Linux and FLOSS unfortunately don’t have budgets, and rely on logic and common sense. Microsoft has a big lobbying budget, gets in to see senior politicians and decision-makers, and then sponsors training, digital villages, etc. Yes, it costs a country overall much more than Linux, but it is easier for schools/gov depts and middle-men make some actual money in their pockets. That’s what Linux and FLOSS end up against. What would turn it around is having strong local businesses driving training and making tender bids to install and support Linux and FLOSS. A government or school wants to have it done for them. That’s the reality, unfortunately.

They know little about open source. Microsoft is exclusively in schools and government, and that is what they grow up with. They probably know more about pirating Windows, than using Linux legally. There is also a good kick-back in terms of MS license mark-ups for middle-men businesses. One would hope there is some mandatory education around different OSs as I’m sure kids would love to explore and modify software.

Brave Search

Paid Proton Mail with my own domain name and own PGP keypair. Although it now has a way to securely search mail, I use the bridge service to allow Betterbird mail to sync my mail to my PC for searching.

About 3 months back I cancelled Netflix (after being in it for many years) and moved to free Tubi.

My morning always starts with a mixed bowl of:

• Diced paypaya
• Diced seedless grapes
• Slices of banana
• 3 or 4 heaped tablespoons double-cream plain youghurt
• Cocoa powder to flavour
• Some powdered almond nuts

Three fruits are part of my morning breakfast, along with Double Fat Plain Yoghurt, and powdered almonds and some plain cocoa powder.

Partly my fault - I have that page set to auto open on my browser every week

I keep trying it but for me its not ready yet. Finally, in 2023 I can actually boot into it, but I get random freezes for up to a few minutes at a time. So it’s closer, but not stable yet. Hoping that Plasma 6 will be good to go.

Yep good advice, some services have no investment value loss e.g. short term insurance, life insurance, etc. You can switch elsewhere for a cheaper rate and lose nothing.

Unless you have a family or dependants, I’d cut out life insurance and focus on the essentials for now to recover. I also learn long ago to pay my credit card off every month to not have to pay interest on it…

Surely we need some context with this, as what we post is basically publicly visible. Even if we defederate the posts are anyway visible. Our IP addresses are probably visible to the home instance we connect to (or our VPN IP address etc) but how does our IP address then travel off with the federated post to someone following us on Threads? It’s only what travels out through the ActivityPub federation.

What would help with this post was, instead of just a link, maybe extracting the two or three issues that look problematic, and say why. That gives us something definite to actually debate.

For those who have friends stuck on Threads still, this maybe a good way for them to stay in contact. The Threads user gets their login times, IP address, location, etc tracked by Meta, and the Lemmy user with their Lemmy app, only identifies with their Lemmy instance. Threads should only be seeing the post and time that a Lemmy user posts something that is followed by a Threads user.

Each quirky hobby mentioned here, deserves its own Lemmy community!

And I forgot about those one-liner replies with something semi controversial, without any sort of backing. In the few places where I’ve managed my own community groups, I made it a rule that you can disagree, but then have to back it up with some reference. That made it super easy to get rid of trolls, and supported better debate as it forced people to fact-check a bit.

Actually, you are quite lucky with SDR, as there are many such stations on the Internet where you can tune in locally at that location and listen as if you are there. I operate one for listening to our local ham radio frequencies on VHF at https://openwebrx.gadgeteerza.co.za. But mine is very simple compared to some of the more complex one’s available.

I certainly notice it as I post a lot across networks. I always have a title with my content explaining what’s what. There are so many times I have to reply to a commenter, saying “yes, that was what I mentioned in the post”. Clearly, way too many just dive in and comment on a title without even bothering to read the post content. It’s not that the content is pages long, it is usually maybe 3 or 4 paragraphs.

It’s no wonder so much misinformation takes hold, as few take the time to critically comprehend what they’re reading.

I think it is partly just fast scrolling and laziness to actually read the point being made. But then you may ask, why bother commenting at all then…

“Be careful what you wish for”

–Aesop–

I think it is quite well known that only Telegram Secret Chats are true E2EE. That said, Telegram is still not in the business of selling metadata actively like Whatsapp/Facebook/Meta are. As far as plain features go, Telegram is streets ahead of Whatsapp. But if I needed real “secret chat” I’d probably use Threema, SimpleX, Nostr, Jami, etc where I’m not tied to my mobile phone number or e-mail address.

Yes and no. It is good and I did one restore of some files that worked fine, but in my case it was noticeably affecting my boot up times, and I reverted to ext4 (boot ups were fast again to less than one minute). For some reason, BTRFS was resulting in quick login, but about 18 mins before my actual desktop was responsive after login. I spend many days trying to troubleshoot that. Maybe you won’t have this problem. I had my SSD system drive on ext4 with Timeshift backups, and my /home partition on BTRFS.

So I’m back on my ext4 doing a daily automated backup to a second drive with rsync (LuckyBackup app). I think there are further kernel improvements coming to BTRFS later in this year. But I’ll probably only retry it again end of 2023 or in2024. So if you decide to move, just benchmark your boot times, so you can judge if it affects them badly or not.

That said, BTRFS has some great features, lost no data for me, and I think has a great future.

Actually no, Impi Linux was SA govs Linux distro in mid 2000’s before politicians changed. It was all political decision making. Ubuntu was a private initiative of Mark Shuttleworth, which he took to the UK. He was from SA and did give support to Impi Linux.

But then Munich went back to Linux again did they not?