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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • This is beautifully familiar.

    Am I seeing too many similarities between how Twitter/X was taken over and singlehandedly being irreversibly ruined?

    While Windows is stubbornly becoming increasingly user-adversarial (advertising, constant intrusive updates, forced transition from your favorite browser to Microsoft Edge, etc.) and unintuitive (sometimes even counter intuitive) interface design, placement and inaccessible settings.

    Well, delighting in schadenfreude, I won’t complain. Microsoft is inadvertently helping me help transition many friends, family and colleagues to various flavors of Linux systems, namely Linux Mint (whichever desktop they prefer) and/or Pop!OS most of the time, but also occasionally Fedora or a particular flavor of Ubuntu.

    I never recommend Arch or rolling release systems or immutable systems to first time Linux user so as to preemptively avoid additional layers of complexity, learning curve, downtime and troubleshooting.








  • The essential part at the end:

    “ When reached for comment, Reddit spokesperson Tim Rathschmidt directed me to Reddit’s API FAQ page and said the company couldn’t comment further because it’s in a quiet period and doesn’t “comment on confidential business conversations and/or agreements.” ”

    We can infer that it was not the fountain of money they thought it would become.

    More telling is their silence. Who doesn’t want to promote and advertise how profitable they are to potential shareholders just before an IPO.



  • Nowadays, the only thing I find myself printing occasionally are return labels for Amazon RMA on my trusty old Samsung CLP laser printer (which sometime has a mind of its own and starts adding a single grayish streak on the second page onward at random location).

    I have a second monochrome laser printer from Brother I purchased 2-3 years ago for a bargain lightning price of $70 thinking of replacing my old “dying” printer, however I exclusively use it to do occasional photocopies and I already have a bunch of TN660 toner for it.

    Just waiting for the Samsung to run its course and finally die but it lives on challenging any thoughts I may have to send it to the eco-centre (recycling center in Québec). It is at least maybe 20 years old and the darn thing is stubbornly holding on 😆. At this point I feel like it may last another 20 years. It has indeed been well worth the $300 at the time.

    Early on, I experienced so many issues with Lexmark, Epson and HP that I crossed off the companies forever.

    Fortunately, I think I lucked out on my current 2 printers that will, hopefully, last me a few more decades.

    I used to only recommend that any Brother printer would be better to friends and family, but I came accross information that newer brother printers started to have a chip in their ink/toner cartridges. I am unaware if it is for some nefarious purpose. Hopefully, they understand alienating customers will quickly dissolve all the good will they have accumulated.


  • Thank you for this excellent writeup.

    A lot of mistakes/repercussions was readily documented beforehand and could have been avoided by proper regulations (even by not removing sane ones such as the Glass–Steagall legislation).

    Moreover, Climate Change is affecting a larger and larger part of the stochastic increases in instability: from extreme localized weather and regional aberration to global temperature anomaly affecting every part of the planet differently.

    However, we live in a world whereas bombastic contrarians are lauded, even elevated to positions of power or at the center of important decision making processes. No wonder we keep being surprised by avoidable disasters.




  • Too late, I was buying up a bunch of high TBW solid state drives the last ~2 years, even this Black Friday/Boxing Day there were a few last deals.

    My focus was mostly on Intel Optane leftovers, but also Samsung Pro (NVMe, SATA, even microSD), Kingston enterprise (DC500M/DC600M/DC1500M, NVMe, SD/microSD), even some Seagate Nytro SATA/SAS enterprise drives, Crucial MX500, WD Red, and a bunch of other brands.

    I’m a data hoarder organizer for family/relatives/friends I regularly give tech support for and myself. I love to recycle old PC I’ve build previously into NAS, media center, NVR or whatever new projects or ideas they come up with.

    Unfortunately, I may have missed out on some great DDR4 and DDR5 deals I saw but was thinking it was not immediately necessary 🫤… oh well… we win some and lose some.







  • I regularly “deep freeze” or make read-only systems from Raspberry Pi, Ubuntu, Linux Mint LMDE and others Linux Distros whereas I disable automatic updates everywhere (except for some obvious config/network/hardware/subsystem changes I control separately).

    I have had systems running 24/7 (no internet, WiFi) for 2-3 years before I got around to update/upgrade them. Almost never had an issue. I always expected some serious issues but the Linux package management and upgrade system is surprisingly robust. Obviously, I don’t install new software on a old system before updating/upgrading (learned that early on empirically).

    Automatic updates are generally beneficial and helps avoid future compatibility/dependency issues on active systems with frequent user interaction.

    However, on embedded/single purpose/long distance/dedicated or ephemeral application, (unsupervised) automatic updates may break how the custom/main software may interact with the platform. Causing irreversible issues with the purpose it was built for or negatively impact other parts of closed circuit systems (for example: longitudinal environmental monitoring, fauna and flora observation studies, climate monitoring stations, etc.)

    Generally, any kind of update imply some level of supervision and testing, otherwise things could break silently without anyone noticing. Until a critical situation arises and everything break loose and it is too late/too demanding/too costly to try to fix or recover within a impossibly short window of time.