I use it too, all the way from New Zealand. It’s ridiculously cheap if you keep your emails under 2 gigabytes.

I gave up. There are only two options in my country. Maybe it’s possible to order Nokia 2780 from Amazon but right now it’s summer and I want to use an e-scooter app.

Once I was driving at 100 km/h and Google suddenly told me to turn right in 100 or 200 metres (rural road). I almost soiled myself. True story.

I had a print map for a while but I know my city way too well so I didn’t need it anyway.

Good luck with not logging into your email account. Mine is web mail so it’s always there.

An mp3 player is good but I don’t recommend flip phones. The build quality is pretty bad from my experience with alcatel and I think mobiwire may have the same issue.

I tried an Alcatel candy bar phone but I don’t recommend it. The parts are cheap. The keypad can feel inconsistent. Eventually the static on the line got so bad that I had to abandon it after about 1 year. Not worth it!

If you have $12 to spend then I can recommend a tutorial series for you which you can buy on itch io. It’s in ‘c’ but you can easily transfer the skills to Python and everything is much nicer. I only recommend c for foundation skills. I respect the old skool methods - it may open your mind.

If you’re still young then I want to convince you that it’s worth your time. You don’t need to be very smart to make simple programs but you can save yourself time and frustration by avoiding stupid mistakes. I know a guy in Australia who can motivate you on this, I sometimes voice call him on Signal.

I no longer prioritise software any more because I’m focused on simply surviving. I’m too old to care any more lol. That said, I do have plans to film interviews with people who work in this field. I’m thinking about doing code review videos and discussions about how to be a good programmer, but not from a heavily commercial pperspective (I hate those endlessly positive videos on youtube who want you to think that anyone can succeed in the industry and become wealthy). I don’t know how viable the industry is any more and I just want to make hobby videos and encourage people to find a path that works for them. I think gamedev is one of the best paths for learning software, unless you want to make web apps instead.

For the same price you can buy a Samsung S25 with 7 years of security patches instead of Apple’s 5 years.

(Ps. If I had any money then I’d buy multiple phones just to hack them and I’d have Graphene or SailFish depending on what the 3 telcos here support)

I try to be spicy and waste surveillance money. I actually got an email from NZ Security Intelligence Service one time but they emailed me from a mail.com domain. They said they were writing to me “human to human” and asked me if I was “planning anything rash”. This was in response to some edgy posts that I made online. I deliberately act mental to tie up government resources lol. I make a huge trail and when they get a surveillance warrant on me I start going to Google or bing and I ask questions like “was 9/11 an inside job” so that Security intelligence Service sees it. I also blame the government for supporting the wholesale slaughter of people in Afghanistan to make them feel guilty.

I tried to change my gamma in Ubuntu but couldn’t find the setting. I just use the soft night light instead but your suggestion would’ve made more sense.

Just wait till the day when the average person wakes up to realise that it was never about fair play or international law. It’s about power and the use of force and it always has been.

Don’t forget to add Comverse Infosys.

I find it astounding that the U.S. went on to devastate Libya before they had concluded Afghanistan. Apparently I’m in the minority of people who understood that all of this was bad - even back in 2009-2011.