people into buying old insecure phones. There were times I was watching his videos until I saw the pattern…

Brax Phone, LOL! yeah, I’ll surely trust this list…

I don’t have it so I can’t tell for sure about the telemetry part but PineTime is an open source smartwatch, so if someone can confirm about telemetry you could add it to the list.

Mozilla has their Nothing Personal online magazine with product reviews. It’s only a small handful of product at this point. This started out as “Privacy Not Included”, which is now defunct.

watch: i haven’t looked too deeply into the pine watch but i think it could be worth looking into (it is open source) https://pine64.org/devices/pinetime/

Would steam frame fall into a vr headset category that doesn’t spy on you?

Yes an account is required for most straightforward functionality and it is made to primarily work with steam but from what I know it can be bypassed and isolated to a specific dongle network channel and will only sends stuff like eye tracking or camera data if you submit troubleshooting logs, everything else is either on device or not stored at all

Oh man how I wish Steam made a linux phone… Sure we have pmOS but it not yet daily driveable (I have it on op6) for most people and second, once there is official Linux phone from a big company, every Linux phone benefits because there will be new apps like banking apps and similar.

Last I checked (which, admittedly, was a few years ago) I literally couldn’t find any security cameras that weren’t compromised in some way. The only options are basically:

• Consumer models tied to “cloud” services
• Generic Chinese ONVIF cameras that probably phone home to who knows where unless you firewall them off from the Internet
• ONVIF cameras that might have a slightly better reputation than the previous category but are only sold through security system installers, not normal retail channels
• Analog (not IP) cameras that you hook up via coaxial cable
• Building your own goddamn camera from scratch with a Raspberry Pi or something

It’s ridiculous!

For TVs, there used to be the option of Sceptre dumb TVs, but even those have disappeared from the market in the last year or so.

I’ve been looking for a smartwatch/fitness tracker (and a bike computer, which is kind of a similar category) and the pickings seem very slim there, too. There’s the Pebble and the PineTime, which are open but maybe lack some of the sensors one might want in a fitness tracker, and there’s stuff that’s intended to be proprietary but supported by Gadgetbridge (e.g. iGPSPORT bike computers) . There might be others, but I don’t know about them.

It’s fuckin’ bleak, y’all. I’m at the point where I’m seriously considering building almost all my own tech out of Raspberry Pis and/or ESP32s because that’s easier than searching for needles in the infinite haystack of surveillance capitalist slop!

There’s a Linux mobile OS that’s not related to something two scammers have boosted as part of their scams.