After a year there’s only something about linux-firmware requiring manual intervention.

I thought I wasn’t reading the news in correct place. Manjaro had update snapshot discussion threads, and usually there were things to fix manually. Usually just minor things.

I had luck with VNC, although it’s still worse than RDP. There’s also some RDP implementations on Linux that are apparently better, but VNC works well enough for me.
But there’s no sound, I don’t know if RDP has that. I’ve used VLC for sound forwarding. I also tried PulseAudio TCP module, but that didn’t quite work. With VLC I can do lossy compression.

What I wish would work better is X11 forwarding. That could be so awesome, just having the remote windows local-like. But from what I can find, in the past, programs used X11’s drawing features which would save a lot of bandwidth, while now they just draw pixel by pixel.

To give you some idea, I’ve tried it on LAN with gigabit ethernet, ping below 1ms. It would saturate the port and still be kinda slow.

I also found it OK-ish, at least after my usual disabling of BITS and SuperFetch (SysMain now, I think), and disabling auto-updates, I think in gpedit.msc, and using the provided BypassNRO.cmd to create local account.

Alright, maybe not that OK, but after the initial setup it ran fine even on officially unsupported computer made in 2007. Just had to modify the installer by merging W11 image into W10 installer.

Anyway, the Windows store or whatever isn’t that used, and I got tired of updating every random program coming from .exe files. But similarly I don’t like the large hops in versions like Windows 10 -> 11, or similarly with Linux Mint, so I went with Arch.

Anyway, I’ll be a smaller minority. I most liked Windows 8.1. It was really well optimized.

price for a domain name

Or host your own VPN on home network. Or use Tailscale VPN, that also works behind CG-NAT, and can usually get direct connection.

My closest attempt at pronouncing that:

echo 'šxʷməθkʷəy̓əmasəm' | aplay -c 1 -f u8 -r 2000 -t raw -

Hey, hey, it’s average.

It is improving search result, with filters. Ads, tracking, data deletion possibility, in-app purchases, license, etc…

At least some of these are already tracked.

The other Arch user body type

Sell you a new motherboard?

I connect to mine with a USB serial adapter, since my laptop doesn’t have one built-in, which I wish it did. Software-wise, I just use screen because I am lazy to use something like Minicom.

Just don’t set any low baud rate for Linux. It will wait for logs to be printed out while booting. Though perhaps you can reduce the loglevel, I haven’t tried that. I’ve tried 300 baud for fun, and that wasn’t fun. I think it was over half an hour to boot up just waiting for logs to print.

I honestly don’t remember what I did, but this lies in my /etc/default/grub and looks relevant:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="console=ttyS1,115200"
GRUB_TERMINAL_INPUT="console serial"
GRUB_TERMINAL_OUTPUT="gfxterm serial"
GRUB_SERIAL_COMMAND="serial --unit=1 --speed=115200"

Also it’s useful to then set width, height and terminal type. I think terminal type is in $TERM , and size is set with stty, but I am not sure. It’s been a while.

You may also need a “null modem adapter” to reverse RX and TX, but oddly enough, that actually makes it not work with my adapter, despite it also working when directly connected to a switch. Maybe it can figure out which end it’s supposed to be? Dunno.

That rare occasion where you’re actually on a console

Actually having login console on a serial port can be pretty useful if you screw up something with network on a headless PC. I wish modern computers still had that as it also works better than USB adapters.

Hard to tell, guesstimate €1,500.

I really only download music, mostly individual songs. I use sites like himovies.to for movies, and then if I like something enough, I buy a DVD, if available.
And some few “mod apks”, which yes, are a bit shady. I don’t know how to do that myself, so I just run them through VirusTotal and hope for the best if it’s all green (false negatives). Stuff like KineMaster because I am procrastinating to learn using Kdenlive, MLUSB Mounter and some games.

I haven’t purchased any media or software (excl. donations) that doesn’t come on a physical medium.

In the reply to Patreon they mentioned having some automated and manual ways of removing CSAM, plus “closely working with NCMEC”, but I have no idea what that means.
And these statistics of resolved reports: https://www.missingkids.org/content/dam/missingkids/pdfs/cybertiplinedata2024/2024-notifications-by-ncmec-resulting-content-removal.pdf

Total number of reports of 128 resolved on average in 1.91 days. Less than half the time spent by Amazon, Google and Microsoft (for Bing).

“Youtube will begin showing 4 videos at once”

The average YouTube short:

Edit: It’s called “Sludge content”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sludge_content

Which reminds me of a certain part from Back to the future too. I’ll try to search for it, but my DVD drive is currently occupied

Edit 2:

Part 2 at 30:27 (at least on PAL edition)

Ah, yes

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The 65,000 users: 👁️L👁️

In my opinion the last great was Android 7. Just getting more locked down since.

But also it was kinda funny when manufacturers left over some of their software. I think it was ZTE which had a hidden menu to change the fucking IMEI.

Unless it’s quite shitty.

I’ve got Ulefone, and the default audio source (software) is dogshit quality. And that’s what the camera app uses, unless I use something like Open Camera where I can manually select “Unprocessed” rather than default.

For the idea
Default: https://files.catbox.moe/d2n7sg.flac
Unprocessed: https://files.catbox.moe/xf9ab8.flac

Very obvious, at least with earphones.

External HDDs, external DVD drives, laptop cooling pads, if you were looking for examples.