I agree not having micro SD cards is pretty frustrating. The way I have worked around it is to “self-host” the things that take up lots of storage space on a separate PC, and connect to that with my phone when I want to access it.

For example, instead of loading a bunch of movies onto my phone, all my movies/tv are on my plex server. When I want to watch something I just open the Plex app and go. The videos don’t take up any space on my phone (unless i will be out of service, then I can download them via the app for offline viewing).

I do the same thing for music, pictures, and other things. A benefit of this is all my stuff is accessible from all my devices (phone, tablet/pc/laptop/tv) without me having to manually load it on each device.

It takes work to get setup, and it’s important to make sure you have good data backup practices incase you have drives that fail. But once you have it setup it’s quite liberating not having to rely on all the BS cloud services that big tech tries to sell us.

While I would still prefer to have a micro sd card slot, this setup makes me miss them less.

I’ve been happy with racknerd. They usually run specials that are pretty reasonable: https://www.racknerd.com/NewYear/

I did have one rather long outage of about 48 hours once. The host running my VPS had a nic fail. They got it fixed and it’s been solid ever since.

There came an echo by big giant circles.

I really enjoy reading in my hammock. Usually I set it up in my backyard but it’s also easy to take to a park or on a hike. I just use one of those camping ones that packs away to the size of a nalgene water bottle.

Sidenote, I also use one of these security straps on my e-reader. It allows me to read laying down in the hammock or in bed without having to completely hold onto my reader. Definitely recommend.

Aptera is doing this with custom solar cells and they claim it’ll provide up to 40 miles of range per day. https://aptera.us/

Can you ping the server from your phone successfully? You can use an app like this to check: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.he.networktools

Making sure you have layer 3 connectivity first would be a good first step. If you don’t, I would start by troubleshooting at layer 2. Run a packet capture on both your phone and server while trying to connect to determine where the disconnect is. Make sure ARP is resolving properly.

If layer 3 IS working, move up to layer 4 and make sure you are using the correct port, http vs https, etc