How would Amazon track a voucher? It’s a physical scratch off code, sealed by Mullvad before they send it over to Amazon. More importantly, if you think that was possible why would Mullvad be unaware of it and/or lie about it? Just go with the vouchers if you want untraceability. They’re also cheaper in USD than other methods IIRC, at $29/6 months and $57/12 months.

I feel piracy for demo purposes is fully justified if you buy it after you like it. People always say vote with your wallet but it’s more like gambling with your wallet if you don’t get to see and touch the product before you make the purchase. Giving proper demos should be more common with digital media.

Very disappointing. Moreover I’m not even sure if they’re allowed to do this with GPL and other contributors. If they sell I think it would need to stay GPL? Regardless I’m removing these either way.

This is all I needed to do so: https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=314220

Run the script from the second post, then eject the Kobo and let it install. Afterwards you can open it from the new NickelMenu button at the bottom right. My Kobo just stays in KOReader mode all the time.

You can change the background color by changing the ["cre_background_color"] key in settings.reader.lua (again, I dislike needing to configure it like this). On my Android and desktop I set it to ["cre_background_color"] = "0xECECEC",, which inverts into a nice gray when I set it to night mode, then I invert all the image colors so they’re a normal color. Font color can’t be changed though, TMK. You can change font color with custom CSS snippets.

Have you tried KOReader yet? It’s not Material UI and doesn’t have any sort of “theme”, since it’s very focused on just showing your text, but it lets you extensively pick fonts and styles for your books, has dictionary lookups (tap and hold), page view, and it can sync with itself (available on the desktop and many physical ereaders). My main gripe is that it’s very configurable, and I don’t personally like many of the defaults. After setting it all up it’s quite powerful, and I use it on my physical ereader, Android phone, and desktop PC in roughly the same configuration.

JXL is the best image codec we have so far and it’s not even close. I did a breakdown on some of its benefits here. JXL can losslessly convert PNG, JPG, and GIF into itself, and can losslessly send them back the other way too. The main downside is that Google has been blocking its adoption by keeping support out of Chromium in favor of pushing AVIF, which started a chicken and egg problem of no one wanting to use it until everyone else started using it too. If you want to be an early adopter you can feel free to use JXL, but just know that 3rd party software support is still maturing.

Something you might find interesting is that the original JPEG is such a badass format that they’ve taken a lot of their findings from JXL and made a badass JPEG encoder with it named jpegli. Oddly, jpegli-based JPEGs are not yet able to be losslessly-compressed into JXL files, per this issue - hopefully that will be fixed at some point.

I feel like it would be better as a toggle in the settings? I wonder if they envision it as something that’s always enabled for everyone in the future.

This actually happens a lot. It’s sort of an inside joke in the fandom as a result. Anti-furry people spend a lot of time consuming fandom material to get e.g. cringe compilation material, and prolonged exposure eventually gets them interested or dulls their prejudice.

Break the beef into smaller pieces first so the germs can’t find it.

I’ve been noticing this for a while now. I chalked it up to YouTube having ugly code, but now I see that it is simply malicious code.

I’ve seen a trend where people move the goalposts on the reasons they’re not able to switch. “If only this program worked I could switch”, but when that program is ported it’ll be a new excuse next. Sooner or later you’ll have to draw a line and say “99% of my stuff works, the 1% that doesn’t can get bent”.

Conduit is also licensed under Apache 2.0, so it could also be taken closed source at any point in time. The reason this wouldn’t impact Conduit as much is that there’re other contributors, whilst Synapse and Dendrite are almost exclusively developed by Element.

Right. The current perspective is based on the idea that if Synapse/Dendrite go closed-source right now, an open source version would be good as dead. Element is responsible for 95% of Synapse/Dendrite and I’m sure a community fork would have to play a lot of catch-up to figure out how to keep it going. If the community was more involved in Synapse/Dendrite implementation (and if Element let them) there would be less cause for alarm, as closing the source would just mean an immediate community fork and putting Element on ignore. Also to reiterate, The Matrix Foundation is not going along with Element on this move, and even if Element pulled something shady the Matrix Core Spec etc. would still remain open and under the Foundation’s control, so the max we have to lose is Synapse/Dendrite and all of Element’s developers.

As for the rest I agree and I do actually trust that Element is simply playing their only card here. These maneuvers are all required in order for Element to survive as a company at all, but they also unfortunately leave this backdoor open as a consequence. Matthew has pinky-promised over and over that they are only acting in good faith and that they would never use the backdoor, but it’s understandable that the presence of the backdoor is putting everyone at unease. Best case scenario we take this as a warning sign that if Element drops dead tomorrow then Matrix is also dead. If people want Matrix to not be practically owned by Element then we should diversify and prepare escape plans.

This is actually quite a controversial change mainly because of their switch to a CLA. This indirectly gives them the opportunity to switch the license to closed source whenever they feel like it in the future. Semi-controversially, they are also primarly making this AGPL change in order to begin selling dual-licensing to companies. The Matrix Foundation itself does not support this change from Element, though Element is within its rights to do so.

You can read some more thoughts on this from the pessimistic folks at HackerNews. My main takeaway is that I don’t trust Element because I don’t trust anyone. I’m sure they’re doing this in good faith but I don’t like the power they have at the moment. I hope this is what’s needed to begin focusing efforts on alternative homeserver implementations like Conduit.

Syncthing - No introduction needed. Couldn’t live without it.

Healthchecks.io (you can self host this) - Dead man’s switch monitoring for all my automation. Most of my automated scripts hit up a Healthchecks endpoint when they run, and if they fail to hit the endpoint on a regular schedule I get notified. Mandatory for my anxiety.

Just like real life you can also ignore the crime and say “that would take too much effort to solve”.

None of this is your fault, this is your company being garbage. Putting you in charge of all these responsibilities with a ~year of experience is a big red flag. Your project manager asking you to estimate your percentage work done is also ridiculous - people can barely get decent estimates with fully-dissected agile pointing, so I’m not sure how a “project manager” thinks that your guesses are useful data. If you’re not getting paid at least 6 figures right now you should hop to another job immediately. It won’t look bad on your resume to hop from your first job after a year and a half.

I personally wouldn’t stay with a company like this even if they paid fairly because the culture is borderline toxic/manipulative. I wouldn’t recommend you stay but the only reason I see in favor of staying is that you’ll learn a lot really quickly - at the expense of your mental, not being paid fairly, and potentially being fired.

The health is listed next to each piece at this URL: https://annas-archive.org/torrents

Arch has made a lot of mistakes, and their most recent one where they bricked everyone’s GRUB loader is the one that caused me to stop using it as a general recommendation. This sort of thing would never happen in Debian, and pretending that “every distro makes massive mistakes!” is disrespectful to distros that actually put a ton of effort into making sure these things don’t happen. Sweeping those mistakes under the rug is harmful to new users who don’t know what they’re signing up for when they download the distro that you are sugarcoating, and that is the primary reason to make sure that anyone considering Manjaro is aware of its past so they can make their own decisions.

Security updates aren’t delayed in Manjaro, they’re pushed through out of band.

Manually. Also read as: delayed. The comment from Arch’s security team that you are minimizing is part of the reason why this is a bad idea: “They just forward our security advisories without reading them. Leaving critical security issues to rot in their “stable” repositories while only pushing forward issues that are publicized or users telling them about”. Once again, why would I trust the Manjaro team to be on top of security when they can’t figure out how to keep an SSL cert alive? Their security mailing list hasn’t even been updated in a year.

Once you’ve compiled an AUR package it will remain compatible with the system you compiled it on until you update and introduce an incompatibility.

You are dodging the real dependency problem by focusing on this half. The real dependency problem is that when an AUR package updates and Manjaro’s packages are not new enough for the update, it will cause breakage. AUR packages are built with Arch Linux’s repos in mind and no care whatsoever for the versions of packages that Manjaro holds. Updating your AUR packages frequently will all but guarantee that you will eventually run an AUR update that requires a dependency with a newer version than Manjaro provides, and that app will break (or worse, the AUR package is a dependency for other apps which will cause further breakage). Even Manjaro knows this: “Using AUR also implies Arch stable branch - which is only achievable by using Manjaro unstable or testing branch.”. Also take it from their team: “The AUR is neither officially supported by Arch nor Manjaro. If you do use the AUR on Manjaro, use our unstable branch. Problem solved.”

That’s not the “Arch’s security team”, it’s one person on a 3rd party forum, with a history of issuing personal statements reeking of personal grudge. Yeah I know that comment unfortunately. It’s a singular, isolated piece of flamebait and it makes me sad to see it’s still being bookmarked and passed around 5 years later.

Yes very sad that a member of Arch’s security team made a warning about Manjaro’s security 5 years ago and still we have people pretending that it’s “flamebait” because that’s a convenient excuse to dismiss it.

The receipts that I just linked show far more than 2 mistakes. I don’t care whether they have fixed them or not, I care that they have made so many. Trust arrives on foot and leaves on horseback. Distro forks are nothing special, so why use the one with a history of bad management? Use Arch proper or any of the countless Arch forks that use the real Arch repos, which will inherently sidestep a lot of issues that Manjaro created for itself.

You say that delaying packages makes things more stable but there is a clear history of that not being the case, which has already been described in the links I posted. This is most importantly true in terms of delayed security updates. You also don’t understand how the AUR works in conjunction with outdated Manjaro packages, which will cause dependency problems and lead to breakage. This is a very simple cause and effect so I’m not sure how you think you can try to assert “everyone else must misunderstand how dependencies work”.

As for the last bit, no Arch is obviously not being hurt when Manjaro is called out. If anything I’ll bet Arch wishes Manjaro would stop tripping over itself and giving Arch a bad name. They are already sick of Manjaro users using the AUR and complaining every time it breaks their packages, and you can read what Arch’s security team thinks about Manjaro here on r/archlinux (image mirror here if you don’t want to visit that site).