On that note, some LG phones like the V20 were renowned for having a nice DAC

Rarely if it gets hot enough, I’ll toss the pillow aside first.

But I’m also the same person who voluntarily sleeps on a padded sheet of plywood instead of a mattress

No, I need something to keep a pocket of warm air around me, unless:

• It’s hot enough I’d sweat with the blanket on
• I’m tired enough I’m actively fighting to stay awake
• I’m wearing something equivalent to a blanket like a puffy jacket (for the times I was exiled to the couch in college)

Innioasis Y1 might be a nice option. Looks like a classic iPod, but supports drag-and-drop syncing, USB-C, FM Radio, Bluetooth, even FLAC files. 128 GB out of the box, replaceable with a larger SD card, albeit you have to crack it open. Only downside I can think of is not being able to fast scroll through the alphabet if you have a larger collection.

Bear in mind that many modern fingerprint readers can work through even a latex glove, defeating non-destructive attempts to obscure fingerprints.

Also, a wet, wrinkly fingerprint is usually not recognized unless it is itself also enrolled on a fingerprint reader. Perhaps too anecdotal and conspicuous, but I’ll throw it out there too.

Not an answer to your question, but it would be interesting to see how much those companies already have on all of us already since the TSA sometimes hands out a free trial of PreCheck without any action on the traveller’s part.

That’s also the lovely thing with AI assistants like Gemini and Recall. Instead of having to deal with the PR fallout of client-side scanning, they just let the AI hoover up your data while it’s in plain view on your phone or computer.

When debating the efficacy of my privacy measures, my friend asked,

You know, what if it just is compromised already? By the NSA, Facebook, Google, and so forth.

And I said, at least I am making it known that I hate them all, I’ll stand up for what is right, and I’m not leaving without a fight.

Second one rides a fine line between privacy and practicality, but better to be tracked for a few frames every 10 minutes than continuously

Among the people I know in real life, some post (non-tech stuff) to Reddit, some write reviews on Yelp, and some have called customer support hotlines for tech products. But none have ever posted online to ask for tech help, at least not to my awareness. Neither did I back when I used Windows, and not for a couple years even after switching to Linux.

I suspect most Ubuntu users are among that common crowd. They might look up an issue on the internet, but expect to ask for help from a dedicated support center. Or can’t be bothered to sign up for an account and post to the places that can answer their questions, which are usually very “techy” and possibly even intimidating to beginners.

As for my setup, the upgrade from Debian 12 to 13 went very smoothly. I had to fix a few obscure config files, but nobody else really touches them, and it didn’t stop it from booting. Replaced a deprecated package with its Flatpak equivalent as well. Only unsolved issue is the xfce4-panel consuming all of one core on occasion for no apparent reason.

Same, until I got a pouch to store the keys, multi-tool, pen, and mini notepad in a single package. Now it’s kinda like a wallet for all of the non-wallet things.

Github now reports to Microsoft’s AI division directly

The usual measures, like avoiding their browser extensions and cookies, should keep you in the clear for the most part. The last time I had a code from Honey, Retailmenot, or Groupon work for a major site like eBay and Amazon was maybe in 2021. Stopped trying later that year. They’ve mostly cracked down on it in favor of automatic discounts.

Letting batteries drain too far:

• In phones where it’s hard to replace and old laptops where it’s hard to source a replacement
• In AA/AAA-powered devices where a dead battery will evolve hydrogen gas and eventually break its seal, causing a leak

Also, I really should be buying Lithium AA/AAA cells now that I have so few devices that need them, but I keep buying a pack of alkalines each year. Ni-MH voltage falls just a tad short.

glim is like Ventoy, but built on GRUB with much cleaner code and no blobs. Doesn’t work with as many ISOs though.

Any way you boot it, gparted should work just fine from a live ISO.

If you’re just testing things out, Ventoy should be fine. If you want full assurance nothing fishy is going on when installing, do it the old way and dd the image to the USB.

Linux Mint, as many have suggested, but Fedora would also be a good choice if there’s any bleeding-edge hardware not supported otherwise.

I got away with a 380 MB /boot during upgrade, though that assumes you aren’t dual booting another distro that also needs some room. Have you tried deleting old kernel versions?

But if you want to future-proof, the issue is that shrinking a partition from its “top” is not a supported function. For ease of explanation, suppose we want a 1.5 GB /boot partition:

1. Shrink nvme0n1p3 by 1.5 GB
2. Create a new partition and format
3. dd the old boot partition to the new partition
4. Resize the new /boot partition to the full 1.5 GB
5. Delete the old boot partition
6. For good measure, reinstall GRUB to make sure it is aware of the new partition: https://wiki.debian.org/GrubEFIReinstall

This assumes your fstab file mounts by UUID (default in recent versions of Debian). If not, update /etc/fstab to match the new partition. It’s been a while since I last did this, so definitely have your backup on hand and perhaps double check with other resources in case I left out any steps.

More precisely, shrinking relies on the presence of empty blocks. A filesystem usually fills from “top” to “bottom”, so there would be no empty blocks to shave off the top of your nvme0n1p3, you can only shave off at the end. If you really don’t want /boot at the end, you’ll have to shrink nvme0n1p3, back it up, delete nvme0n1p3, expand /boot, re-create nvme0n1p3, and dd the backup back into its place.

Classic case of xkcd 927

The OS bundled with TI-84 Plus CE Python Edition graphing calculators is a wacky one. It runs primarily on an eZ80 core for backwards-compatibility with earlier graphing calculators while also handling an ARM core for Python functions. Parts of the assembly code can be traced back to the TI-82 calculator ROM from 1993.

Most people wouldn’t think a calculator would ever need a security solution, but it even verifies application signatures so students are less likely to load cheating utilities on them.

Correct, could mean other, various, “etc.”. Inherited heading from my previous journals, I’m not sure where it came from either.

For the time column, I highlight, shade, or “whisker plot” the cells of the relevant hours and minutes, then write in the task. Stole the idea from a Kokuyo planner, you can see it in action here.

And the file: https://codeberg.org/monovergent/my-planner-odt