Does anyone know about flashing a Google mini or amazon alexa or similar device with some other firmware to make it run funky custom stuff and not phone home or is that kinda just impossible?

I tried searching for this on the general Internet but there was too much clutter from the manufacturers to find anything.

This post is born from another discussion we have currently on tildes about the benefits of LineageOS. Please, check it out if you wanna discuss about the benefits of the custom ROM scene.
Here, instead, I ask primarily about hardware, not about software. Although, as always, they later intersect.

My question comes from my search for a new phone, I have been rocking a Moto G5 Plus since 2018 (it was released in 2017 and I bought it second-hand) and my experience has been great overall. I knew that I could root this phone so that I did in September 2018 and from there I haven't gone back to stock ever since. Mistakes aside, the experience has been great overall and has nourish my interest in computing. But, this phone is 3 and a half years old and I definitely notice it. One, due to the wear and second the 2GB of RAM my model had (XT1680). I'm in no hurry in a change though, I think I could use it for some more years and I can say that thanks to an amazing community that still supports this phone. (Seriously, I am using Android 10 with the latest patch, unthinkable!).

Nevertheless, as a thought experiment, or as a backup plan, or useful for anyone interested in being part of custom ROMs, I would like to ask you guys which do you think are the most dev-friendly phone in the market right now?

The criteria would be:

• It has a unlockable bootloader.
• The kernel has been released and is available.
• Has a community that constantly supports it.
• It doesn't have 2GB of RAM

Please, write any phone you have the idea that has a modding scene. I'm afraid that some will not be available in my country, but I want to make it as international possible so I insist, write any phone that has that criteria. And feedback for the english will also be appreciated.

I’m pretty sure every dog owner thinks their dog is the best most unique dog in the world, and the same is true about cat owners, snake owners, etc!

So make your best case: why is your animal companion the coolest in the whole world?

I beat Final Fantasy VII Remake last week. Those last chapters were exhausting, and amazing, and now that I've gotten some rest I'm thinking about going back and doing some postgame content and Hard mode.

Any tips on where to begin? I tried picking Chapter 9 to go to the Colosseum and get a couple upgrades I missed for Aerith, but quickly died to some easy mobs within the first 15 minutes of the chapter.

So I'm thinking I need to do some grinding first, probably on Normal, before attempting Hard? My characters are around Level 40.

How did you go about the postgame content? Did you replay the chapters in chronological order, or prioritize specific goals? What worked well for you (read: made the postgame enjoyable and not frustrating), and what would you have done differently?

What have you been watching and reading this week? You don't need to give us a whole essay if you don't want to, but please write something! Feel free to talk about something you saw that was cool, something that was bad, ask for recommendations, or anything else you can think of.

If you want to, feel free to find the thing you're talking about and link to its pages on Anilist, MAL, or any other database you use!

As part of a weekly series, these topics are a place for users to casually discuss the things they did — or didn't do — during their week. Did you accomplish any goals? Suffer a failure? Do nothing at all? Tell us about it!

tl;dr What applications (web or desktop) have you seen that have excellent, productive user interfaces that prioritize getting shit done?

I am currently developing a moderately complex web application with a management interface that will be used by non-technical users. It also has a separate interface for technicians to see their tasks and submit reports, but I'm pretty happy with how that's coming together. I have a pretty good idea of how I want to display data in terms of what kind of "widgets" I could use. For example, a calendar view with daily, weekly, and monthly view modes. What I'm looking for inspiration with are the finer details, like filtering data, navigation, data hierarchy. I want to find things I hadn't even considered and aren't part of the typical "flat web UI toolkit" playbook.

I'd love to steal small ideas from a forgotten tool built for Windows 95, or maybe those paradigms are best left in the past—I don't know. Personally, I find most flat UI applications are almost useless in terms of discoverability, productivity, and general ease of use. Something like the Azure dashboard is what I would like to avoid building.

I'm also trying to keep my front end stack pretty lean by using Vue.js and rolling my own components based on accessible and keyboard navigable HTML components.

This thread is posted weekly, and is intended as a place for more-casual discussion of the coronavirus and questions/updates that may not warrant their own dedicated topics. Tell us about what the situation is like where you live!