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Bob Smith

@ bismuthbob @sopuli.xyz

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0
Comments
66
Joined
2 yr. ago

  • The Economist on using phrenology for hiring and lending decisions: "Some might argue that face-based analysis is more meritocratic" […] "For people without access to credit, that could be a blessing"

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  • All of that being typed, I'm aware that the 'If' in my initial response is doing the same amount of heavy lifting as the 'Some might argue' in the article. Barring the revelation of some truly extraordinary evidence, I don't accept the premise.

  • The Economist on using phrenology for hiring and lending decisions: "Some might argue that face-based analysis is more meritocratic" […] "For people without access to credit, that could be a blessing"

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  • Wow. If a black box analysis of arbitrary facial characteristics is more meritocratic than the status quo, that speaks volumes about the nightmare hellscape shitshow of policy, procedure and discretion that resides behind the current set of 'metrics' being used.

  • Libreboot – Free and Open Source BIOS/UEFI boot firmware

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  • I tell a lie: the specific computer that I mention in the above post has a cleaned-up version of coreboot on it, not libreboot.

    I had a much smaller chromebook with libreboot on in a few years ago. Booting was fine, the rest of the hardware was too weak for my daily use. It was an Asus C201. I vaguely remember having to disconnect the battery and bridge some board contacts to get it switched over.

  • Libreboot – Free and Open Source BIOS/UEFI boot firmware

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  • I have libreboot on an old chromebook that I converted a year or two ago. I followed a guide. Minor disassembly but nothing weird.

    The computer boots just fine with one issue that is hardly worth mentioning. I accidentally left some cruft around when I switched from one distro to another, so it fails to boot to the old system before successfully booting the current one. That's a 'me being lazy' problem, not a 'libreboot' problem.

  • Your Kindle Can Finally Be Jailbroken Again. [22:00]

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  • One thing to note about the Kobo store is that it (unlike Amazon) lists the DRM status of a given book towards the bottom of the store page below the reviews. If you see something like "Epub 2 (DRM Free)" then that's the format that the book will be in if you download it.

    You can download a book that you've purchased directly from the website on the My Account/My Books subpage. I've tested this out and it can be a good way to get paid DRM free ebooks, if that's what the publisher wants to sell.

  • plasticatto dustcover question

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  • How to Succeed in Grifting Without Really Trying

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  • Bahhahhah!

  • What's a good Google Drive replacement for syncing my Keepass database?

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  • Syncthing is an option on the desktop side and it works with Syncthing-Fork on Android. It takes a bit of setting up, but I've been using a setup like this for years now.

  • Documenting the descent into madness

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  • Make friends with some PC repair people. Depending on where you live, a LOT of Win10 stuff is getting thrown out right now. If you present yourself as an alternative to recycling/scrapping, you might get a good deal.

  • What would you do with a device like this

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  • I used one of these (might even be the exact same model) as a little music player attached to an old soundbar. I could connect via ssh and play music through the speakers. The main challenge was finding a distribution that worked well with the internal sound card, since I wanted to use the aux output for sound. I don't think that I ever tried connecting a monitor to it, but it worked well for what I used it for, right up until I needed the sound bar for something else.

  • psa: snapd leads to massive slowdowns in boot time

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  • Snap turned several of my oldest Ubuntu boxes into unuseable e-waste before I jumped to a different distribution. This is the sole reason that I left Ubuntu behind back in the day and switched to something else on ALL of my computers. I'm not going through that again.

  • custom rom?

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  • I've been running various unofficial versions of LineageOS on a Pixel C for years because the screen is beautiful and the battery remained good until this year.

    Official Google support ended with 8.1 Oreo in 2017, but it is currently running 13. I don't think that it'll get any more updates, but I squeezed an extra 7 or 8 years out of it. Plus, I can probably keep using it as a stationary screen on my treadmill for a few more years. Potentially, It'll be useful for a full decade past that final release date.

    That's why I use custom roms.

  • I really do....

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  • Then Friday night shows up.

  • Win 10 home theater PC file system

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  • To be fair, power loss is a concern for any setup. More recent copy-on-write filesystems are supposed to be a bit more resilient...but I also worry about the lack of a long-term reliability track record for newer filesystems like BTRFS. The long term solution, like more than one other poster has indicated, is having multiple backups.

  • Win 10 home theater PC file system

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  • The biggest issue that I ran into when I was using NTFS drives with Linux was caused by unclean drive dismounts. After power outages, forced shutdowns, or manually pulled drives (I am the problem sometimes), the NTFS drive would sometimes fail to mount properly unless I connected it to a Windows computer and scanned the drive for errors first. Not the end of the world if you have backups and a Windows computer handy, but pretty terrible if you don't have both.

  • What are your favourite ebook reading apps?

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  • And my experience is limited. I opened up an especially large book earlier today to test things out and it took the better part of ten seconds to load. That seems to be the case every time I switch from a different book to that one, so there's still a bit of an issue. Not as bad as I remember it being.

  • What are your favourite ebook reading apps?

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  • I've had the large file issue with Librera too. Bundled epub collections with absurdly large page counts have sometimes been extremely slow to load. I've had better luck recently, so it might be a partially solved problem.

  • What are your favourite ebook reading apps?

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  • I use Librera on Android. I generally convert to .txt when I read fiction on Linux because I can use a wide range of text editors/viewers that way. It has been a great way to familiarize myself with a lot of features that I don't use when I'm tweaking config files.

    Beyond that, I use Okular or Calibre's reader for epubs on an as-needed basis.

  • Linux Tablet?

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  • If notetaking is going to be your primary use, you'll definitely want to focus on the keyboard experience. Touch-typing on a screen isn't a fun way to take class notes and a lot of cheap bluetooth keyboards end up being laggy or otherwise unsatisfactory.

    I've heard good things about Surface tablets and their attachable keyboards. I've personally had good luck with two-in-one laptops, where the keyboards are built-in.

    When/if you try for a pure tablet experience, be prepared for rough edges. Outside of KDE, Gnome and maybe Budgie, most desktop environments/WMs aren't designed to work on tablets without keyboards. Getting an on-screen keyboard to act how you want it to act isn't something that has been solved universally. Another fun wrinkle is that there's no guarantee that the tablet's accelerometer will be detected, so it may be challenging to rotate the screen orientation. If you like messing around with settings and downloading half-finished projects from github, then you'll love playing around with Linux tablets.