Funny you should ask: I installed Debian 32-bit on an old Asus Eee PC netbook yesterday to breathe new life into that old machine and turn it into a controller for a piece of test equipment we have at work. My company keeps old stuff like that around until space is needed in case someone needs something.

Just in case I had to modify something in the tester’s control software, I figured I’d install i3wm and Vim. It didn’t take long and I was surprised by how usable the machine ended up being. Honestly I wouldn’t have minded using it as a bone fide laptop for light-duty work on the go.

So basically keep your expectations low and install super-lightweight software, and your old Aspire could live a few extra productive years instead of going to the landfill.

Here’s a little story that shows how much society has become dystopian:

Back in the 90’s, I worked in France for a while. When I was there, a case was brought up against the state that had violated a CNIL rule: some dude was cheating on his taxes by claiming he lived at some address. Tthe French fiscal administration sued him because they obtained a file from the electricity company and another from the water utilty company showing that the consumption of both electricity and water were so low it wasn’t consistent with the dude actually living there.

The case was thrown out, the dude walked and the state was fined because it had violated a rule that clearly stipulated cross-referencing files for the purpose of extracting secondary information that wasn’t available in each single file was a violation of privacy and civil liberties.

I shit you not. This used to be a thing.

Can you imagine this today? All the Big Data sonsabitches cross-reference billions of files ALL THE TIME and nobody bats an eyelid anymore.

If you’re old enough, you remember sovereign states taking privacy seriously. If you’re not, you don’t. And that’s how Big Data gets away with what they do today because fewer and fewer people remember a time when it was unacceptable.

Eventually we’ll hit big brother levels.

As someone who was born before the age of surveillance capitalism, I can tell you we’ve hit that level a long time ago. Anybody who thinks society has been running normally for at least the past 15 years is too young to have known what a normal society is.

To evade taxes of course.

Have you ever asked yourself how it’s possible that ALL the fucking ultra-rich almost without exception do philanthropy?

It doesn’t make sense: most of those millionaires and billionaires are psychopaths who essentially don’t give a shit about their fellow man, acquired their wealth by exploiting and shafting others for the most part, and don’t give a shit about how that makes them look: why on Earth would any of them do philanthropy, let alone all of them?

It only starts to make sense when you understand philanthropy is yet another tax loophole.

I would suggest we give him the 3,000 acres of Lana’i he doesn’t own, so the entire island belongs to him, then strand him there forever.

I have been hating this man’s guts since the mid 90’s and somehow it never lets off. Most hateful people manage to become a little bit more likeable as they age. Even this disgusting piece of human refuse Bill Gates might pass for a somewhat okay human being if you wilfully overlook why he truly does philanthropy.

But Larry Ellison? Hell no. He never changes. he’s just consistently the worst year after year, decade after decade.

Runbox, a privacy-focused email provider out of Norway. Our family has been using it for many years with zero issues. The prices are very decent.

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I’m a kid of the cold war.

It’s behind a firewall. The only thing exposed to the outside is port 22 - and only pubkey login too.

And gee dude… It’s been running for 18 years without being pwned 🙂

Sure it is. There’s a button labeled “Manage exceptions” that does exactly that.

It’s not the only thing that leaks timezone data, and the fix is identical: have the machine pretend you’re in UTC.

For example: if you enable Resist Fingerprinting (RFP) in Librewolf, it will lie to websites and pretend your timezone is UTC - because of course timezone is one of the factors used to fingerprint you - and all the sites you visit that show you your local time, or depend on your local time for something or other, will show you the wrong time. And that’s how you know it works 🙂

The most painless way to dual-boot is to install something that’s not Windows alongside something else that’s not Windows.

Pray tell, what possible benefit can Lemmy communities gain from Facebook users?

You do realize most people who joined the Fediverse did so because Facebook and the likes are a steaming pile of shit, right?

What possible benefit is there to the pile of shit coming to splatter itself here uninvited?

It’s not just a matter of blocking Threads users.

Facebook is coming on here to slurp up data I don’t want them to have, and enriching their own Threads ecosystem with Fediverse content they haven’t lifted a finger to create.

Not to mention, when Threads users are able to fully interact in the Fediverse, do you really want that particular bunch to create noise in your communities? I don’t. There’s a reason why I avoid Facebook in all its forms.

Great.
I joined the Fediverse to escape Facebook’s toxic interpretation of communities, so Facebook is coming to the Fediverse instead.
Just great…

That is not the reason: Signai is very good but it’s not the best. The reason why it’s more popular is because it’s good, ubiquitous and easy to install.

In other words, it’s a well-known app you can confidently tell your computer idiot friends and family to install on their phone and start communicating with them 5 minutes later. What’s what makes it popular.

practice the shortcuts

You know, I used to think like that when I first learned Unix shell commands and vi. I shlepped through the learning process because I had to when I was a student. Then after graduation, I joined a Unix company so I was dragged deeper into it screaming and kicking, and I kept picking up more and more commands and shortcuts until they etched themselves deep into my muscle memory. At some point, it all stopped being a chore and it became second nature.

And it went like that for many other software I’ve used. Decades later, I get the payoff: I’m a fast engineer and the friction between what I want to do and the final result is very low despite working 90% of the time with the keyboard.

It was a pain to get there and it took a mighty long time, I’ll be honest. but I reap the benefits now.

If I were you, I’d make the effort for that sort of thing. A couple of months tops: if you don’t like it, you’ll have wasted 2 months of your life. If you do, you’ll have gained skills that will pay for your efforts for the rest of your life many times over.

This one.

Well, Sway and Gnome. But I already know Gnome so Sway piqued my interest.