I think I posted this before in some other thread, but one time back when I used to use Ubuntu, I opened my laptop and the screen was upside-down. Everything worked perfectly, but just upside-down. I went through every display setting I could find, trawled through forums for hours (on a different, non upside-down computer) and got absolutely nowhere. It was at the point where I was thinking I’ll probably have to reformat and start over and this will forever be a mystery.

Then I accidentally solved it when my Playstation controller battery got low and I plugged it into the nearest USB port to charge, which was my laptop. As soon as I plugged it it, the screen flipped back the right way. As it turned out, Ubuntu was talking to the controller and had for some reason interpreted the gyroscope movement as ‘rotate screen’ the last time I charged it. After a couple of minutes of waving the controller around and watching the desktop spin while going “huh”, I just unplugged it when it the right way round and crisis averted!

Yeah my Kobo is great. Plays nicely with Calibre and DeDRM, reads pretty much every eBook format, and doesn’t seem to be sketchy about privacy as far as I can tell.

Well, 50% of young people asked were willing to admit to their piracy lol

I probably will end up with tons eventually, I haven’t been doing it for too long and I don’t sign up for many things lol

I use addy.io to create aliases for different things, and then set up filters in Thunderbird to mark them as they come in so, for example, if I make an account at xyz.com and then I get a bunch of unrelated spam marked as coming from xyz.com, then I know they’ve been selling my info.

I probably have about a dozen or so aliases currently, but they’re pretty loosely organized.

I have two, KDE on my laptop that runs Arch (btw) which is my tinkering machine, and GNOME/Pop!_OS on the desktop, which is the one other people use and I’m not allowed to break lol.

Although I might switch the desktop to COSMIC at some point if it doesn’t cause too much trouble.

If it helps at all, I’m typing this on a Lenovo Ideadpad 5 that has a Ryzen 5 and 8gb that’s running up-to-date Arch (btw) and KDE perfectly well with no troubles at all. I haven’t owned the Yoga Slim specifically, but I’ve had a few Lenovos over the years and mine have all run various forms of Linux quite happily.

The Steam Deck sort-of has it on some games already, but it’s a bit hacky. I did get 60fps Cyberpunk going though, which was a nice surprise. It’ll be great to get a proper unified way of doing frame-gen though.

I assume this is the same reason why they want to ban TikTok but not Facebook - it’s not so much that they object to the data harvesting, they just object to non-American data harvesting that they can’t readily influence.

I’m still using my old Pixel 4a because I refuse to get a phone without a headphone jack lol

It’s harder to measure of course, but I wonder how that compares to the amount of sales they lose from people who just don’t bother buying the game when they find out it has Denuvo? I know I recently lost all interest in two games (Civ VII and Kingdom Come: Deliverance II) when I found out they were launching with Denuvo and I assume I’m not the only person who does that.

I like Ventoy, it’s handy but I don’t think it’s indispensable so probably what I’ll do is go back to using Etcher (which is open source AFAIK) until this resolves itself one way or another. I assume either the dev will respond properly with an explanation and everything will be fine, or someone will get fed up enough to fork it. I feel like it’s probably nothing nefarious, but it doesn’t really hurt to be overly cautious in this case IMO.

Currently I use Borg Backup with Vorta as a GUI. I don’t really do anything automated/scheduled, I just back it up manually to an external SSD every few days or so. I pretty much do my whole /home folder, except for a couple of subfolders that aren’t really necessary (and Videos, which I back up separately.)

I do eventually want to upgrade to a NAS, but I’m waiting until we move to start setting that up. Also I don’t really have an off-site plan yet which I know is bad, but I need to figure that out.

Yeah that’s my main issue with them too. I like the idea in theory, but in practice I find it tends to create this weird environment where something’s always broken because everything updates on a different schedule and nobody cares if their update breaks anything else.

It’s there now!

Done! I told them this is the first Civ game in a long time that I have no interest in picking up at launch, because of Denuvo and that the price is wildly unreasonable. Nearly $170 Canadian for the full edition!

I was a teenager in the 90s and there was a whole pirate video game ring going around our school that worked this way! Someone would buy a game, and everyone would bring in their blank floppies and it would get distributed around the computer lab. Also a separate ring of banned VHS movies taped off Swedish TV for some reason.

Here ya go! it’s a Japanese fork of FF that’s more focused on privacy. I prefer Librewolf personally but it’s good to have options I guess.

Aw half the fun of linux is all the weird janky software some nerds felt strongly enough about to release.

My favourites are the ones that just have a Github with absolutely no explanation of what the software does at all. It’ll just be like “After two years, blurplr has been refactored to use the updated flerb library instead of flerbp, which is deprecated” and then just a link to a tarball.

Yeah it’s been kind of legally proven that Mullvad keeps no logs too, they were raided by police last year and they came away with nothing.

From the article:

However, Swedish police left empty-handed. It looks like Mullvad’s own lawyers stepped in and pointed out that the company maintains a strict no-logging policy on customer data. This means the VPN service will abstain from collecting a subscriber’s IP address, web traffic, and connection timestamps, in an effort to protect user privacy. (It’s also why Mullvad VPN is among our most highly ranked VPN services.)

“We argued they had no reason to expect to find what they were looking for and any seizures would therefore be illegal under Swedish law,” Mullvad said. “After demonstrating that this is indeed how our service works and them consulting the prosecutor they left without taking anything and without any customer information.”