I got the popup all the time for a few weeks with Firefox and uBlock Origin. As a YouTube Premium subscriber. The paid service. The whole reason they were pushing back on ad blockers to begin with.

Fuck these guys, I let the subscription lapse.

Debian stable

Liquorix kernel

Flatpak the apps

13% is low, but I guess this shows how resistant to change people are. It’s better to establish a new market (or the first to become popular in a young market) than to try and come along with something disruptive in a mature market.

There is an entire industry of shady companies who make tens of millions per by selling dogshit “secure comms” products to barely literate and computer illiterate LtCols and procurement officers in the US Government.

Those officers are close to retirement and by regurgitating big words they do not understand while still in their procurement positions, they can land a job at said company and receive some of those funds once they hit minimum retirement age and wait a year.

Signal is free and disruptive to those business models.

Ergo the misinformation campaign, the FUD, is well funded, by people who have a lot to lose.

It’s already started.

Anti-malaria measures in Africa are funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the same Bill Gates that anti-vaxxers argue are trying to poison us through the COVID vaccines and has ties to Epstein.

They are already warning about weaponized mosquitoes being used as flying syringes in California and genetically modified mosquitoes being unleashed.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/other/flying-syringes-and-conspiracies-the-far-right-battle-for-a-mosquito-control-board/ar-AA1hMuT9

Spotify Premium pays Joe Rogan.

Laptops: ThinkPad P-series. The repairability that the T-series used to have with slightly beefier specs and better heatsinks. Great for Linux.

Phones: FairPhone 4 (FP5 will likely be announced end of the month so wait for that) - user repairable, supports alternate operating systems, 7 years official OS support from FairPhone.

They also only fight for privacy as a marketing differentiator from Google in the US. Their privacy stance varies from country to country.

If Apple had the same capability to harvest and mine user data as Google, there’s no doubt in my mind they would already be doing so. Their inability to produce a viable cloud service and major security and update issues with iCloud imply it’s a lack of ability and not any pro-user/privacy-oriented sentiment in the company.

The Protonmail client is okay.

Sometimes, it hangs and never shows the Inbox or takes a very long time to show your Inbox (several minutes). You have to clear your app cache when this happens and sign in again. You also don’t get full access to settings. You cannot go in and add a new alias from the mobile app, or change payment options.

Fastmail is okay. My gripe is you can’t use biometric security on Android and when you set custom color schemes on the web client, the app disregards them.

I use both. I used Fastmail since college when they were the big thing and they support and develop FOSS software. I migrated to ProtonMail out of curiosity after more than a decade, but when they turned over the IP address of a fucking CLIMATE ACTIVIST to police, I decided to halt that process and later on I renewed my domain with Fastmail out of convenience (other things that irked me were were the Proton Mail bridge didn’t work on OpenBSD and I couldn’t use it with alpine or K9 mail at the time). I keep ProtonMail for occasional registration/verification email that doesn’t make it to Fastmail but I’m not under any illusion about protection under Swiss law.

I was so entrenched in Fastmail that I stayed with them because the annoyances with ProtonMail service didn’t outweigh the benefits or price increase. If you are starting from scratch, I would probably go ProtonMail.

This came out when I was still in elementary school. I remember at the time the computer guru people were like, “It’s not a real computer, it doesn’t even have a 3 1/2” floppy drive. How can it be a computer without a floppy disk?" And people bought into that sentiment because Apple of the 90s was a company with no new ideas that was almost dead.

From an LA Times article, “Wait, did I really say “no floppy”? I did. This is probably the biggest gamble. Third-party vendors will no doubt develop a floppy that will attach via one of the iMac’s universal serial bus ports for connecting peripheral devices. (USB is a successor to a range of ports used previously on PCs and Macs.) My guess is that Apple is wrong about home users–most will still want a floppy (or zip drive) and will have to buy an add-on.”

I thought it was kind of neat to not have a floppy because even in those days 1.44MB was pathetically small and there were competing standards for a floppy replacement around 100-120MB range.

I think the biggest influence, besides killing off floppy drive was that this also killed beige PCs. Everybody shit on Apple for their new design but then in a few years they were all putting different colors on their cases and nobody had beige computers anymore.

I never got to use one until almost a decade later, in undergrad, where they were still in use at the kiosks for free internet in the student center. That’s where I finally learned to despise the puck mouse.

The eye strain comes from pwm dimming.

The Wikipedia article has a link that should always work.

Not surprising, given how difficult Apple has made it for people who want to use third party GPUs. I’m actually surprised it was ahead of Linux at all.

It’s a worse Mastodon, run by a company that celebrated election misinformation, leading to the storming of the Capitol, and who later helped police arrest a woman for abortion by turning over private messages she sent to another party. I hope it fails.

It’s not the blue emitting light that causes eyestrain on OLEDs, it’s the low frequency pwm used to control brightness. Basically all the pixels turn on and off a few hundred times a second, not slow enough for your brain to consciously notice it, but fast enough for your eyes to react to what is in effect a strobelight right in front of your face. That is how dimming works on an OLED.

You end up with devices that still cause headaches and dizziness because they flicker in this manner, but are “eyesafe certified” because they filter out the blue light right before bed.

Yes, the solution for me was to remove those ubuntu-* meta packages, reinstall what I needed by hand then update. Simple things like ftp, telnet, time, etc. had to be reinstalled.

I was kind of nervous on the reboot since a plymouth theme was removed in addition to adding a newer kernel with the amd microcode patch, but it came up fine.

Yet somehow, through only apt updates, it brought back LibreOffice, Firefox, and snapd.

IIRC, it was something to do with ubuntu-minimal or ubuntu-release meta packages, which I never intentionaly installed.

I’m probably the only person who uninstalls the Firefox and LibreOffice packages and replaces them with the flatpaks, but this seemed like an oversight and dependency hell that comes from using the derivative of a derivative distribution.

Agreed. It’s the best blend of keyboard driven window management and recognizing that users might also use the mouse from time to time. I got my wife to use and default to tiling with Pop!_OS.

The only problem is Pop!_OS is a shitshow of dependencies being built on Ubuntu. I had an update last night that reinstalled snapd and LibreOffice and Firefox even though I intentionally uninstalled them in favor of the flatpaks. Cosmic DE, and presumably re-basing Pop!_OS on nixOS (given a dev comment) can’t come soon enough.

Most data harvesting companies filter out anything after the plus sign. Google made this easy for a reason.

It’s just easier to have an email service that allows multiple aliases.

Suckless on OpenBSD.

You might also try one of the alternate operating systems like Haiku or ReactOS. Haiku is very lightweight and supports both Qt and some Wine-based apps. Maybe K-Meleon on Haiku works for your system.