Ah, a new Invention in the Asshole-Technology Department. Satan has a very special place in hell for the Managers who decided on this and he will place an order on this exact technology just for them to enjoy it non-stop. Forever.

Would be a shame if Android disabled sideloading entirely like apple.

Create a household account book. Either use existing solutions like apps, go the excel / sheets route (I did) or use pen&paper with a calculator to help you out.

Learn how budgeting works in the first place. This step is REALLY important! I recreated my household account book two more times because I was an idiot who ignored learning the bare basics on money and accounting. There’s a reason it’s a profession with proper wordings and not some obsure hobby. Use youtube tutorials for that, as you will need several examples to understand budgeting in general.

Once you’ve got that down, measure your income and expenses over a year. Estimate your last year by category and type of expense, write reoccuring yearly and monthly expenses down. Create a saving expense to build up a budget buffer. You WILL need a buffer for all the variations you inevitably will encounter throughout a year. Once you understand how much you spent monthly to stay alive, calculate how much you can spent freely (pocket money). Ideally, put that pocket money on a separate account with a separate card as access to it and “pay yourself” that pocket money. Your main account should be the houshold expenses account with strict rules on spendings. It’s also where all your income enters to finance it.

If you’Ve reached this point, you will need to let it run for a couple of months to work out a lot of kinks in it. Food budget, mobility budgets, health budgets, etc. all need to be tuned to fit your needs. Whatever’s left goes to saving or pocket money. That’s up to you. Set yourself a minimal safety savings point that will keep you alive for half or a full year without (relevant) income. That’s enough buffer for most expenses you will encounter.

So after all of this you should have a good understanding how much you spend on what. That’s when you dive deeper and look into each spending category, including food and rent (often the two major expenses). Cutting out or replacing certain type of foods or drinks with cheaper alternatives have huge impacts on your available money.

The rest should slowly become obvious if you’ve educated yourself enough to reach this point. It’s all about learning and understanding, really.

Frugal challenges, forcing myself to use my bicycle instead of my car where possible, declutter my belongings (why do I even have all this crap I never touched for the last year?!) and trying out weird things in general at least once (like throwing things at the wall and see what sticks).

Can confirm. That’s also why most appliances are surprisingly repairable today. You can just buy used appliances that aren’t working as long as it’s something minor like leaking or squeaking of a washer, no heating of a dryer, rumbling like crazy, etc. Inside you usually find many parts from Whirlpool and a few other components like Bosch Motors (which often enough do not actually fail). Those parts have numbers you can find for cheap online. Just get a proper(!) bitset with some generic tools and go watch Youtube repair videos. It’s too easy these days.

Heck I even bought a completely dead machine where the description clearly matched a note online that a resistor and a single easy-to-solder chip for 2$ total need to be replaced. That repair worked for 5 years until I sold it for a better machine.

This. Go ahead and tell everyone that you are worried about your mother and would like to see her anytime and check on her for your own peace of mind. Post a clear, preferably large, sign up front that there’s an active camera in the room. But do not insist on it. That’ll tell you all you need to know about the staff very quickly.

For the camera, use a regular old wifi-enabled baby monitor (App-controlled for best results) and connect it to a mobile Internet router. These routers have internal logs - learn how to access them, then check them (remotely, after setting up security in them) at intervals for suspicious reboot events.

Can confirm. Watching 50 Shades of Greek told me way too many aspects of the Greek mythology. The Intro alone sums it up perfectly.

If you carry a sharp screwdriver or stable hard knife around to puncture the battery rapidly, you may have something sort of resembling explosives, just very, VERY inefficient and unpredictably to set off. You’d be a lot better off using that screwdriver or knife instead to do whatever you’d wanna do with an exploding phone.

Hatte die Frage auch mal gestellt gehabt, wofür Microblogging-Dienste vom Typ Twitter/Mastodon/… eigentlich gut sind. Ergebnis war letztendlich: Posten in die Wildnis und hoffen, dass es irgendwelche Leute interessiert und vielleicht sogar was dazu sagen. Follower zu gewinnen ist dabei etwas für den “Promi”-Status, also um Fans zu gewinnen, die einem durch allerlei Reaktionen das Gefühl geben, bei den Leuten beliebt zu sein.