Sounds quite similar to Markov chains which made me think of this story:

https://thedailywtf.com/articles/the-automated-curse-generator

Still gets a snort out of me every time Markov chains are mentioned.

IF you already have an email domain you control.

Calling “acquiring and setting up an email domain and configuring the mail server for wildcards” “basically no extra effort” is a bit disingenuous compared to “solve a captcha for a Gmail account”

Yeah, inductive charging is basically a must.

Especially because it eliminates the guesswork if the watch is correctly seated to charge

Oh, they’re putting a lot of thought into it I’m sure.

That thought being “Money, Money, Money, Profit, Profit” of course.

No actual technical solution here, but it smells slightly of XY-Problems.

From what you described it seems the main issues are

• too many calls
• not knowing who’s calling
• not wanting to answer the phone
• not reaching the phone in time

Maybe you could look into solutions like setting a custom ringtone for important callers or having the phone announce caller names so your mother can decide if she wants to make the effort to get her phone.

I’m speculating a bit here but I can imagine that getting up and answering the phone is exhausting for your mother. Also if her mindset is " a ringing phone means it’s important" that could make it even more stressful.

Maybe you could find a way to let her silence all calls except caregivers and ICE contacts. (On Android DND exceptions could work for that)

That way she doesn’t feel pressured to answer the phone every time it rings and stays reachable.

If it’s actually just the physical issue of reaching the phone in time, does she have a convenient way to carry the phone indoors like a lanyard?

Hope some of this helps you

No idea, but it was my parent’s box for loose tea leaves…

There should be an external hard drive full of portable game installs in some drawer that fits the time period.

Should easily kill a week.

Wow, that sounds like a decent start for an architecture.

I’m tempted to spin up a few Jellyfin instances to see how it might work…

JellyFed(eration) would be awesome. It should use an anonymous overlay network so federation is not limited to people you trust in copyright-zealous jurisdictions.

It doesn’t. It carries you by having a module for absolutely everything even shooting yourself in the foot.

That’s the equivalent of leaving the door open and hanging a sign “Internet over there” pointing at a wall.

Programs don’t need to respect those registry keys. If you’re worried about internet access, set up a firewall.

Also, if you’re worried about malware, the damage is probably done before anything connects to the internet.

B stands for Billion (Parameters) IIRC

To a certain degree, yes. If someone at Google decides to wage all-out war against ad blockers they have a good chance. But if that costs more money than it generates, odds are that someone will stop it. Google / Alphabet is publicly traded after all and that means profit above all else.

Embedding ads into the stream would be hard to counter, but it’s far away. That would invalidate caches along the way and need extra performance to reencode the stream with the ads inserted.

That’s extra costs that are hopefully orders of magnitude above the lost ad revenue from ad blockers

Ironically Sync does, too, and zooms to full width on tap, hiding the Rick roll.

Okay, you got me there. In all fairness, as instruction videos go, that one is on the tame side.

Thanks for posting the instructions here.

Tl;dw:

Append systemd.debug_shell to the boot command line.

No, No, they don’t understand everything and nothing!

I’m hopeful that reencoding on the fly or even merging preencoded files into a single stream is too expensive because it needs a lot of compute power and invalidates caches .

The problem is that android auto is restricted to apps installed from the play store.

The F-Droid Version supports Android Auto, but it’s blocked by Google.

I managed to enable it by spoofing the installer-package during installation.

For me, the navigation is near unusable. Location tends to lag behind by a few seconds when running on Android Auto. On my phone it’s fine.