Barx [none/use name]

“Why does Alan want me to ‘prevaricatingly touch base about the brown water situation?’”

It was Big Pencil all along

The last point is the important one. If you’re regularly seeing these in your house that means they’ve found a food source: your house is infested with another insect they’re keeping at bay.

Used Thinkpad if you want to save money and have easy Linux compatibility. Double check compatibility when you find a good option since ~10% of Thinkpads have a random Linux-unfriendly hardware component.

For gaming I would recommend getting a second hand (or even first hand) steam deck rather than getting a laptop with a dedicated graphics card. It will be more future-proof and work better. It will probably work out to be a wash in costs after a few years. As a bonus, it is also a Linux computer and with a dock, monitor, keyboard, and mouse, it can be used like a desktop, like with a full desktop environment.

LibreOffice is the main alternative to MS Word, Excel, etc. Google Docs is a cloud service so if you want an open alternative you’d need to run your own service on a computer somewhere. There are services that are good for that but I’m not sure if that’s what you were asking about.

More honest headline: Dell created intolerable working conditions so that they could engage in constructive dismissal and avoid paying for unemployment for their massive layoffs.

It’s good because most of the American audience is too politically miseducated to recognize it otherwise.

An invasion of Lebanon risks direct Iranian involvement. Not sure if they’re trying to call a bluff or if they actually want that.

I’m always amazed at these losers that think Trump is somehow fit under that big ol suit

They’re gonna figure out how absurdly stingy I am I guess.

apt is good for most things.

Flatpak is good for applications where you want the people who write the software to be creating the releases and for closed source apps that you want to isolate a bit from your system.

For example, on a new system you might install everything using apt except for Zoom. Zoom isn’t in the Debian repos, it’s closed source and proprietary. But you can get the official Zoom application using flathub. Zoom will also be fairly isolated from the rest of your system so it has less access to your files and can be removed more cleanly later on if needed.

Liberal union staff always say that Dem politicians help. It’s part of their false ideology and one if the main things we need to combat if we are to build unions that aren’t used to kill us.

They did do some Biden photo ops, yes. I personally don’t think that is particularly valuable for the union itself.

It’s kind of like politicians showing up to a protest looking to get clout despite doing nothing to organize it. They get to claim credit while doing literally nothing.

I actually don’t remember lol. He was fairly irrelevant, just plain didn’t have enough people organized to his side.

I feel like the Trotskyist thing to do would’ve been to try and take over the viable reform campaign, UAWD. And I know that some did try that.

Fain was the least-connected viable option during the last UAW elections. As in, aside from the non-viable socialist, Fain was the only one not tiesd to the UAW’s long strong of corrupt leadership that embezzled money, collaborated with manager, and, on one occasion, likely burned down UAW’s records office.

While it’s not impossible that he has similar problems, it’s more likely that he’s vastly less shitty and these internal conflicts are with the prior loyalists to the corrupt leadership, e.g. Mock.

Anyways the early endorsement of Biden was still terrible.

I can’t answer your Ente questions but I do recommend using a self-hosting strategy (with or without Ente) if it is within your skillset. The costs are your time and commodity hardware and cloud services. For example, if you just use a cloud service for backups, then the cost of storage will be something similar to Amazon Glacier (I use a different S3-compatible host). $4/TB/month to store, around $100/TB to download. You will presumably only download all of your (hopefully encrypted) photos when you need to test or restore the backups. There are also S3-compatible services that are cheaper than this, but this is a well-known one.

Also, depending on how your photos have been organized, you may benefit from a deduping storage strategy that does incremental backups. If you used Borg or a similar piece of software, you would benefit cost-wise in two ways:

1. It will dedupe at the beginning of the backup process. If you have 3 copies of the exact same video for whatever reason, it will realize this and only include the data once in the backup.

2. Incremental backups will sometimes use a multi-file strategy that is efficient for efficient synchronization to other services. Basically, they sometimes store files or groups of files together more or less chronologically. When you then want to send the obfuscated backup data, you can use a sync program that tries to send only the backup files that have changed, which is usually a small minority of files. This is great for when you need to get that data back off the cloud to test backups. Rather than download 1 TB every time you can synchronize the data to a dedicated test volume on your own server where you always keep the last copy (so it can recognize and download only the changes).

It is a great idea to move away from Google and move towards hosting your own services. Ente looks like it could be useful for many people to begin that transition. I will point out some common pitfalls to watch out for. But don’t let them stop you from making this transition: Google has most of these same risks.

• As a private, for-profit company that offers its own hosted services, it will always face a conflict between the features it includes in its “free” self-hosted version vs. its paid offering. Most companies that try this eventually sell out, either by changing their offerings or by selling the company to another one that is looking to reap some quick profits.

• If the company goes under, so do your backups. All your photos. You may run into a situation where you lose all of your photos or where your photos are basically held hostage with an exorbitant export fee for that one last cash grab. For this reason I would suggest prioritizing using something like Ente as a *self-hosted service ". If you do your own backups right then you will never lose your photos.

• You will have to pay close attention to the project when you seld-host. Unless you are particularly good at network and computer security, your self-hosted instance will be able to poke around your computer or network if it wants to. You are trusting the project to not eventually include any spyware (they often call it “telemetry” nowadays) or worse. So basically… pay close attention to the project’s community and news and be careful during upgrades.

• Do begin learning security best practices. You will avoid a lot of pitfalls by running your services on virtual machines with their own IPs on your network and good (highly restrictive) firewall rules. This isolates your application from the computer it is running on and from sniffing around your network in the case where it does something shady.

• Good backups are kind of difficult. For this reason I recommend many layers of redundancy both in terms of multiple copies of data and in terms of backup process. 3-2-1 is a good baseline where you have at least 3 copies of your data in at least 2 different mediums and at least 1 off-site. Your backups should be periodically tested by doing a mock restoration and checking the output for “correctness”. This is a lot of work. But it is also the only way to properly do it without leaving responsibility for your data up to a third party that you almost certainly shouldn’t trust with your security or even just not losing your data, eventually.

For specific recs, I think the backup process is the most important. Anything that automatically syncs your phone photos to your own server and then makes multiple backups to multiple locations (including an encrypted copy in the cloud somewhere) is a good start. There are open source sync apps and servers, Nextcloud, Immich, etc that will automatically copy your files to your server. Then you should back up your photos using software intended for the purpose. Rsync, Borg, etc. I recommend storing a copy of your photos in a cloud service as well, like one of the many S3-compatible services out there, but only if you encrypt your data first. Borg and similar programs can make encrypted copies of your data that you can then safely upload to a cloud service.

Monopoly capitalists did the most monopoly capitalist thing ever, journalists are surprised.

tyranny.gov is just a proxy for tyranny.com

Yeah duh. This is a very, very old way to fire people without having to actually fire them. Just create intolerable working conditions.

In modern times they’re mostly trying to avoid paying for unemployment.

Archived version only grabbed the first page or so, I think