Oh boy, you haven’t met some Dell Optiplexes.

That shit, for whatever reason, can’t boot from internal DVD drive. I tried with 2 of them. Both had functional drives, I tried disabling secure boot, enabling legacy boot and some other settings which seemed related, but nothing worked. Then for shits and giggles I tried a USB DVD drive and that worked just fine.

I mean, they have a hole in the middle, so if I stack them they let stuff pass.

Meanwhile me with a CD book that has 17 bootable DVDs and CDs plus a separate DVD+RW for more random, less permanent crap and a portable USB DVD drive (the drive is sourced from e-waste and fails to write both DVD+/-RW and CD-RW at 4x, only 2.4x and 10x respectively work).

I like spinny media.

I mean, I also have a Ventoy disk, but I haven’t used it for a looooong time because it’s no fun, but discs are.
I just need a bigger backpack. The WRT54GL is taking up quite some space too.

Much cooler than ventoy, no?

Yes.

The fuck? (Edit: Although, does it have a map?)

Hmm…

AliExpress has no right to be that large, neither Opera. No reason to store that much cache. (Edit: cache and cookies are only around 500MB total. Hmmm…) Also, I set F-Droid to keep cached apps for 1 hour, what the hell is this?

I kind of forgot to manage my storage, as I usually do until I have like 5GB left…

Data will always adapt to storage size.

They even have Android app. I mean, a server app.
Anyway, they still seem to paywall some things.

I did nothing. After using either the default 200MB or the 80MB I pay for it’s supposed to be throttled, but that kinda just… doesn’t happen. I activated a 2nd SIM of those yesterday, same thing. The most I used in a month was some 28GB (out of 80MB), getting me as much as 150Mbps in cities covered by LTE-A from Telekom (this SIM can connect to Telekom, Orange and O2).

Though I just went back to my previous carrier and keep this as a backup. The second SIM I put into a USB modem. May come in handy if I finally decide to try Tailscale.

Searching around, I found someone with the same “issue” for a different provider on Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/NoContract/comments/ntul3w/unlimited_data_sim_for_only_45year/

Also a one that was meant to have 64kbps unlimited, but it just… wasn’t throttled. But based on one comment they fixed it later which I assume will happen here too. Almost 4 months so far though.

But perhaps they just don’t care that much. Based on ToS I can be charged extra €1.30/GB (excl. VAT) since I use permanent roaming, and perhaps I will as it is defined as >50% of usage in EU roaming for the past 4 months. Maybe they just rely on that to kick in…? Also the data warning states “…may be probably temporarily restricted.”, which is just so oddly phrased.

But most likely scenario, someone just fucked up the config.

I found yet another such fuck up here: https://www.reddit.com/r/tmobile/comments/c6ilbp/bought_the_new_15gb_international_data_pass_didnt/

Dude used up 24GB out of 15GB high-speed data pass.

It can happen both ways though. My current carrier accidentally (I hope) set the limit to half the one stated in ToS. This was reversed already. I assume it was an accident, because they plainly stated the incorrect limit in SMS as well.

And finally “We are reaching out to let you know Alexa key phrase based activation will no longer be supported. For better personalization, Alexa will always process audio in background. Don’t worry, your audio is safe with us, we highly care about your privacy.”

I am just reading this on my laptop, sitting on a bed in shrimp-like shape with laptop (a ThinkPad of course) on top of egg carton (called Eggsbox 360 based on The Two Ronnies skit) which is on top of a pillow while listening to music from a CD being played on an e-waste sourced 5.25" DVD drive attached via SATA to USB that can only reliably load CDs (perhaps because the USB provided power is less than half max spec of 2A) and accessing the internet via USB cellular modem using cheap IoT SIM that has broken (not applied) throttling (instead of 64/32kbps).

Laughs in ISO 9660 on disc.

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I use LibreTorrent since I only have mobile data. It’s nice.

I don’t know how to share URL from F-Droid app, it just tries to export the APK file…

https://gitlab.com/proninyaroslav/libretorrent There’s all the links

Edit: Oh, I am not sure if it was fixed/improved but previously it would pre-allocate full file size on external storage which would just write corresponding size of probably zeroes and then gradually overwrite it.
Perhaps this changelog entry is related to a fix:

POSIX Disk IO option in the settings. This should solve the downloading problem on some Android file systems, for example exFAT on SD cards.

I didn’t try it as my current phone only works with stupid 4GB per file FAT32 so I don’t use the SD card for torrents anymore.

This was a huge problem when I was downloading Wikipedia ZIM file (110GB), it crashed a few times, and even when it finally worked the pre-allocation took a few hours (I think) as it had to write 110GB of nothing.

Edit 2: Yep. Zeros. This file shows up as “110GB” but doesn’t actually take up any (noticeable) free space on internal storage and it gets generated immediately. On SD card (at least in prior versions) it would actually write all of that first, which unless you were looking to partially prevent data recovery is unwanted.

I just got an old HP inkjet that doesn’t care about reported ink levels and cheap ink bottles from AliExpress.

I print white on black because I have so much damn ink and nobody expects dark mode documents. Kinda funny when I take out a sheet of paper and have to dry it out. 120g/m² is absolutely the minimum when doing such crap though. Regular 80g/m² just wrinkles up and leaks through, although that’s also a property of dye ink vs pigment ink.

But I also lucked out on sales combined with coupons

Currently it’s €18.50, though for 0.5L (~1 pint) that’s still cheap. Honestly I am surprised I actually received that.

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10 years later
Printers now include embedded cellular modems as backup for OTA firmware updates, ink subscriptions and telemetry.

Wait, I thought that’s something that only color laser do with yellow toner…

Edit: Possibly

And once again the only available good tech is old 2nd hand.

Based on https://postmarketos.org/install/ the Nokia N900 can run the latest stable release of PostmarketOS.

Nokia N900 was a proper Linux-powered phone released in November 2009.

So yeah, it’s been getting over 15 years of community support so far.

Edit: Fixed typo

I have fairly small hands, but still prefer a larger phone. More content on the screen and space for battery.

HOWEVER, I’d take both. A small phone would be a good secondary device. I want something modern the size of my Samsung Galaxy Ace (GT-S5830i). The back also has a really nice texture.
Oh, yeah, it also has a headphone jack, MicroSD card slot and quickly swappable battery which I should probably replace because it seems it has slightly increased its capacity… volumetric capacity.

But I also prefer a bit more thickness so it doesn’t feel like a fragile, slippery sheet of glass (rugged phones are good for that).