I have one of these that I use for Pi-hole. I bought it as soon as they were available. Didn’t realise it was 2012, seemed earlier than that.

Yeah I can imagine trying to do it manually could get pretty tricky. I’ll look forward to the smart watch support (though I don’t own one, I might get one if others report it working well with GrapheneOS).

Edit: also one thing to try out if possible is to remove battery optimization from Google Play Services. Your device might be killing that, which stops counting the steps.

It seems it’s already set to not be optimized. It doesn’t seem to have access to the physical activity permission, but granting that permission didn’t seem to help. It still doesn’t count steps with the screen off.

No matter, thanks for all the ideas, I’ll just keep watching and see if others find a solution. I’ve subscribed to the Walkscape community so hopefully you’ll be posting updates there 🙂

Yeah we have that here too. And 3-4x the impact because of measuring in litres not gallons.

Ok apparently Illinois has a 39c per gallon gasoline tax, another 18c in federal, and another 6% or so on state sales tax, plus any regional sales tax. It’s unclear whether the sales tax applies to the gasoline tax (in NZ it does), but let’s assume it doesn’t. Then that’s $3 - 0.39 - 0.18 = $2.43 then remove 6% tax is 2.43/106*100 = $2.29

We can probably knock a bit more off because there is probably some regional/city sales tax but it should be the right ballpark.

It does seem we pay about the same for petrol, though from what I’ve been searching up, this is wildly different across states because states have much different ways of paying for roads (e.g. Hawai’i is mostly taxed at the pump where as Alaska has big taxes on oil extraction to keep taxes for residents low, including for roading).

Huh, the US gets another layer more confusing. Tax is included in gas prices but not in anything else? How do the arguments for not including that tax in the price stack up when gas stations are already including it?

Taxes throw things out because everyone does it different. What are the sans-tax prices?

There is a book called Factfulness where they talk about presenting the UN scientists their own data and surprising them at the standard of living in many third world countries. People’s ideas of third world countries is based on what they were like in the 50s, but many are catching up to the developed world in leaps and bounds.

In NZ it’s roughly $2.50NZD per litre minimum, or $5.31USD per gallon. This is roughly 50% tax (it’s how we pay for roads, plus is subject to sales tax), so a bit over $2USD per gallon at the moment excluding tax.

Is it really $3 a gallon plus tax in the US right now?

I compare it to how I thought mobile phone calls in the US were super cheap, then found out people pay to receive calls, which was super weird to me. Where I live, my whole life it has never been the case that a normal residential connection would pay to receive a call, mobile or not.

Differences in how we do things make differences appear more than they are.

It doesn’t seem to be helping. If I ever work out a more reliable way to get steps counted I’ll let you know. I know some pedometer apps don’t need Google Play Services and use a persistant notification to keep it active, but it seems like quite a significant change from what you currently have which wouldn’t be worth spending time on to appease such a small group of users.

I can’t say I know drumming, but from what I can search up it’s apparently better than nothing. An electronic drum kit is better than a pad but not as good as a real kit. They all have different feels.

However, it seems that doing anything (even air drumming) is better than doing nothing.

If you are serious, then investigate lessons. You might be able to use real drums at your lessons and the pad for in-between. The teacher should be able to help you pick good exercises for using on the pad.

From what I’m searching up, it seems if you’re not doing lessons you’ll get bad habits regardless, but it shouldn’t prevent you from starting. Anything is better than doing nothing.

Get a pressure washer. Then you could get a cheap electronic drum pad like this.

If you enjoy the drums you can upgrade to a better set later.

If Google Play Services aren’t on there, the Recording API will not count steps in the background.

That makes a lot of sense.

Probably easiest solution is to let WalkScape to run in the background, when it’s freezed the battery consumption should be basically nothing.

It’s allowed to run in the background, but I have now disabled battery optimisation and will see if that helps.

From my understanding, any app installed directly from Google Play should be in the sandbox and have access to Google Play Services. I haven’t quite worked out where the steps are missing, but it seems when the game is open it’s fine, and when the game hasn’t been killed by the OS it’s also fine. If I go back to the game and it has to launch again from scratch, it doesn’t seem to count steps that happened while the game wasn’t running (foreground or background).

I also see this post where others are seeing the same thing, and are not using GrapheneOS. Maybe my use of GrapheneOS is a red herring and there’s actually something else happening.

It was always odd to me that apps need to be constantly active to get the steps. I don’t get why the phone doesn’t just count in the background then allow you to request “how many steps today” or “how many steps since X date/time” via the API.

I’m using GrapheneOS and struggling to get the game to count steps when it’s not actively open. Anyone else using GrapheneOS and have any tips?

I thought I’d mention as it hasn’t been mentioned yet: the only way to install the game on Android is through Google Play. You also need to join a Google Group to get access on Google Play.

I’m tired of looking at clear, easy to spot traffic lights that I get 100% right but have to do page after page of them because I’m using a VPN. If it’s not important I will give up on a site using reCaptcha.

The checkbox is only the first step. When it’s a google recapcha, cloudflare, etc that have the checkbox, this is the trigger to check. It sees how long since you loaded the page to when the checkbox is checked, how the mouse moved (perfectly straight line or instant jump to position indicates bot), and other info they have about previous visits (they store a cookie on your PC and when you go to another site they know where you have been and can compare that against the much higher risk of a blank slate user or against whether you’ve tried the same form 100 times).

If you pass that, as 90%+ of users should, then you see no more. If you are like me, you use a VPN and fail the first check and have to do endless recapcha “click on the busses” until you give up and quit the site.

I hate the google ones. Not only do they make life unbearable for people with VPNs, they use the info about what sites you visit to sell ads. And half the time you don’t even know because the recapcha is the hidden in page one not the one in the form when you click the box.

The cloudflare ones are nicer. They virtually always pass me even though I’m behind a VPN, and although they technically can track me across sites (and probably do to track threat level), they aren’t in the business of selling ads based on that data.

I have also generally had a nice experience with hCapcha. And recently I came across one that is using proof of work, mCaptcha - not sure what to think on that as it probably uses excess energy but it’s nice to have your computer sort it out in the background. The idea here is a sort of rate limit. It takes a few seconds to do the work to pass the test (variable difficulty depending on how many accesses are happening on the site - i.e. whether they are under attack), but it all happens in the background while you fill the form in so you don’t notice. It slows down bots but doesn’t really detect them - more of a rate limiter or something designed to reduce the cost effectiveness of bots.

Thank you for coming to my ted talk.

Ah, OK, it’s a personal preference thing. Personally, that’s one of the things I like over the Ubuntu one.

I am using a laptop, very limited screen real estate. I wonder if that makes a difference.

Interesting. I love Vanilla Gnome over Ubuntu’s version. What do you prefer from Ubuntu that I might have overlooked?

If you want start menu and taskbar, Linux Mint. It was based on Ubuntu so under the hood is very similar but the desktop is more Windows like.

If you want a similar experience to Ubuntu then Fedora, which uses the Gnome desktop environment like Ubuntu but without all the Ubuntu changes. Plus Fedora does some things in different ways under the hood so there is a learning experience that is a nice stepping stone rather than being thrown in the deep end.