Little update in case you were wondering. After the news of kernel 6.13 being out I decided to look up when that would be available on Fedora. I found some mentions of the display bug being resolved in 6.12.9, and it’s true! Now my saga of switching a parent to Linux can truly begin!

Did you ever end up getting that Brother scanner to work?

Instagram IIRC

I’ve been living on Tumbleweed KDE for about a year now, and I love it. My mum recently got a new laptop, so I decided to make it a dual boot of Windows 11 LTSC (no Copilot or forced MS accounts) and Fedora KDE.

Apparently Windows doesn’t ship with the relevant network driver built-in, so that was fun to hunt down while Device Manager didn’t announce what network card was in there. The manufacturer’s site lists a certain driver as the “latest”, and that would “successfully” install without actually doing anything. Half an hour later, it turns out that pressing “more” on their website shows previous versions of the driver… and drivers for a totally different network card that also gets shipped with this laptop sometimes. Naturally, the hidden one worked first try. Most other drivers were borked too, so Windows Update had to fetch them.

I then got to set up Fedora, which I chose because from what I heard it’s neither boring nor too bleeding edge, without Canonical’s controversial Snap shenanigans and with some relatively easy enabling of proprietary codecs (which I still need to verify) and with okay package management through Discover. The network card and everything else worked perfectly out of the box, but I have never installed Fedora before and forgot to partition the drive in Windows beforehand. Eventually I finish the install, install some apps and do some updates (while feeling uncomfortable with having to guess how package management works in dnf). I’m finally done, shut the laptop, bring it down to show her, open the lid, screen comes on…

… and then it shuts off. Turns back on, flickers a couple times, then permanently shuts off. Turns out there’s a kernel bug around display power saving that’s causing this, and I don’t know when the fix will land on Fedora.

It’s been real fun trying to explain to her that I didn’t just break her fancy new laptop every 15 minutes and that everything I did was just a conventional procedure that should be supported (I’m lying)

This sounds solvable, doesn’t it? Have the extension cable have a chip saying it can do X at maximum, then compare with whatever is to be extended and communicate the minimum of both upstream. Might not become a sleek cable-like design, but would extend the 240W cable with the extender safely staying at 120W

Someone I know recently showed me that extension. I replied to them with “why bother with a browser extension, just paste the DOI into Anna’s Archive and it’ll show up 99% of the time” and showed it to them on their computer. It then showed a message along the lines of “you can access this file, but not here. Go to this site instead”.

They were signed into their university account. As you use that extension yourself, do you know if that’s normal behavior? I’m afraid the extension flagged this person at the campus IT department or something like that

There are stories making the rounds of a YouTube channel in his name with two videos. One was something along the lines of “if you’re setting this, I’m already captured”, the other was set to premiere but the account got removed before it was public

I’m not one to buy Apple products, but I keep hearing amazing things about their M4 devices. Most of them come with quite some dealbrealers compared to the competition, such as soldered RAM across the board, and Apple proprietary storage on the Mini (which they just have to tack an Apple tax onto).

The iPad’s pretty much the only thing they make where the competition shares most of the same drawbacks (especially if either self-repair is proven to work, or parts pairing gets banned in enough jurisdicitions). Most of the reason that I don’t want one is that I don’t want to move into yet another proprietary ecosystem.

So, ever since learning about the fact that Asahi Linux exists, I’ve been dreaming about an iPad that can run arbitrary OS’es just like the Macs. Imagine running something like Plasma Mobile or Phosh on an iPad, with full desktop apps being ready should you need them. I hope I get to see something like that someday, whether through an exploit, legislation or just Apple finally coming around.

Crap, I’m fresh out of hopium

Learn of YouTube, go to youtube.com and there’s content.

Learn of Mastodon, ask “where’s that?” and be told to go to joinmastodon.org. When I did this, you had to pick an instance. mastodon.social was full, you had to find something else. So you look at every instance there is in the list, and try to filter for moderation rules as you’re told this is best practice. Don’t worry, all of Mastodon can see everything posted by everyone on every instance! Picking an instance is really choosing where your values are best aligned, nothing more. So you spend the effort, make an account, get asked a reason why you’re signing up (though I might be mistaking this memory for when I signed up to Lemmy), have to wait for approval, get an account, and sign into the official app…

… and there’s no content. The only way I ever managed to get content was to learn of Mastodon accounts outside of Mastodon and manually look them up. So I ended up following a whopping 3 accounts, one of which being some EU governmental account, another essentially being the XDA RSS feed. Needless to say, I didn’t stick around.

I don’t know if things have improved since then, or how Bluesky does things. But I’d imagine a platform supposedly started by the people who founded Twitter, built from what supposedly was once an internal test of modifications to Twitter, to have an easier onboarding experience than whatever Mastodon did back when I tried it.

Oh boy, does this also hold for people who don’t like any pets?

There already exists a “Google Play licence check” permission apps can use to verify whether or not the app has been bought on a Google account that’s present on the device.

If people can crack the app to remove this (which is a thing for some of the popular apps), they’ll also figure out how to patch this out. This is strictly useful for free apps, and only serves to make it unviable to distribute verifiably clean apk’s outside of Google Play (so rip APKMirror)

It isn’t. I’ve personally had it happen where a relative who went to some country that bans video calling and VoIP (except for the unencrypted/honey pots of course) and used Signal to call people back home (only because I told them it would be unblocked due to censorship circumvention). Despite everyone in my household being familiar with WhatsApp, I was the only who did video calls with them and had to share my device so others could also call them. Even when I’d set up Signal on one of their devices, they still complained it was to difficult to use, insisted I’d uninstall it when the trip was over and used it a grand total of once.

I honestly think it’s partly to do with the nerd factor. This same relative turned out to also have installed the backdoored unencrypted app to chat with others, but hid it from us due to me being vocal about not using that. These other households, also WhatsApp based, managed to install, sign up and use that just fine. They also couldn’t be bothered to set up Signal for some reason, yet gladly accepted the suggestion to use the honey pot.
I think that these people in my circle don’t care about security at all and only care about the platform. If it’s “secure”, “private” and “censorship resistant” and they haven’t heard of it until I, the “techie”, explain the technological benefits of it, they’ll think it’s a niche “techie” thing they’re not nerdy enough to understand. If I get them to use it, they’ll keep thinking this whenever something is slightly different than WhatsApp and be frustrated. Meanwhile they can get behind the honey pot because “WhatsApp doesn’t work there, this is just what people in that country use”. It appears normal because “normal people” use it all the time, and they’ll solve any inconvenience themselves because “normal people (can) use this, and I’m normal too”.

My grandpa had developed the habit of falling out of his bed. The first time I was afraid that he was gonna die on the spot as I’d heard it, but it eventually became such a “regular” occurrence that I didn’t think of immediate death anymore. This particular day, he’d fallen twice. They brought him to a nearby hospital to get a check-up. I was worried sick that this time something was actually wrong, or that he might’ve broken a bone or something. Turns out he was fine! No broken bones or anything. Just one teeny tiny minor issue…

When he was brought to the hospital, he was accidentally placed in the area with people who were brought there with covid. I hadn’t been able to see him in months because of the restrictions, and even when I did go the months prior it was always with far distance, masks and in short bursts. I did everything I had been told to do to “keep him safe”, “ease up the workload in the hospitals” and all those government campaigns and all that, only for him to die because of this (seeming) serious neglect from medical professionals.

IIRC, GBC cartridges could physically fit inside the OG GB, but would throw an error when it required the extra power of the GBC. The GBA had the notch that determined Advance/not-Advance mode and made GBA games physically exclusive to the GBA

I’m hoping it’s gonna be like a GameBoy Color game. One cartridge. Play on Switch, regular graphics. Play on Switch 2, next-gen graphics. Everyone wins

I’ve checked the Github when I read this to see whether they’re having trouble as well, and currently it appears that YouTube will block your IP if you use it too much

It could’ve been. You and me probably would’ve blocked ads regardless of their content for various reasons, but I’d imagine that Google wouldn’t have reached this critical mass prompting this scheme if their ads were properly vetted.

The technologically literate capable of installing ad blockers are the minority, and those who’d do it out of principle are a smaller subset of those

Does this also apply when not using the official app? I recently bought a Phillips bulb (not Hue) and set up Home Assistant for it, along with the Matter bridge. This turned out to also connect it to the Wi-Fi, but I never installed a manufacturer app.

Would blocking internet access via parental controls on the router be enough to mitigate such threats, or is its mere presence in an internet-connected network dangerous?

Firefox is looking to implement Manifest V3 to keep extension feature parity with Chromium, but their version will not ban the one API that adblockers use. So Firefox will eventually be V3 compliant

The app doesn’t even come with any removed channels?! What’s next, ban VLC because it can play illegal videos? Ban Windows because it can connect to the internet and play pirated streams? Ban eyesight because you can watch an unlicensed broadcast? Removed politicians

I don’t know if this would ‘satisfy’ them (I know it wouldn’t, I’m referring strictly to the legal stuff). From what I’ve heard, the point Nintendo was making wrt the encryption is that aquiring prod.keys in any way, shape or form is illegal. Of course, creating an emulator for a system that only runs games that contain encryption which can only be undone with prod.keys requires the developers to have this file. Since they’ve successfully made an emulator, this implies that the Yuzu team has in fact obtained a copy of this file and done something naughty.

The problem is that, regardless of whether or not the decryption happens in Yuzu or in another completely separate program, modern Nintendo games do not come unencrypted. This means that someone at some point has to decrypt the files, and thus has to use prod.keys to do so. According to Nintendo, using and creating any emulator for a modern system requires someone to do something illegal at one point in the chain, and therefore emulation (by parties not explicitly authorized by Nintendo) cannot legally exist.

I say that Nintendo should piss off after I’ve bought something from them and that I should be allowed to do with my property as I please, but even the most legally and morally correct way to emulate is not okay with them.

This raises the following question: if Nintendo does not respect in the slightest our property rights by pulling such stunts, why should we as end users respect their intellectual property rights? Why go through all the effort of clean room reverse engineering a console instead of blatantly copying as much of the official code base as possible if the legal system punishes you all the same? Why limit yourself to only emulating games you personally ripped from your own cartridges if the act of ripping has already placed your actions into the “illegal” category?