The middleware app you link to says this:

Navigation apps that support the default Android Developer Option’s ‘mock location’ feature location source.

I installed a similar FOSS middleware app (which apparently no longer exists):

http://f-droid.org/en/packages/org.broeuschmeul.android.gps.bluetooth.provider/

It worked as far as getting the fix via NMEA over bluetooth and sending the mock location to the kernel, but the problem is that OSMand and Organic Maps are not written to make use of it. What version of OSMand are you using? I am trapped on an old version because OSMand decided to leave those with pre-AOS7 devices in the dust. Maybe they added mock locations afterwards.

Not sure where to start with an eyeroll? from a clueless Cloudflare boot-licker. Coming from a CF domain (another technofeudal fiefdom) there is probably no hope for you. But since there are at least 6 others equally clueless, I’ll go out on a limb and link the research in the off chance the extent of disclosure with Google’s Location service sinks in with someone:

http://web.archive.org/web/20250422153816/http://www.scss.tcd.ie/doug.leith/apple_google.pdf

If you can root your phone

Only certain phones. I tried several different hacks out in the wild for my version and they failed. It’s also an off-brand phone that gets no notice by any of the alternate OS projects so flashing is not an option either.

you can install whatever location mocking app from fdroid,

What exactly are you referring to? The stock AOS already supports mock locations. And I’ve used it. But not many apps are designed to make use of the mock location. I vaguely recall coming across an app that hacked the official GPS API to use the mock location in order to fool apps that are naive about mock locations, but of course that bit only works on rooted phones.

It’s a shit show all around. But in any case since not all phones are rootable, apps need to be written to specifically read the mock location feed as a GPS alternative.

Network based location is available via other ways, not just by the goog, if you install microg

I heard of microg before; looked into it, and went no further. I don’t recall what the problem was, but I vaguely recall that it still requires some kind of ties to Google.

(edit) MicroG is proposed as an alternative to playstore. I used to use Raccoon, a desktop app to fetch playstore junk. It still required a Google login to use Google’s API. The circumvention was to use a shared account. I imagine that’s also how microg must work. But I eventually decided Playstore garbage does not belong on my phone anyway. I will only use apps I can obtain outside of playstore.

or only its location part unifiednlp, you can get quick rough location from celltowers and even crowd sourced wifi based location, formerly collected by mozilla, nowadays by poziton.

If there is some way of getting that info using an unrooted phone that has been Google-neutered to the full unrooted extent, I would be interested. I could not remove most of the Google infra but I could disable it. I had it in my notes to check out Unified Network Location Provider and forgot about it. Thanks for the reminder.

My notes also mention this app, which only works on recent phones (not mine):

http://f-droid.org/en/packages/net.wigle.wigleandroid/

Not sure if that was the barrier that stopped me looking further.

In any case, there is still a role for old TomToms to play here. Using cell towers and wifi APs requires your navigation phone to have those radios powered on, which need energy.

I agree. But you have to start somewhere. The guideline has been converted into legislation in Belgium since last week.

Do you have more detail on what was implemented? I could only find this repairability index, which I suspect won’t be much more useful than energy indexes and nutrition indexes.

This is why I said at the local level. City council cannot change federal laws.

Also when people would dig through the piles they would often throw shit everywhere

The problem is that they are in piles to begin with. I have climbed on piles of appliance waste stacked ~5 meters high. These are not neat stacks but randomly dropped/tossed things which roll when you step on them. I fell once and got bruised but was lucky I did not get impaled. I’ve been kicked out of junk yards ½ dozen times.

The problem with the chain of disposal is the public tosses something out and the privately-operated metal recovery business immediately claims it as their property to be cashed in for its melt value. They immediately treat the incoming appliances as garbage. A middle step is missing. The middle step should not involve a massive pile of junk that is dangerous to climb. Large appliances should all be on the ground with space around them to inspect. The metal recovery business should not have a claim on the property before this middle step.

The EU has been grappling with right to repair laws for over 10 years now. It’s a complete shit show.

At the moment, a washing machine maker in the EU is only required to release repair documentation to professional repairers who are insured, not consumers. And they only have to do it in the 1st 10 years, not in the time period that things actually break. At the 10 year mark, they automatically lose the docs and stop making parts.

The law you reference is not yet in force AFAIK. But when it comes into force and each member state eventually legislates, look at what we are getting-- from your reference:

A European information form can be offered to consumers to help them assess and compare repair services (detailing the nature of the defect, price and duration of the repair). To make the repair process easier, a European online platform with national sections will be set up to help consumers easily find local repair shops, sellers of refurbished goods, buyers of defective items or community-led repair initiatives, such as repair cafes.

That’s crap. It’s fuck all. Consumers are not getting service manuals. They are just being told where they can go to get someone else to do the work. We can of course already find repair cafes because they publish their own location. But repairers at repair cafes are just winging it. You cannot bring them a large appliance like a washer. They don’t even have water and drain hookups. And even if one repair cafe made an exception for large appliances, their repairers are not insured and thus cannot legally get access to service manuals.

Everything at the state/fed/intl levels is a total shitshow. This is why I asked in the OP what can be done at the local level.

I should have linked the parent thread. Federal laws are a shit show. In the US, most states have paltry R2R protections typically only covering cars, wheel chairs, and farm equipment.

This is why I am collecting ideas for what we might petition LOCAL govs to do, like city councils.

I don’t think that is true. I never heard of a creativity test or measurement as a precondition to copyright protection. As I understand it, anything you write (regardless of artistic creativity) is automatically protected under an all rights reserved copyright unless you explicitly state otherwise.

Seems like a good approach for the scale. It’s quite thin but I’ll see if I can add a mechanical switch.

i might try this for the calipers. But the battery cover for the scale uses a screw… so i might opt to hack that to use external power of some kind.

your interpretation of my quote is incorrect

Your words, quoted here again as proof that you have defined “repair” so narrowly as to exclude taking actions to restore a product to put back into service:

I wouldn’t consider “hacking” a drive to continue using it when you shouldn’t a repair.

What is your mother tongue that is so far from English?

All I’ll say is I’m glad you have nothing to do with making the specifications for this sort of hardware and that it’s left to competent and educated engineers.

You are really lost here. We actually agreed on the engineering decision (which was the decision to have a fail safe trigger). Again, the point of contention is the management decision to block property owners from control over their own property after they recover their data – the management decision that forces useful hardware to be needlessly committed to e-waste after the data has been migrated. It is because you think the profit-driven management decision of a private enterprise is “engineering” makes you profoundly incompetent for involvement in engineering specs. But you might be able to do marketing or management at a company like Microsoft. Shareholders would at least love your corporate boot-licking posture and your propaganda rhetoric in framing management decisions as “engineering”.

But plz, stay away from specs. Proper specs favor the consumers/users and community. They are not optimized to exploit consumers to enrich corporate suppliers and generate landfill.

Me providing an example of a repair is not me claiming it is the only method of repair.

Luckily I quoted you, which shows that you have defined “repair” so narrowly as to exclude taking actions to restore a product to put back into service.

Except, again, you aren’t making it useful again,

Of course it’s useful again. To claim writing to a drive is not useful is to misunderstand how storage devices are useful.

you’re attempting to bypass a fail safe put in place by engineers.

No I’m not. The fail safe should remain. That much was well done by engineers and I would be outraged if it were not in place. I WANT my drive to go into read-only mode when it crosses a reliability threshhold. The contention is what happens after the fail safe – after recovering the data. No one here believes the drive should not fail safe.

The first paragraph quoted (and the article as whole) cover reads, different between different drives (including different specs for enterprise vs consumer) and how the values are drawn.

Yes I read that. And? It’s immaterial to the discussion whether it’s an enterprise or consumer grade. Enterprise hardware still lands in the hands of consumers at 2nd-hand markets.

10k is for intel 50nm MLC NAND specifically. Other values are presented in the article.

And? Why do you think this is relevant to the nannying anti-repair discussion? It doesn’t obviate anything I have said. It’s just a red herring.

It isn’t arbitrary as you’ve attempted to hand wave it as.

Yes it is. Read your own source. They are counting write cycles to get an approximation of wear, not counting electrons that stick.

It doesn’t matter how sophisticated the software standard is, the oxide on the drive will eventually wear down and is a physical problem.

This supports what I have said. Extreme precision is not needed when we have software that gives redundancy to a user-specified extent and precisely detects errors.

it doesn’t pass for right to repair imo.

Denying owners control over their own property s.t. they cannot put it back into service is an assault on repair. Opposing the nannying is to advocate for a right to repair.

It’s risking data loss to wring an extra 12 months (or likely, less) from a dying drive.

You’re not grasping how the tech works. The 12 months is powered off state maintenance for reading. Again, you’re missing the reading and writing roles here. I’m not going to explain it again. Read your own source again.

For every 1 person like you that its an annoyance for it saves multitudes more that are less savvy pointlessly risking data loss.

This is a false dichotomy. It’s possible to protect the low tech novices without compromising experts from retaining control over their own product. This false dichotomy manifests from your erroneous belief that the fail safe contradicts an ability to reverse the safety switch after it triggers.

I didn’t claim as such

Luckily I quoted you, which shows that you have defined “repair” so narrowly as to exclude taking actions to restore a product to put back into service.

and replacing a faulty or damaged module wouldn’t return it to factory condition.

I never said it would. But more importantly, this is a red herring. I don’t accept your claim that it wouldn’t, but it’s a moot point because this is not the sort of repair I would do and it’s not likely worthwhile. The anti-repair tactic that I condemn is the one that blocks owners from hacks that make the device more useful than the read-only state.

I wouldn’t consider “hacking” a drive to continue using it when you shouldn’t a repair.

(emphasis mine) This is the nannying I am calling out. If someone can make a degraded product useful again, it’s neither your place nor the manufacturers place to tell advanced users/repairers not to – to dictate what is appropriate.

As far as I’m aware it’s to comply with JEDEC standards.

It’s over-compliant. Also, we don’t give a shit about JEDEC standards after the drive is garbage. The standards are only useful during the useful life of the product. From your own source:

In the consumer space you need that time to presumably transfer your data over.

I need a couple weeks tops to transfer my data. It’s good that we get a year. Then what? The drive is as useful as a brick. And needlessly so.

I just don’t see how using a drive into the period where it’s likely to fail and lose data,

That’s because you’re not making the distinction between reading and writing, and understanding that it’s writing that fails. The fitness to write to a NAND declines gradually with each cycle. Every transistor is different. A transistor might last 11,943 cycles and it sits next to a transistor that lasts 10,392 cycles. They drew a line and said “10k writes is safe for this tech, so draw a line there and go into read-only mode when an arbitrary number of transistors have likely undergone 10k writes”.

The telemetry on the device is not sophisticated enough to track exactly when a transistor’s state becomes ambiguous. So the best they could do is keep an avg cycle count which factors in a large safety margin for error. So of course it would be an insignificant risk to do 1 (or 5) more write cycles. Even if the straw that breaks the camel’s back is on the 1 additional write operation on a particular sector, we have software that is sophisticated enough to correct it. Have a look at par2.

against specification,

It’s not “against” the spec because the spec does not specify how we may use the drive. Rightfully so. The spec says the drive must remain readable for 1 year after crossing a threshhold (which BTW is determined by write cycle counts not actual ability to store electrons).

is a good idea.

Bricking by design is a bad idea because preventable e-waste and consumerism is harmful to the environment. I write this post from a 2008 laptop that novice consumers would have declared useless 10 years ago.

Let alone a right to repair issue.

Of course it’s a right to repair issue because it’s a nannying anti-repair tactic that has prematurely forced a functional product into uselessness. I am being artificially blocked from returning the product into useful service.

I don’t think this is right to repair tbh. You can’t repair the SSD in this state?

“Repair” does not necessarily mean returning to a factory state. If a machine/appliance/device breaks and the OEM parts are no longer available, and you hack it to serve your purpose without restoring the original mint state, that’s still a repair. My bicycle is loaded after-market parts and hacks in order to keep it in service. The fact that the parts function differently does not mean they cease to repair the bike.

In the case at hand, the drive is crippled. To uncripple it to get back some of its original functionality to some extent is to repair it.

Which click “ignore” after not reading the message informing them

That’s not how it works. Though it would be feasible for an OS creator to implement such a click-through hack, that’s on them. ATM it does not exist. It’s unlikely that OS suppliers would want that liability.

A good majority of users aren’t anywhere near as tech savvy enough to understand what’s going on.

Nannying those who do know what they’re doing is not a justified propoposition when low-tech users can still be nannied nonetheless. Anyone who implements a one-click automatic dialog as you suggest would be at fault for low-tech users getting stung. Publishing an ATA password for hdparm users gives a sufficient hurdle for the tech illiterates without nannying advanced users.

That indeed makes sense from a purely practical PoV, if you neglect right to repair. But the drive maker (Apacer) is effectively denying users their right to repair through the nannying. Your approach is good for repair avoidance but still supports anti-repair suppliers in the end.

The right to repair (at least in the EU) is being written to facilitate both people who have the ability to repair and those who do not. If you do not have the ability to repair, the law will entitle you have the device repaired outside of the warranty for a reasonable price.

If you have the ability to repair, the law entitles you to manuals and parts, and the parts must be at a reasonable price.

I had a proprietary valve fail in a boiler. The valve should be under $10, but because the manufacturer bundles the valve with many other fittings people are forced to buy a kit that’s no less than $100. That’s one thing the right to repair should solve.

Thanks… looks like I got my answer. Not a single bottle rejected!