HP also made laptops with a Blu-Ray drive built right into them. I got one for a few bucks at a flea market and ended up swapping the BD drive into my old ThinkPad.

I’d look for an alternative. Failing that, I would try every trick to fake that selfie.

The cheap secondary phone is the approach I have gone with for work apps. Powered up only when needed and doesn’t connect to my main home network.

Great for my tablet which is too weak to run IronFox smoothly. One annoyance is that it’ll insist on a refresh if your internet connection is interrupted or changes in any way. The reason for it is not immediately obvious and neither is the option to turn it off (Settings > Homepage > Ask to restart on connection change)

Glove Prints

Problem: Thin gloves like surgical gloves can still leave fingerprints on surfaces.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glove_prints

Mitigation: Wear thick, textured gloves

Finally found an explanation for why my phone’s fingerprint sensor works through thin gloves.

Have a NAS, Jellyfin server, and LLM on my LAN so far. Next step is to make them available outside my home, but I’ve been procrastinating.

I daily drive Debian and have a few loose .deb packages and tarballs installed. Also enabled the Librewolf repo. It mostly comes down to an issue of manageability and possible conflicting dependencies. The ones I have installed don’t introduce any dependencies, so they’ve been trouble-free and have survived the Bookworm to Trixie upgrade. They are installed as a last resort option in the absence of a satisfactory equivalent via the official repo, Flatpak, or AppImage.

Loose .deb packages can be installed and uninstalled like any other normal Debian package, but won’t be automatically updated and don’t have any compatibility guarantee. Tarballs are nothing more than a collection of files, which may need to be placed in system directories. You’re on your own for those since there’s no standard and automated way to manage them and it’s possible to overwrite important system files if unpacked and copied in blindly. It’s a good idea to keep a manual record of what was put where in case any issues with them pop up down the road.

My personal ranking:

Official Debian repo > Flatpak > AppImage > Docker/Podman > Snap >> Reputable and known compatible third-party repo > Loose Debian .deb > tarball > Loose Ubuntu .deb >> Unfamiliar third-party repos and PPAs

There are certain occasions where a loose .deb or tarball won’t hurt, but sticking to options further up the list closes off the biggest routes of breaking Debian.

The firmware isn’t open source and I only chose it for the employee discount, but the blue Yubico security key has held up well over hundreds of uses and several years jingling around in my keychain.

It’s prevalent among pdfs downloaded from academic publishers (text listing the receiving IP address and/or institution running down the margins). I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s also done with hidden white text or in the metadata.

an antivirus program has to be installed on the PC used for online banking

How would they know?

I’m more concerned about rogue browser extensions that may be innocent when you install them, but then change owners, and after an update that you don’t even notice are going to do bad things.

Exactly why the only extensions on my browser are uBlock Origin and LibRedirect. Was a victim of one user agent switcher extension that went rogue back in the day.

5" would be a breath of fresh air in today’s market of monster phones

Seems reasonable to me, although I might be lacking perspective since my latest hardware is already 6 years old.

In previous years, my criteria was to upgrade once the hardware was holding back my workflow and productivity. But with Moore’s Law coming to a plateau, I’ve upgraded my RAM, GPU, and SSD not because I have to, but just because I got an very good deal on them.

Package managers:

• Repositories
• Update mechanism. Many of my friends and family are used to updates being either automatic, nagged, or nonexistent. Not an issue on auto-updating distros, but could get ugly on vanilla Arch or Debian.
• Resisting the urge to install loose executables from websites

File system:

• Write caching. Windows doesn’t do this for most USB drives so people get away without safely ejecting for years. On Linux, the safe eject button does matter.
• File hierarchy and mount points. When I first used Linux, I was very confused by the lack of the Program Files and Users folders, My Computer page, and drive letters.
• File permissions, especially executables
• Partitioning and how to format drives in the absence of a format dialog in the file explorer

Bash shell:

• It’s not the incomplete mess that made cmd or Powershell so intimidating
• Resisting the urge to paste in commands and scripts without knowing what they do

Only downside to this is that if your house burns down you’ll lose everything - but a friend suggested me to have important files on an encrypted tarball stored in the cloud.

For those with lots of files and poor upload speeds but blessed with a desk at work, also consider stashing an encrypted disk in a drawer / fake plant / etc.

I’m not against the use of LLMs in principle, but their responses are for you only. As soon as it rolls out the door onto the open internet, it oxidizes to become slop. Prompt us with an original question, not stuff fresh out the back end of a LLM.

Is there an option to show archived conversations when you tap the three dots next to the search bar?

I’ve used Fossify SMS and its predcessor for the past few years and I’m very satisfied with it. Everything works as expected and it’s easy to export and import your entire SMS database when moving phones. Thing that keeps me on it is that it lets me block texts by pattern, including entire area codes (looking at the 410 spam texts that plague AT&T).

It’s a once-off operation if you’re willing to go the LTSC route. Microsoft likes to undo all your hard work debloating Windows with the semi-annual major updates on non-LTSC editions.

Linux on all of my main machines, so I’m grabbing the popcorn. Got LTSC for all the remaining Windows use cases: VMs, beater laptop for Windows-only stuff, and a couple of computers from family.

Most of my friends replace their computers quite frequently, so they’re living blissfully unaware on Windows 11 or MacOS. The ones who do have older laptops tend to be tech-savvy enough to have figured out LTSC or Linux themselves. On one occasion, a good friend of mine had an old iMac that wasn’t getting updates anymore, so I installed Debian and themed XFCE to look like MacOS, taught them the basics, and they were impressed with the result.

As for family, they’re usually very happy with the Linux Mint Debian Edition that I install for them, but some I know just won’t use the computer if it doesn’t have their familiar Windows-specific software, so I get them started with LTSC.

I frankly have an excess of unused hardware that’s piling up, which won’t be helped by my access to a good source of e-waste. Old computers have already been trickling in, but I’m excited to see what’s next now that the Oct 14 date has come.