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Joined 4 months ago
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Cake day: February 1st, 2025

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  • May be overthinking it a bit, the typical opportunistic thief that would try to snatch a phone and run is just looking to see what bank apps you have installed. Usually they are looking to see if you have something like Venmo installed so they can go into your app and send themselves your money. Venmo of course will say that money was transferred from your phone so it was clearly you and there’s nothing to dispute, hence you’re fucked.

    These type of thieves already know to try to keep the screen unlocked long enough to do that, afterwards they usually just toss the phone somewhere. The phone hardware itself isn’t that useful while it’s still locked down and tied to someone’s Google/Apple account, most phones are firmware locked in that fashion. Sure they could wait it out until you finally remove the phone from your Google/Apple account but every time they check it’ll keep giving out their location, not really worth it.

    Nowadays current Android phones do have theft protection to prevent loss in a snatch attempt e.g. my Android has settings to auto lock it if it detects fast movement while unlocked, and it also auto locks if the entire phone itself has been set offline/airplane mode for a while.










  • Cash back rewards cards work well, I end up with at least 2% - 5% cash back on all my shopping.

    The key is to treat credit cards like cash e.g. pay your bill in full every month, never ever carry a balance. It doesn’t work for everyone and that’s okay, some people just can’t help themselves and get too spendy and end up in debt.

    Other nice thing is that fraud is handled better with credit cards, if my card is lost/stolen no one has a direct line to my bank account and can’t try to drain my bank balance with debit purchases. Sure your bank may/may not void those transactions but in the time it takes for them to “investigate” you’re going to be out real money in your bank account. With a credit card you just dispute those fraud charges and never actually pay for them.


  • If you haven’t already visited you definitely should! I never had the chance to live there but did spend a couple of weeks visiting and it was awesome. Reykjavik, driving the ring road, all those cliffs, waterfalls, national parks, it’s all great. That was before this Lemmy bar existed otherwise I would’ve visited that too.

    I’ve too wondered how feasible it would be to relocate and/or retire to Iceland but that seems pretty far off from reality.





  • Should be okay as long as you didn’t give the instance any of your other information (e.g. email during signup, etc.) and the Lemmy instance itself allows logins via Tor. You may also want to avoid instances using Cloudflare, it often blocks Tor connections so loading pages can be hit-or-miss.

    Just saying it’s okay for basic privacy, you’d likely need a different solution if you’re actually being targeted by governments/organizations/etc with access to your ISPs and ability to backdoor your equipment.

    OTOH if you’re already on a VPN I don’t think you need to go through the trouble of adding Tor to that mix.

    (I’m on Tor right now)

    What if I logged into my Lemmy account outside of Tor without a VPN one single time?

    Strictly speaking that means your Lemmy account is now compromised, time to go create a new one over VPN or Tor or however you prefer to browse.



  • I’m kind of in the same boat, thought I’d be programming but figured out early on that sitting at a desk coding for 8+ hours a day just wasn’t my thing. Turns out I’m happier doing all the other IT grunt work e.g. setting up servers, backups, dealing with the network/wireless/firewalls, even provisioning and supporting user desktops gets interesting.