Threads for Fairphone often fill up with "it's not going to work if they don't X." Lots of people don't seem to understand that their personal viewpoint can be quite different from other's.

There are people who are aware of the trade-offs of a Fairphone, but still choose to get one.

Well, I submitted a "support" request:

For whatever it's worth - I'm disappointed to see that XXX is pushing for its customers to download Chrome rather than ensure that their website supports proper web standards. A website that supports web standards will work well on all browsers and will save you from trying to pressure your customers into changing their preferred browser.

Thank you for your time (and, this is my personal opinion, not the opinion of the organization I'm here supporting).

NotAnArdvark

Something I worry about, but haven't seen anyone mention yet, is that a long-after-the-fact apology seems a little self-serving. I'm the one who feels bad, so I'm going to bring something up again hoping that I feel better about the situation afterwards.

There are people I didn't treat very well when I was young. When I think about reaching out to apologize I imagine the interaction ending with me feeling better and them feeling shitty again.

Reading this thread, however, it doesn't look like that's how this usually goes. So, maybe I should rethink it.

Adopt a cat. The are so, so many excellent cats (and kittens) out there with no home. Save a life instead of bringing another cat into the world.

They say no one is using these older LTS kernels, but I'm running into them all the time on Android devices. I don't know if the vendors are taking advantage of those updates, but they're definitely choosing the LTS kernels for their BSPs at release time.

I don't see what would be wrong with a world where businesses just satisfied themselves with providing employees with a reasonable living, contributed to the communities they were in, and provided a good or service that was needed. Sitting under a tree and reading a book sounds better than watching the world burn in your name-brand clothes and 5 bedroom 2.5 bath house.

“These people who are mad, they’re mad because they used to get something for free, and now it’s going to be not free,” he said in an interview with The Verge.

I find this an irritating statement. Before this shit-show, I would have paid ~$5 /month to keep using Reddit the way I was. I got huge value from all the different communities - and their history - that Reddit made possible. But they never made that a real option and instead burnt a lot of bridges.

"If it's free then you're the product" isn't even true when search engines are ad supported, so stick with the much better free alternatives.

This is exactly what "you're the product" means. Google is selling your presence on their platform to advertisers - you are the product they're selling.

A sticking point I encountered - the drop in efficiency as the weather gets colder means you need a unit sized to heat your home on the coldest days you expect to encounter. So you need to buy a heat pump that's larger than you need for 98% of the year just so you don't freeze that other 2%. In addition to higher cost an oversized unit is less efficient because it's cycling more.

So this is where "heating strips" or "backup heating" come in, and then I get we've come full-circle.

When you put about:support into the Firefox URL bar, do you see evidence that your GPU is being used? I'm not sure which settings, exactly, would indicate that, but mine, under "GPU #1" has "Active: Yes."

Lots of GPU-related options are also disabled, but I still get a smooth Google Earth experience.

"... but sign up for our newsletter!"

Wow, thanks for this. Those are two very similar flags and I missed this entirely.

Everyone - Now that you know my passphrase, be sure to keep it a secret!

Just the other day my dog lost track of his frisbee in the water. It barely floats so it must be hard for him to see. He swam around in circles for a while looking for it. My wife started cheering when he would swim towards it, then go "oh! no. no. no" when he was swimming away from it. He essentially worked out hotter/colder on the spot in order to find his frisbee.

There must be more to it than this. As a Dr. Pepper connoisseur I can tell you that Dr. Pepper from a can tastes far superior than from a bottle.

Here's a little script I've put in my $PATH, called memsum:

#!/usr/bin/bash
/usr/bin/ps -eo rss,command --sort -rss | egrep $1 | awk '{ hr=$1/1024 ; sum +=hr} END {print sum}'

Now you can go: memsum firefox or memsum whatever and see that, actually, apps use a ridiculous amount of memory these days.

I can get Firefox up to 8GB by using things like Office 365.

I'm my experience, if iPhone users don't like the way Apple messaging works with Android contacts, they bitch at the person using Android telling them to get an iPhone.

I installed the Fakespot extension and then went looking through my past purchases. It seemed to work really well and called out things as shady for products that I can say, first hand, were actually kind of sketchy.

It does support microSD (https://www.gsmarena.com/fairphone_4-11136.php).

Ooh, we're not at the speed of light as a limit yet, are we? Do you mean "point A to point B" on fibre, or do you actually mean full on "routed-over-the-internet"? Even with fibre (which is slower than the speed of light), you're never going in a straight line. And, at least where I live, you're often back-tracking across the continent before your traffic makes it to the end destination, with ISPs caring more about saving money than routing traffic quickly.

Really? There are some pretty serious trade-offs that Qubes requires if you're going to use it as your daily driver. I'm far more security-conscious than anyone I know, but I couldn't bring myself to make those trade-offs.

The model for most the content on the internet doesn't work without advertising. The people who are "zero tolerance" on ads are going to prevent possible compromises from being made and just encourage an arms race. I don't think we win that arms race, we get more insidious forms of tracking and brazen advertising.

Agreed on the latency issues. I tested SMB and NFS once and found them to be pretty much the same in that regard.

I'm interested to test iSCSI, as for some reason I think it might be better designed for latency.

Their rechargable batteries are so incredible deal.

My Dad has a cheap laptop he uses just for banking, and he asked me to put Linux on it so he wouldn't have to upgrade to Windows 10. It's not much - for my Dad, or for the greater Linux market share - but it's something!

I have email going all the way back to 2013 or so, and don't like the idea of all that information sitting readily available for hacks, warrants, or automated scanning. I move mail older than two years into a local Thunderbird folder to limit what's sitting online, while also letting me search for recent emails while out and about.

Aside from that, I like that I can still access emails while offline, see all my inboxes, contacts, and calendar in one place. Also, I've got enough "apps" that run in the browser.

Actually, sudden account closure without recourse (which Google does) is another reason to make sure I have local copies of email too.

Are you leaving behind the dotfiles because you don't want to bring over any of your old configuration?

For whatever it's worth, you can remove Snap support from your Ubuntu system. If you want more current software, AppImage and Flatpaks are good for that.

I ordered mine from http://clove.co.uk/ and they happily shipped to Canada. It has worked fine in Canada, the US, and Barbados (eSIM and physical SIM).

I like the phone a lot, but whenever it's talked about I'm surprised how many people feel the urge to chime in on why it wouldn't work for them.

I'd say my biggest gripe is lack of accessories. I paid the huge price for the official screen protector twice. They both cracked relatively quickly and there are pretty much no other options. I'm using a flexible matte-finish screen protector from Amazon now, but it scratches really easily and will slide around on the screen if I keep my phone in my back pocket.

The general discovery I made was this: for the small price of foregoing pretty colors and buttons and chrome, you can get a computer to do exactly what you want it to do much quicker. Assuming a willingness to learn a bit of shell scripting, of course.

I find the emphasis people put on speed interesting, because by far the slowest part of any interaction I have with my computer is caused by me just figuring out what I'm doing next. When I'm functioning at top speed not needing to click around, or say, having the perfect keyboard shortcut, would save me only fractions of a second.

Actually.. to add to this I think the cognitive load of visually navigating is much lower than typing specific things it. I think this is why I find I'd prefer to click around my bookmarks or files to find something than just pull up a "Find" dialog and type something reasonable in.

Adding my "Me too" to Vorta/Borg. I use it with Borgbase, which I like because it's legitimately cheap and they support Borg development. As well, you can set Borg backups with Borgbase to "append only," which prevents ransomware or other unexpected "whoopsies" from wiping out your backup history.

I backup most of my computer every hour, but have pruning rules that make sure things don't get too out of hand. I have a second backup that backs everything up to my NAS (using Vorta, again). This is helpful for things like my downloads folder, virtual machines, or STEAM library - things I wouldn't want to backup over the network, but on occasion I do find myself going "whoops, I wanted that."

I also have Vorta working on my Mom's Macbook, then have Borgbase send me an email when there isn't any activity for longer than a couple of days. Once I got automatic pruning working right I never had to touch this again.

That'll depend on the server you're connecting to to test your speed, and also if you're using wifi.

Shaw (in Western Canada) seems to route everything through Seattle so there's like a built-in 20 millisecond delay for every destination.

I don't really want to give some of your hyperbolic statements credibility by replying, but - I've been loving Mudeer for tiling. I'm not sure if it qualifies as a true tiling window manager and my setup does straddle the line between tiling and floating, but it works great for me.

Sublime?! What packages are you running with that?

"Your teeth/eyes look pretty good for your age! 👍"

Oh hey, I use IPvFoo and really enjoy it! Happy to see this update.

Some of the videos of this are really frustrating to watch. Like, what are you trying to do!? You just found your spot, now you're coming back out?? More circling, stopping, going back, going forward. Uughghhh..

Are you happy with the Kiyo X?

I really enjoyed reading this, thank you.

I'd be interested in reading more about the benefits of using an atomic distro, if you were looking for ideas on things to write about. I imagine it must make system upgrades easier but what about replicating your setup elsewhere? Like if I was doing some development and now I need to throw some serious hardware at the problem, could I just backup all my Flatpaks some configs, and spin up my desktop on a cloud VM?

I'm pretty sure that's what Nix is all about, but the learning curve seems steep.

I journal to process thoughts, feelings, and problems, so I often go back to try to help me "figure things out." It's a double-edge sword sort of situation. Like it really lays bare the fact that certain problems I've made zero progress on over the years, but on the other hand, it's helps me realize other places where I've made way more progress than I would have thought.

If you've ever seen the Black Mirror episode where they're able to record their memories and play them back, it can be a little like that. An argument with the wife? I can pull back every. single. time. she's done "that" before. I think that's probably not good.

Anyway, overall, when I come away from reading past journal entries I tend to feel a lot more calm and humble.

It's roughly the same size as the Fairphone 4, isn't it? Like 1mm less thick.

I would say the technology for cloud gaming is here today, but the home internet connections of a lot of people aren't ready yet.

You witness this a lot with video conferencing. People tell one person their audio/video is shitty, and that person just shrugs and says "yeah, I have bad internet." In my head I'm screaming "Well, what have you tried?!" or "I see you sitting beside the refrigerator there!"