averyminya

I made a mistake in my dates and so I have a few chapters to edit and upload and I have work tomorrow morning. Gonna be rough.

So, to make myself feel better, what are you time crunching this week?

I've been trying to clean for a week, yesterday and today I've spent actually making some headway. My grandma is coming to town so I'm trying to spruce up the place! Not very exciting for the fleeting weekends of the summer, so I thought I'd live vicariously through you all!

P.S. you can't clean without music: Sorry for the YouTube link but I've been unable to use the alternatives recently

Served with oven roasted broccoli and demi-baguette toasted with garlic butter!

• 8oz. Broccoli florets
• 1/4 oz. Rosemary (finely chopped)
• 10oz Pork Chops
• 5tsp Balsamic Vinegar
• 2 tsp sugar
• 4 TBSP Garlic Herb Butter
• 1 TBSP Cooking Oil
• ~1oz Chicken stock concentrate
• 1/4 cup water
• Salt & Pepper as desired

Preheat oven to 425f, halve the baguette and set in toaster (but do not toast) while you wash & dry produce. Cut broccoli to size and put on baking sheet, drizzle oil, salt, and pepper. I also added just a bit of dried basil. Roast on top rack until browned, 15-20 mins. Make sure you set your timer loud, mine was going off for 5 minutes. That said, still great, they were like chips :)

Once that's going, strip rosemary leaves from stems and finely chop leaves for 1tsp. Pat pork dry and dry season with salt and pepper (I did both sides salted). Heat a drizzle of oil in a large pan over medium high, add pork and cook until browned and cooked through, 4-6 minutes per side. Once done, transfer to cutting board or plate. Check on the broccoli if it hasn't come out by this point.

You can also sub other meat like chicken or beef, roughly 3-5 mins per side or 4-7 minutes per side.

It says to wipe out pan, but since I know what's in it I decided to just add another drizzle of oil and use the current season in addition.

Add chopped rosemary cook and stir until fragrant, about 30 seconds, then stir in stock concentrate, 1/4 cup of water, vinegar, and 2 tsp of sugar. Bring to a simmer and cook stirring until reduced slightly over 3-4 minutes. Season "generously" with pepper (I am not huge on pepper so I did a little more than I usually do, it was pleasant). Turn on the toaster for the baguette. Turn off heat then add about 2-3 TBSP of garlic herb butter and stir until melted.

Once reduced, everything is ready to be plated! Serve the pork chop topped with the balsamic rosemary sauce, roasted broccoli, and baguette with garlic butter, salt and pepper to finish!

I very much enjoyed this one, this was the first time I have made pork chops myself and I think I did very well! I did overcook the broccoli but they were still very good, and the baguette and garlic butter were to die for.

Paired with a Deschutes Obsidian Stout, a bit of a chocolate-espresso with some sweet aftertaste before the bitterness sets in. It went very well with the Rosemary Balsamic reduction, which was very sweet as I think I added a bit more sugar.

All in all it was delectable!

It featured geotagging and made it pretty easy to get really nicely organized albums for trips.

However I don't really want my stuff on their servers nor am I fond of the subscription for trips I get to take maybe once a year these days.

Currently I use syncthing and some gallery apps (immich, photoprism), but due to network conditions (CG/NAT) accessing these outside my local network can be annoying at times. Ideally I could sync&transfer photos and have them cached on the device instead, which is what Journey accomplished for me.

I was up late last night and we know how that goes - rabbit holes. This time I was trying to find some ways to make my phone feel a little snappier and possibly eliminate the issue I was having where my recent apps button stops working until I restart the phone. On Android 13 I found that if I changed to gesture based navigation it solves the problem - recent apps can be switched to for just a small change. But the fluidity of gesture based navigation got me thinking about the animation speeds, so off I went into developer mode to play with some settings. This is where the rabbit hole begins.

(Small edit for phone!) I've only recently gotten the Sony Xperia 1IV direct from Sony, put in my TMobile SIM and have been running it the last 8 months or so. I haven't looked too much into the A13, but I made sure to do all my usual protections - disable Facebook and whatever other bloatware comes preinstalled. I saw a category to see a list of running services and there's some pretty innocuous ones - wireless charging service, accubattery, google, KDE connect, Vanced MicroG and Meta Services. It just looked like an RSS feed with a notification icon, really and I didn't think much of it.

Well with (edit for clarity) Vanced being dead me not liking ReVanced as much (end edit) and should have switched to LibreTube much sooner, I was trying to find where and how to uninstall MicroG. I came across my active processes again and I remembered about Meta, did a little digging (and I mean little) and saw that many Android phones come with a Meta App Manager and tracking service that runs automatically in the background, whether or not you have their apps installed/disabled. We all knew about bloatware coming preinstalled, but this was the first I'd come across full on background services using data and RAM (minute as they may be).

So I thought I'd share. It's simple, but here we are. To find them (in Android 13)

Android Settings > Apps > See All Apps > top corner Show System

Scroll down to the M's and be sure to disable background data, clear cache and storage, and disable these 3 Meta services.

And if you're curious to see your Running Services, enable developer mode, navigate to it and it's the 8th option, right under "OEM unlocking". Handy for finding sneaky apps.

While I don't use Facebook on my phone (app wrapper), I do use Instagram and I've noticed zero issues with the app. Almost like the tracking is completely unnecessary for the user experience and its removal breaks nothing! But obligatory YMMV and do this at your own risk etc. The risk is likely that Facebook wont serve you ads as well, the horror.

Anyway, I thought I was up to date on everything that needs to be done to debloat a phone, but I found some more that I've yet to see any mentions or guides for until after I started researching what and why Meta Services was running on my phone. I thought I'd share since I'm tech savvy and try to stay up to date, so if I feel this way then there may be others who would like to know about this as well.