My wife likes her kindle hardware.

I love stumbling upon EPUBs and using Amazon’s website to send them to her kindle.

Na na~ nanananana~ na~ na~ na, nazi cars are not for meeee

(To the tune of Katamari on the Rocks)

sudo exit simulation please abracadabra Rumpelstiltskin

But not beyond the brain-in-a-box’s comprehension!

4D chess up in here. Take THAT, migrants! Don’t want to come up here now, do ya?

(Looks up measles vaccination rates in US vs Mexico)

Well at least you are probably starting off protected.

I cannot help but respect any organization that has “here are the conditions that make our product useless” in their FAQ.

It’s an effective way to describe what their proxy does, for sure. It’s just nice to read public-facing text that doesn’t feel sanitized by committee.

Oh yeah, I think it’s both, to be sure.

Only if you ignore the context.

If I said “Mexico isn’t even trying to end this war” and you said “they are literally shooting every American that steps across the border!” it would not sound odd at all.

And it certainly wouldn’t sound bigoted against an ethnicity.

Context clues, my friend.

That post is clearly referring to shooting Russian soldiers that have invaded.

And just to help you further, the adjective “Russian” in that sentence refers to the state for which the soldiers fight. So a “Russian soldier” could be some poor dude from North Korea who got shipped over.

To further aid understanding, look at the military of a diverse place like the United States. You will have “American soldiers” working side by side who have different ethnic backgrounds and were even born on other continents.

The shitty thing is, the checks and balances kind of still exist but the people in charge of them approve everything Trump is doing.

And then the constituents who are in charge of voting those people out ALSO approve of what they are doing and/or are too ignorant to notice. (Any illegal tampering with voter rolls and ballots notwithstanding)

How does one fix the culture of an entire nation? Ugh.

In my limited exposure to the ramblings of conservative acquaintances, they now consider Zelensky to be a “little dictator” who was rude to their favorite douches.

Regarding Israel, I think it’s something along the lines of “judeo-christian values” good, brown savages bad, and OH LOOK SOMETHING SHINY!! Sorry, you were saying?

“Narrative” has been an american conservative dog whistle for a while now, as far as I can tell.

It translates roughly to “the reported facts which should not be believed because they don’t work for MY narrative.” So basically just the usual projection. And it’s even a smart-sounding word which really helps it carry weight with dummies.

Oh YouTube. You are in such a dominant position for talented individuals who want to create their own TV show. You’ve been pissing people off for a long time, but changing what “YouTube” even is seems way worse.

I will even pay the $15 for my family to be able to easily watch or listen to whatever they want in a native app on whatever platform they’re using. And I like how it makes my views more valuable to the creators I care about.

But if it’s not cheap, easy, AND ad-free, it is not difficult to block ads or even download videos I care about onto my Jellyfin server.

It looks like the latest firmware on their website for my old-ass black & white brother laser was released in 2019.

Hopefully that thing lasts another few decades on top of the ~15 years I’ve already had it, because it sounds like it’s the last printer I’m going to buy.

The differences in sheer speed and responsiveness is something FOSS alternatives need much more publicity about. When the requirements for one product are “help the user do what they want” and the requirements for another product are “synergize the KPIs of these 53 stakeholders in our trillion dollar conglomerate, monetize our market position in every way possible, and check the minimum viable checkboxes to keep end users engaged with the brand” it shows!

Windows to Linux is of course the most significant and worthwhile. As I like to describe it, even using the most full-featured distros out there (Linux Mint Cinnamon gang represent!) any flavor of Linux is like greased lightning compared with windows. And I mean Windows 10, not even 11.

A few weeks ago I turned on an old secondary desktop PC that had been powered off for a month. It had numerous updates, everything except installing a new named version. Even the kernel. I decided to time it. From the time I opened the software update GUI – including typing in my password, letting it download, letting it install, getting the “yo, reboot when you’re ready,” etc – it was done in 5 minutes. And those were 5 minutes where the computer was totally usable. Running the current version of the full featured Linux Mint Cinnamon 22.1 on a PC from 2011!

My favorite recent example is the switch from Plex to Jellyfin. Now granted, fully self-hosting means more IT admin type stuff for me so that family members and I can securely connect remotely. But god damn if every single app I have tried doesn’t feel like warp speed compared with the Plex versions. Did you know that watching my media using the WebOS app on my LG TV does not have to be dog shit slow? And don’t even get me started on phone apps like Finamp. (it really whips the jelly’s ass?)

Maybe we should all throw some kind of support behind https://ladybird.org/ with an eye to the future.

That project isn’t problematic for some reason I haven’t heard about, is it?

(Problematic other than web browsers being gigantic pieces of software, and ladybrid itself not even being in alpha yet)

What is even worse than how embarrassing this is, is that it’s impossible for me to tell if this was Putin’s idea or just a fortunate side effect of his stooge’s lead-addled and dying brain.

I wonder how much this affects things if you’ve already gone through Firefox’s settings to max out privacy and turn off all telemetry.

I resisted switching to Librewolf because Firefox works great (including M365 in Linux at work) and seemed to have the options you’d want for privacy and security.

This doesn’t feel like an emergency, especially in a chrome/edge dominated world. But it’s back on the list of things to investigate transitioning away from.

Excellent post! Any time I see one of these from you I’m going to upvote and comment just in case it gets it onto more screens.

I still haven’t tried the steam deck, but it seems like such an awesome system. I won’t be in the market for one any time soon but maybe by the time I am, there will be a Deck 2.

I think the important point in this case is not that the content is acceptable, but that it is newsworthy.

If somebody made the video and posted it, I could see it being permanently taken down. And it was at first, per the letter of their policy.

But the fact that government employees had it playing on government property inside government facilities, to protest some extreme and historical stuff going on, means it should be recorded for the public and for history.

I look at it much the same way as the photos of upside down American flags that various government employees put up. Just posting an upside down flag and saying how America is wrong is an opinion like any other that would get lost in the noise. But when it’s people inside the government intending it as a sign of distress, very much more newsworthy and important to record.