All of that and Custom DNS? Sounds like a pet project with scope issues.

I’ve settled on Fast Draw. You get to use exactly one widget, but it’s lightweight and lets me launch apps.

While I can fully understand his pain, I can’t quite follow how adding a paid subscription model will make his life easier (except financially).

Before, he had to deal with entitled asshats, and now he’ll have to deal with asshats feeling even more entitled, because they paid for it.

I’ve been manually reencoding to h265 l, and while the space savings are significant, the pain is also. Especially if you mess up the audio or subs!

Will definitely look into that!

If you have bad eyesight, VR won’t help you. The goggles contain lenses to magnify and project the screens to a virtual distance from your eyeballs similar to a monitor.

You’ll still need your glasses, I’m afraid.

They’re still a big name in mainframes and are also a cloud hyperscaler, and they offer software development and consulting. They do a lot of research in AI and quantum computing, and even blockchain a few years ago. But altogether just a shadow of what they once were. I used to work there when Lenovo took over ThinkPad production and the hard drive business was phasing out. I couldn’t imagine being there now.

Hey look everyone, we got a dirty belter here!

So is AI the new Blockchain?

Switching over to a new operating system can be challenging, even frightening for some people. We should acknowledge that, welcome them and offer them help along the way. We all want FOSS to gain more traction, and gatekeeping isn’t the way. How about a new community for Linux news?

It’s been a while since I looked into it, and things might have changed since then, but some stuff off the top of my head:

• Messages are stored on the server, not on the device
• end-to-end encryption not enabled by default
• uses proprietary encryption, making security audits difficult

Apart from that it’s somewhat politically questionable, based in Dubai (I think), with dubious financial backing and Russian developers. Because it’s closed source and the encryption is proprietary, there’s no way of knowing how much info it leaks.

I thoroughly recommend the book “The Chinese Typewriter”. It goes through the various challenges that the Chinese language pose. How do you order characters, like in an alphabet? How it was encoded in Morse, or later on, in ASCII. And of course, the various attempts at Chinese typewriting. Actually quite fascinating!

It’s easy for you and me. But imagine you’re Joe Everyman. First off, you need to know about F-Droid and where to download it. Then confirm that the browser can install software. And this is where I would imagine many users second-guessing if everything’s legit. And after it’s installed, you’ve got two separate app-stores to deal with. You need to know what you can install where.

If I extrapolate from my mother-in-law, who still can’t wrap her head around the concept of an app-store, let alone alternative browsers, that’s just too much hassle for most people.

As an OSS advocate, I fully agree. Sadly, OSS alternatives have to compete with easily accessible, slick and well-integrated products that are aggressively positioned. Just imagine all the steps you need to go through, just to install Fennec from F-Droid.

What is renewable about nuclear? It’s not a fossil fuel, but uranium has to be mined and is a finite resource just like oil.

How exactly do solar and wind waste more money than they generate? There is hardly anything that requires less maintenance. I put panels on my roof and just forget about them for 20 years. No space wasted, no maintenance.

Compare that to a nuclear power plant. How long does it take to build one? France is building new ones for I don’t know, 5 or ten years? And once it’s built, how much land does a NPP require? How much staffing and maintenance? They have massive cooling requirements so they always need to be built close to water. Did you know that France had to power down about half their NPPs in the summer because the rivers didn’t carry enough water? You say that solar is toxic as hell, then what is nuclear? What exactly is the plan with waste? Bury it somewhere really really deep and keep fingers crossed for thousands of years that it doesn’t contaminate ground water? And what’s with all the irradiated parts of the plant itself? How can you recycle them?

Any way you cut it, nuclear is a grandiose, but extremely risky and costly technology.

An interesting alternative to sails are Flettner rotors. They’re pretty much just rotating pillars, and are being tested on some cargo ships to reduce fuel consumption.

Remember when Prime meant same-day shipping? Now it just means somewhat better terms than the stingy rabble.

When I was vaping I had to replace the coils every few weeks and cleaned out the mouthpiece, liquid container and stuff in an ultrasound. Also, I mixed flavor liquid with the nicotine liquid and had to watch out for the right mixing ratios. I’d say that’s all a bit involved and a bit much for those that just want a hit of nicotine.

All utilities, phone, electricity, sewage, road and rail.

But actually looking at these, pretty much all protocols and standards are already open.

Thanks so much for this post! Ventoy is really the tool I never knew I really needed. Up to now, I have been reflashing and juggling sticks with various ISOs.

But even better, now I could finally update the BIOS on my Framework 13!