monovergent

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monovergent ,

Questionable behavior sure, but could you provide a technical explanation as to why the information presented on madaidans-insecurities, etc. is problematic?

monovergent ,

Do you use or plan on using an eSIM? I think that system app is responsible for the settings menus that let you add and set up an eSIM. GrapheneOS doesn't have this app either. Probably won't be an issue if you're sticking to physical SIM cards.

monovergent ,

Honestly no idea. I could perchance team up with trustworthy people to form some self-sufficient community, otherwise it's just a matter of time before succumbing to the elements or other people. Would work on my fitness a bit more if I knew ahead of time the world would become like that.

What's your current situation with Google?

I use GrapheneOS with multiple profiles. My main profile contains only FOSS apps, along with two proprietary apps that have no network access. One secondary profile is for my personal Google account (just Gmail) for work and bills, while another is for a disposable Google account for apps like Google Maps when I need GPS. ...

monovergent ,

Stuck with Google Workspace at work. Fortunately, it's tolerant of me not being reachable 24/7, so it's all confined to the browser on a work laptop. I like to think that I'm free from Google's services in my personal life, though I still haven't been able to give up YouTube yet. At least I'm never signed in.

Also, one personal Google account created ages ago. I've completely gutted it and haven't logged into it in recent memory, but idk, I can't be bothered to delete it either.

Knowing that Google isn't peeking over my shoulder on my GrapheneOS phone is very freeing. I wouldn't ever be comfortable using a regular Android phone again.

Anyone else notice that middle click is the first thing to fail on their mice?

Middle click failure plagues nearly every mouse I've owned, OEM, Logitech, wired, or wireless. I take full advantage of the middle click shortcuts like opening links in new tabs, but I don't think I'm putting it through undue stress either. As far as I can tell, I'm clicking it with the same force as I would the other mouse ...

monovergent ,

No idea about Honeyhell stuff, but last time I was stuck with something that needed wifi to work, I bought a cheap used router, made an access point just for that device, and never connected the router to the internet.

Best way to keep a gmail based non-gmail email address

When I graduated university, they gave me, and others, graduate email addresses with the domain @institution.edu. The catch is, it's entirely based within Gmail, despite having a unique domain. I want to keep using this address, as it's tied heavily to my professional career, but I'm not sure how to decouple it from gmail ...

monovergent ,

The difference would be trivial since the mail would still be going through and sitting on Google's servers. Client has to fetch it from some server and your university using Gmail means they've already outsourced the whole email system to Google.

I'd take u/anticonnor's advice and gradually move services and correspondence to your new mail provider. Several years back, Google flooded the education market with cheap cloud services and "unlimited" storage. Then a couple years ago, they started charging huge premiums on storage use above a certain limit, leading to mass data deletions and the discontinuation of alumni email among many universities. Who knows when they'll pull the rug again.

monovergent ,

I'd say go for it. I can attest that it's a very polished experience and the GrapheneOS devs go at length to ensure that their work is both secure and reliable. Just make sure it's the factory unlocked variant so you can unlock the bootloader. Any apps that require regular Android can be put on a separate phone.

monovergent ,

I will admit, I miss the smooth graphics of Virtualbox. It's quite evident with dragging windows around or playing a video inside a VM. Don't want to touch Oracle stuff anymore though. Anyone here manage to get that working on virt-manager?

Where to start finding what makes unattended-upgrades behave inconsistently on Debian?

A while ago, I set up unattended-upgrades on my Debian 13 machines. Running sudo apt updatedoesn't cross my mind now that I assume unattended-upgrades takes care of that for me, but every once in a while, I'll try installing something and get the "Unable to locate package" errors associated with outdated repositories. After ...

monovergent ,

The way I've seen people around me use the dryer, for sure. High heat will ruin clothes more than anything else, especially if it continues to run after everything had dried out.

Back in university, we had timed dryers that could only do either high heat or tumble dry low for an hour. Rooms were too humid and cramped to air dry. Of course, I wasn't going to spend more money waiting for low heat to do its work. Clothes came out bone dry and metal zippers scalding hot. Only the large towels held up, everything else noticeably faded and thinned over a couple years.

Night and day difference once I got my own place with a condenser dryer. It takes longer, but everything is just dry enough at the end of each cycle. It's also a bit smaller so I have to air dry parts of larger loads, but either way, my clothes have held up much better ever since.

monovergent ,

Functionally, not really. I can get my work done on anything from FVWM to GNOME without a hitch.

Aesthetically, very much. The Chicago95 theme sparks joy and makes work just a bit more enjoyable. KDE and GNOME might have more creature comforts, but I will happily tolerate XFCE because it works well with Chicago95. I don't even do fresh installs anymore because of the time it takes for me to configure the visual style just right. I'll instead image from an install I've prepared on a VM.

monovergent ,

T430 is socketed* and the 35-watt quad cores (3632qm, 3612qm) are nice upgrades that won't put extra strain on the fan or battery. Bonus of being compatible with the T410 battery if you patch the EC.

*the T430S variant is not socketed

monovergent ,

In matters where the judgement of the courts cannot be trusted and I would be jailed either way, I'd rather have the option to wipe my phone.

monovergent ,

Counting all injuries to date, I think I would. Probably with a concussion and blood all over me though. My face would be in very rough shape from how much I've picked at it in the past.

monovergent ,

Between 2 and 3. I'll show off my Linux setup to friends and preach to the choir, but I won't rub my choices in the faces of people who use other distros or operating systems.

monovergent ,

Certainly. I've had setups with FVWM as a pure window manager while using XFCE's xfce4-terminal, MATE's Caja file browser, and GNOME's Evolution mail client. Some utilities will pull a few extra dependencies from their native DE, but they won't get in the way either.

Display manager won't matter too much, most should be configurable to point at your WM of choice. LightDM integrates nicely with GTK themes, SDDM for Qt, and GDM for GNOME.

The biggest pain point from my experience was configuring power management and lid close actions manually, if using a laptop, since those often are only done for you if you install an entire DE at once.

Also grab a copy of qt5ct if you're interested in making your Qt packages look more integrated next to GTK packages.

monovergent ,

Worth it, especially if you are stuck with the phone. Find FOSS equivalents of the built-in utilities (gallery, files, etc.), disable what you can (judiciously) with uad-ng, block the apps that can't be disabled from network access using Rethink DNS, and use the websites of services on a computer browser instead of apps whenever possible.

It's still far from what privacy ROMs can do for you, but until you can get a GrapheneOS, etc. friendly phone, taking some action is much better than just letting the spyware run wild.

monovergent , (edited )

Sorry if this analogy has already been thrown at you dozens of times, I like to think of DNS like an address book for the internet. On a traditional phone, I can't just type in someone's name, I have to type in a number. Without DNS, the internet would be like that, accessing any website would require recalling and typing in the IP address. But DNS translates domain names (hence Domain Name System), the part of the URL leading up to .com, .ml, etc, into the proper IP addresses for you.

Unless you self-host, the DNS service is hosted on someone else's server, and many devices default to communicating with the DNS server in plain text. Which is why you want to trust your DNS provider since they can keep a list of which sites you visit. And DNS over HTTPS mitigates the possibility of interception by encrypting your DNS requests.

Bought an iPod off eBay with a bad battery, how can I make this a fun tech project?

So I'm broke and I buy the cheapest stuff. I bought an iPod Touch 6th Gen off eBay with a cracked screen and a bad battery for about $15. However, what I didn't know was that apparently the battery was soldered to the Logic Board, which I should've looked up I guess... what can I do to tinker a bit with this device, make it a ...

monovergent ,

Does that happen to be a variant? I replaced the battery in my aunt's iPod Touch 6 a few years ago and did have to desolder the battery ribbon cable as it was directly soldered to the logic board. Took a lot of patience just getting to the battery too (screen is held on by glue unlike the clips/tabs in an iPhone).

Also interested to hear other people's thoughts on reusing these old iOS devices, got one sitting around just collecting dust.

monovergent ,

If OP indeed has the 6th gen iPod Touch, not the classic, it won't be as rosy as most of the comment here suggest. From my experience replacing the battery on one, you need a hair dryer to loosen the glue and pry off the screen, then a soldering iron to replace the battery since its ribbon cable is directly soldered to the logic board. No storage expansion or custom firmware is available for such iOS devices, as far as I am aware.

Also watch out for low-quality replacement batteries, the first replacement I tried only lasted around an hour on a full charge.

monovergent ,

No idea about macOS, but this is something the typical Windows user should notice when switching over to Linux. That is, Windows OOBE gives you a user with administrative privileges by default and therefore won't prompt you for the password again after logging in, just yes/no dialogs when exercising those admin privileges.

Typing in the password whenever you need root privileges is just part of the security model of Linux and unless for some reason you're using sudo for everything, people get used to it. Your default user account doesn't automatically have root privileges, sudo or su mediates that for you. Back when I used Windows, I even had my accounts set up that way, separate admin, daily user account without admin privileges, and prompt for the admin password every time I installed stuff, etc.

Granted, it does leave me with a couple compromises like a login password that is shorter than my disk encryption password so I'm not asked for the full thing every time I sudo and sometimes leaving a terminal with sudo -i hanging around.

What's the best way to remove packages that came with desktop environments?

I recently (a day ago) switched from Linux Mint to Debian and tried out several different DEs. I settled on Cinnamon but still have leftover packages and files from Gnome, Plasma, etc. Is there an easy way to remove everything that was installed automatically by a particular DE besides reinstalling Debian with just Cinnamon? Or ...

monovergent ,

The desktop environment packages that tasksel uses (task-gnome-desktop, task-kde-desktop, etc) can be found towards the bottom of the list at: https://packages.debian.org/trixie/task-desktop. In theory, you can just uninstall the task-your-desktop package which takes away everything that DE came with. If that doesn't work or doesn't play well your earlier manual uninstallations, take note of the dependencies that the task packages pulled (including recommendations) and go about uninstalling the dependencies layer by layer.

monovergent OP ,

Hyperthreading opens up an opportunity for various, albeit rare, vulnerabilities. Libreboot documentation also has a blurb on it: https://libreboot.org/docs/install/t480.html#hyperthreading-on-t480t480st580. I'd probably be fine if I left it on, but my light office work won't benefit much from hyperthreading, so it was just a matter of 'why not' for me.

monovergent , (edited )

Are you keen on using wireless headphones or speakers? If not, I'd go all the way for one without Bluetooth so the thought of present or future vulnerabilities won't have to cross my mind whenever I use it.

In addition to the Bluetooth vulnerabilities other commenters have mentioned, a recent one affects headsets with Google's Fast Pair feature. Once forcibly paired, an adversary can register the headset with their Google account. The headset thereafter pings nearby Android devices as part of the find lost devices network and can be used to track the victim.

Not sure if they are in production any more, but I can recommend the old iPod-looking Walkman and Sansa MP3 players. Currently also using a no-name iPod nano clone for the fact that it has a microSD slot, even upgraded the internal battery a few months ago.

monovergent ,

Any hidden screws or seams to pry? Is there alternative firmware for it?

If not, I'd imagine your only options would be physically crippling the bluetooth module, porting something like OpenWrt to it, or getting a router that doesn't force Bluetooth on you.

monovergent ,

Because hamburger menus do not belong on any screen larger than a tablet

monovergent ,

It isn't a dedicated font viewer, but I've used ImageMagick's display utility to preview fonts.

monovergent , (edited )

Linux Mint is your best bet. Intuitive for new users without any flashy features to get in the way.

All said, temper your expectations. I did this for a couple of my folks and the Linux partition just sat untouched until I next visited (and presumably thereafter). Despite updates for their existing Windows 10 ending. For an unfortunate majority of people, they don't really care until their browser stops rendering pages, no matter how you proselytize Linux.

on second thought, don't even dual boot. A separate computer would have fared better. But if you must dual-boot...

No personal experience on how to make the dual-boot graphical, but that's a very good idea. I've witnessed computer science graduates struggle to get their computer to boot from a USB stick.

Separate disk because that eliminates interference with the Windows Boot Manager. More like the other way around since Windows tends to mess with GRUB after certain updates if it's on the same disk. Nearly every concern with whether to install Windows or Linux first arises from trying to dual-boot on the same disk. And if anything goes wrong, you can just revert by unplugging the Linux disk instead of painstakingly reconstructing a broken Windows install.

If you are passionate enough and have some money to spare, get a used laptop (240 GB SSD, 8GB of RAM, 3rd Gen i5 at a minimum), preferably enterprise-grade (Latitude, ProBook, ThinkPad), clean it up, and pop Linux Mint onto it. Your folks can then experience Linux at their leisure, side-by-side with their existing machine at no risk. No fussing with boot order menus, which I have seen confuse computer science graduates.

monovergent ,

Bog standard keyring. To keep everything parallel, the folding multitool gets a tiny sub-keyring and the metal USB stick gets a tiny carabiner (detaches to avoid load-bearing USB ports). Keychain goes in a velcro pouch that also holds a multi-tool pen, mini flashlight, and lighter. Pouch goes into front left pocket.

monovergent ,

Validates my feelings as a Debian user

monovergent ,

The 1969 Apollo 11 mission. To capture the original signal from the lander and make backup copies of it

monovergent ,

I am familiar with a child abuse victim who feels this way. Not like actively seeking it out, but they wouldn't regret it much if it came to that point.

But I'm not personally qualified to comment on it. If it's becoming more than a passing thought and starting to bother you in everyday life or causing actively homicidal thoughts, it's a good time to seek professional help before it gets you into trouble.

monovergent OP ,

RX 480, thinking of upgrading since ROCm support for it ended a while ago and working around it has become very painful

monovergent ,

Instander still works, but it has fallen victim to the bus factor (the sole developer the_dise was reportedly KIA)

Just installed it to see, login is still required

was middle school mostly good or bad for you?

had a middle school ex in seventh grade who called me a “weird bisexual” and “bowling ball /bowling ball stomach”. had another kid who was a popular girl spread a rumor abt me that i was a lesbian with a crush on her bc i asked for her number but stuttered saying it because i was very socially awkward. i was fat shamed ...

monovergent ,

Was fortunate enough to have good teachers and friends so it was mostly enjoyable. I sometimes joke that I peaked in middle school, when I finally came out of my shell enough to have meaningful friendships, but had still yet to experience any sort of academic-related stress.

monovergent ,

Physically yes. Probably not in the way you mean though. The lungs have no facilities to digest food, even if in the form of a rich aerosol (you'd get pneumonia). Perhaps a wayward molecule with caloric value or two could follow air swallowed into the stomach, but that would be very negligible.

Have you been able to reconcile being very private and investing in fintech or buying online?

I’ve always been very private oriented: I started using linux-debian 20 years ago after discarding windows and apple. I rarely buy online but when I did, to be as private as possible I used to create an account using fake data by the e commerce platform I wanted, get my order and then ignore the account until I wanted yo use ...

monovergent ,

If you are in the US, take a look at Fidelity or Vanguard. They haven't required the use of a smartphone app.

Using a phone with Android 8 isn't best practice for security by any means, but unless you are being targeted or going around downloading shady apps, it's more likely it will run into app incompatibility issues in the coming years than anything else.

For sites where I'm making a low-value, one-off purchase and never coming back, I'll use a pseudonym alongside a prepaid gift card, or failing that, a privacy.com virtual card. Not quite a sustainable strategy with eBay or Amazon, especially if the package needs a signature, so I'll just use a privacy.com virtual card and supply a P.O. Box address

Mostly accepted that it is the way it is for these things. If the privacy-friendly option is giving up a few conveniences, I'll take it. But if it's keeping me from reaching certain goals, I'll tolerate a compromise. I don't think I'm being targeted either, so it's all tolerable in my personal threat model.

monovergent ,

One less possible data point for tracking

Also not invested enough in my profile to bother

monovergent ,

I did once while abroad. None of the shoe stores had the style I wanted in wide, so I went on Amazon and found a pair which reviewers tended to say fit well. Particularly that the listed size matched their expectations when they tried the actual shoe on. Ordered the size I thought would fit me and it did in fact fit me perfectly. It lasted about a year until it started leaking at the glued seam, which to be fair, wasn't too disappointing for a 48-Euro no-name pair.

Granted, that was for men's hiking shoes, can't really speak for finding good high heels online. Other than for that one-off occasion, I've only shopped for shoes and clothes in-person.

monovergent ,

Reinstalling GRUB in chroot so it 'registers' with the BIOS when cloning an install of Linux

monovergent ,

How time-consuming would doing it yourself be, if anyone here has tried?

monovergent ,

The average social media profile has just headlines and lead pictures, while a good blog also has articles

monovergent ,

We should have stuck with network file shares and FTP instead of outsourcing everything to Google. 'Unlimited storage' for select organizations was really good bait, but it was never sustainable.

Chromium Vs. Gecko ( f-droid.org )

I know most of the answers here, prefer Gecko over Chromium because Google is a monopoly, but honestly I would like to make the switch, the bad thing is that I still find the Firefox interface on Android old, I know it seems a bit silly to risk a little privacy for a comfortable and visually pleasing interface, but recently I ...

monovergent ,

Aside from my Pixel 7a, the rest of my phones and tablets are either old or originally low-spec budget models. This forces me to use Chromium-based browsers like Cromite since the performance penalty for Gecko-based ones becomes very apparent.

monovergent ,

Completely agree. I find it especially inelegant that we still have such a thing as boot times to wait through, despite improvements by orders of magnitude in processing power and disk throughput. Android devices are a huge offender in this aspect, though I guess few people care since a full shutdown is rarely done.