asian american expat
Install the apparmor profiles and extra profiles packages from the apt repository. They are sensible restrictions on common apps (web browsers) to prevent anything malicious from happening if they are ever hijacked. Make sure apparmor is enabled. This will do more to keep you secure than an antivirus.
If you insist on an AV, install ClamAV and have it scan weekly. It’s libre software and works well with Linux.
No, but it is in the 2024 iPad Pro.
Fairphone 4 with PostmarketOS?
Carbon offsets are like net carbs. It’s just bullshit to make people feel like they are doing something.
I saw fvwm in a magazine and it had a really cool 3D look to it and I wanted that. I had never seen anything like that. We were very poor and I only had an old computer, a 486, so it was either pirate software (and there was no version of Windows in our language) or use Linux.
I ended up on Red Hat from a magazine and then later Slackware. I liked Window Maker so I stayed on that for two decades. Learning Linux gave me a constructive hobby, introduced me to free software philosophy, and gave me technology skills. We moved to the United States. When I was 15 or 16, I helped a college math professor install hardware on Linux. When he found out that I was dropping out of a very racist high school, he provided support and I ended up graduating from their college. Those Linux skills came in handy and helped start a career.
I have only ever used Windows to upgrade firmware on a laptop or to download an ISO so I could replace Windows. Like everyone else, I was enamoured with macOS back in the 2000’s but couldn’t afford one and when I finally could, it couldn’t do sloppy focus and that was a pet peeve of mine so I just returned it and got a used ThinkPad.
I moved back to Asia. Now I use sway on Debian and get to ride my bicycle to work and my kids grow up better than I did, so life is good.
I deleted TikTok a few days ago and I had lots of videos there. Lots of fond memories and even met some people on the platform and found my barber on that app. But it’s going to be another Instagram because the content curators all think the same and promote the same ideology and try to incite people over the same false narratives.
This is going to be like when Fox bought MySpace.
Those are great laptops and were well built. I think the 2011 might have the Radeon GPU issue though but if it’s lasted this long, you are probably safe.
My grail was a 17" MacBook Pro from that era. I saw one the other day at a tech market but the vendor wasn’t at the booth for me to make an offer =/. I’ll swing by again an see if I can get it for around $50. They really do live a second life as Linux machines and OWC keeps me supplied on replacement parts.
It wasn’t doing anything that Facebook wasn’t already doing, but it got banned. The CEO was brought in front of Congress and racially profiled, gave strong answers, and then got banned anyway.
Wonder why?
TikTok hate was a bot farm. The algorithm was always a reflection of the user.
Pretty sure the Punkt is my next phone and a Raspberry Pi 500+ is my next desktop.
Take me back to the start of the millennium. I’m tired of this shit.
Shame … North Carolina was once called the “Rip Van Winkle” state because it was so far behind everyone else. And it woke up briefly and briefly gave us a great public university system as well as Red Hat Linux. Then around the turn of the century, every racist boomer with a small pension from Jersey and New York sold their assets and moved down and bought up all of the old farmland and turned it into cardboard McMansions everywhere and made it MAGA heaven. That combined with all of the Fort Liberty homesteaders who spread out from Fayettenam like a cancer with their perpetual war contracts completely changed the state overnight.
A few years ago we had the biggest solar lobby in the country … the old families had turned the tobacco fields into solar farms and it was going well. But I guess even they have been crowded out of their own state. It’s a violent place now where people can shoot up the power stations to protest books and go unpunished, and spec ops guys can shoot working immigrants 200 yards from their property in “self defense” and not even be arrested.
It’s now just a stew of MAGA that keeps brewing to the point that the original flavor has been lost. It will only get saltier. The “University” system is now run by MAGAts. It takes generations to set up infrastructure like what was set up around the RTP area, and only a few years to undo it all.
Sorry North Carolina, I had to leave.
Because they are controlled opposition.
The only time something not controlled got popular was TikTok and you saw how quickly both parties went to ban it in 2024 after normal people started talking about Gaza genocide in every day conversation. The American Congress worked together to ban it even though they couldn’t agree on anything else.
It went from an Asian platform where Asian people in the West connected with each other outside the mainstream blue pill/red pill false choice and shared culture as well as history that isn’t taught, to “here’s the truth about Jesus” and “the world is flat debate me” after that vote. Now it’s full on MAGA.
Mastodon is harder to control because servers can pop up organically, but I guess Threads was a hedge against that threat.
It’s the opposite: turn the brighness on an OLED display to 100% and the eyestrain ends because the flickering goes away. Pulse width modulation is used for dimming OLED displays – that means turning the screen off and on again in a very quick manner – to simulate a darker screen. It’s fast enough for your brain to think it’s a dimmer screen, but slow enough that the muscles in your eyes still react to the sudden on/off again flashing, which results in eyestrain and headaches. A lot of cheap OLED panels flicker at only 240Hz at anything below 100% brightness, resulting in eyestrain. Chinese phones have gotten around this by using things like DC dimming (lowering the voltage to the diodes) or increasing the rate of the flicker to greater than 1KHz (called high frequency pwm dimming), which is fast enough that your eye muscles don’t notice the flicker.
It’s enough of an issue that Apple followed suit, having just moved to high frequency pwm dimming as a “new” feature on the iPhone 17 last month. They call the feature “Display Pulse Smoothing” and describe it as:
“Disables pulse width modulation to provide a different way to dim the OLED display, which can create a smoother display output at low brightness levels. Disabling PWM may affect low brightness display performance under certain conditions.”
Note that the pwm flicker rate is different than the refresh rate, which has to do with how quickly things are drawn on the screen.
How it relates to e-ink, I do not know. About a decade ago, most e-ink e-readers got backlights and I remember buying the then newest Nook that had a backlight. I would read before going to bed, and as I closed my eyes, I would see flashing light in the outline of the Nook, like a residual effect of screen flicker. I am on a Kobo Libra 2 now and no longer have this flickering issue.
Regarding the Boox, this is a form factor that I’ve always wanted for an e-reader, to use on public transit. I think it’s a fine size for my kids as well. But I’ll wait and see after launch if the current version is discounted and get it from Taobao.