I lucked out and my banking app is fine too. Weirdly its the wifi garage door opener which came with my house that refuses to work. I took it offline and am back to a remote now. I may replace it someday when I finally get home assistant going.

And current. School curriculums are being actively modified to completely eradicate acknowledgement of our real history. It’s tragic.

I am not an expert.

Many many apps rely on google play services to function, basically for most of the data fetching, push notifications, authentications, etc. Disabling it will break those apps as a result. Since your data is fed through those services you cannot maintain privacy from google without doing so.

So yes, you should disable google play for privacy, but you will need to find replacement apps in many cases.

Graphene does a thing where it “sandboxes” google play services, preventing it from grabbing unnecessary data like your real time location telemetry. I think this lets you use those apps that need it, but they will still get some of your data where thats being used. Banking apps are notorious for needing it for authentication, but you can easily use a different map app like magic earth to avoid google services for other needs.

I’m still exploring this and learning so those are just examples I know of. Not sure how much else this will break if you aren’t using graphene to manage it.

I am wary of ever recommending to completely block or avoid updates. Generally this means opening yourself up to security concerns.

Starcraft - alt and ctrl are frequently used, easy slip to make in a rush. Pretty sure there was an override in the options menu specifically for preventing this.

Great idea. I will never buy from amazon so filtering that out automatically would be fantastic when looking for products

As I recall the powers combined with shooting was really new to the genre, along with the ways you combine them. Lighting enemies on fire who would run to water to put themselves out, then hitting water with electricity to zap a group was creative stuff. The way big daddies acted like a boss fight you could tackle in a bunch of different ways was significant too. The options there and with many other obstacles gave player agency for how to navigate most non-linear levels that was a real rarity. For instance, those turrets - have you shcoked them and hacked them? What about freezing them and hacking them? Or using hypnosis on enemies to make them fight the turret? But hacking all those turrets makes for a great distraction in a big daddy fight. And breaking the turrets gives you more ammo.

At the time most shooter were “go here shoot this, go there shoot that” and hell, thats still really common. This game really shook it up, even if it drew inspiration from thief and system shock, it did a lot to improve and advance them. Combined with the unique environment, smart story line, and interesting characters there’s plenty of reason it sticks in people’s memories as an all time classic.