There is an unfortunate lack of female authors in this thread so I will post two recommendations:

• I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman
• The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin

I despise Pournelle, his shitty conservatism always shines through his writing. But I will admit that The Mote in God’s Eye is a good novel, no doubt in large part thanks to Niven.

Another decent first contact novel is Learning the World: a Scientific Romance by Ken MacLeod.

The thing I need to use Mastodon is a proper search. Their opt-in design using hashtags just isn’t usable enough.

Worm by Wildbow, 10/10 all the way through, which is incredible given it’s 7000 pages and written by an indie author.

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Invidious is developed really poorly. The documentation even recommends restarting the service hourly for what I assume has to do with memory leakage (they don’t actually mention the reason, but memory leaks are significant either way). I’d stay away from that project.

I’m just not a fan of mesh VPN solutions that I have no direct control over (i.e. cloud based), and self-hosting them on my own means I have the responsibility of properly securing and hardening the server on which it runs, which I’m not a fan of either haha.

But it might be the best solution, we’ll see. If that’s the case though I’ll probably go for Tailscale despite the fact that I prefer the open source nature of Netbird, and that’s because Tailscale is just more reliable and mature in my experience. It feels like Netbird might be pushing too many new features (like the reverse proxy) before their core features are finished.

I’m warming up to the idea of using some sort of RDP software. I saw that Anydesk is proprietary, do you have any experience with Rustdesk? I’ll do some research.

Thank you (and everyone else who has responded)!

Sorry.

Where are you installing it for her, PC or router?

Her client will be on her laptop.

What OS is she running?

Windows.

What other remote tools do you have available?

More or less none. Any tools I’d need would have to be set up remotely on her device.

Frankly I’d just use Tailscale.

Yeah, I’m starting to lean towards Tailscale or Netbird.

Thanks.

Apple is pretty decent actually. If I couldn’t use GrapheneOS, I’d go for iOS.

Something to keep in mind is that Kagi is sponsoring Russia’s war against Ukraine through their business with Yandex.

that push GOS into unsavoury practices.

Can you elaborate on this?

Someone on Reddit made an interesting comment relevant to this discussion:

https://old.reddit.com/r/BuyFromEU/comments/1rn5qiw/fairphone_grew_83_last_quarter_tried_it_for_a/o94f706/

Graphene uses Play services, albeit sandboxed. I don’t think MicroG is recommended by them. But maybe I misunderstood your comment.

I also came in here to choose the Culture, although I’d be a human. Drug glands FTW.

What sort of attestation, if any, is required? Play Integrity? If so, alternative operating systems like GrapheneOS won’t work. It’s been a problem with a few implementations so far:

https://github.com/eu-digital-identity-wallet/eudi-app-android-wallet-ui/issues/287

Ah, that’s a shame. Thanks.

Honestly, the Pixel is probably your best option. Consider getting it second-hand if you can, or try to snag the Pixel 9a on sale.

GrapheneOS has entered a partnership with Motorola, so maybe a cheaper option from their line of phones will be available in the future.

That’s really cool!

Interestingly enough, the Scientology church is the source of a lot of anti-drug propaganda provided in and by public schools in Sweden.

Source in Swedish: https://www.svt.se/nyheter/inrikes/skolor-koper-droginformation-fran-scientologirorelsen