rm -r *

Also, if you have to type that, don’t use the numpad: / is only one key away from *. If you finger snags the / key on its way to * and you happen to be root, your root partition will go bye-bye.

I never thought of doing that in 40 years. It’s a great idea actually. Thanks!

Here’s a rule I learned the hard way a few decades ago:

• If you type “rm”, take you hands off the keyboard and take one deliberate breath before continuing your command.
• If you then type “-r”, do it again.
• If you then type “-f” do it again.
• In all cases, re-read what you wrote before hitting ENTER.

A post in all caps isn’t doing the work you think it’s doing.

Even if Trump had lost, one fact remains: tens of millions of Americans voted for this guy three times in a row.

The first time, it’s conceivable that Americans made a mistake.

The second time, they knew Trump as actual President.

The third time, they knew Trump as a convicted felon, insurrectionist and overtly wannabe dictator, and they voted for him even harder.

At this point, MAGA isn’t a freak event, it’s the norm. Even if the dems had won, they’d have won the presidency of a MAGA country, and quite frankly, what’s the point… You can’t cure someone who wants to be sick.

Rule #1: don’t read an article entitled “How Do I Protect My Privacy If I’m Seeking an Abortion?” on the internet with your own computer or cellphone. Borrow someone else’s - preferably a man’s so you don’t end up potentially compromising another woman later - or go to the public library.

A lot of restaurants tone down their food for that reason

Here’s a little anecdote:

I used to work for a company in Utah that had a subsidiary in London. One day, two of our UK colleagues came to visit us. In the evening, we invited them to the local Indian restaurant, because they said they liked a good curry.

We sat down at the table, and our colleagues kept quipping about how US Indian food is bland compared to what can be found in London, that the best curries in the world can only be found in London, and yada yada.

The waiters arrived, took our orders, and asked each of us how spicy. Feeling cocky, the Brits said “Nuclear!”.

The waiters paused a bit, then said “Are you sure?”

“Yeah yeah! Bring it on!”

“Okay then…” and they disappeared into the kitchen.

We asked why they asked that, and they said it would probably end up mildly spicy here.

Then our orders came : the two waiters served us, then served the Brits, then they simply stood there and waited. They didn’t go, they just waited, with absolute deadpan composure.

Uh oh… The Brits had a worried look on their faces all of the sudden…

Long story short, they got exactly what they wanted. We had trouble not laughing out loud 🙂

I buy no-name colas - store brands and such. It’s pennies per gallon and I honestly can’t tell the difference between them and Coke / Pepsi. If there is a difference, at the second gulp, I’m already used to the new thing enough to have forgotten. I don’t think I’ve bought the real thing in 25 years.

90% of the price is the brand name.

Vinyl Music Player - Lightweight, simple, does playlist by filesystem structure, stable! You’d be surprised how difficult it is to find a music player that doesn’t have a fancy schmancy playlist and just plays files in directories, that doesn’t crash.

“I’m looking for a privacy respecting vacuum robot” must be one of the most dystopian sentences I’ve read in quite some time.

I mean there is no lack of dystopian stuff going around these days. But if you imagine someone saying that 30 years ago, that someone would have conceivably ended up in a lunatic asylum. In 2024 however, it’s a perfectly valid and apropos question.

What a sad, sad world we live in…

It’s supposed to be a good thing

What part of it is good in any way?

• Guy’s in the military: yeah war. Yeehaw…
• He’s proud to drive a gas guzzling truck

Missing option that I use:

Free Google Drive mounted with rclone and then eCryptfs filesystem mounted on the Google Drive mountpoint.

I get the free space and Google only sees encrypted files.

Aah yes, appimage, flatpak, snaps, progressive web apps, electron apps… The cross-compatibility of the lazy 21st century developer, where a simple IRC-like chat client comes with an entire operating system or an entire browser (which itself is an entire operating system too nowadays), takes up half a gig of disk space, and starts up in over 10 seconds with a multi-gigahertz multicore CPU.

Just perfect…

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This is where you clearly see Apple is all about privacy posturing and not much about actual privacy.

If they really cared about their customers’ privacy, they would require notification servers registered with APN to push notifications encrypted with a key that only the recipient apps have the private key to. This would be true end-to-end encryption, and Apple would only relay encrypted notifications across, enabling them to deny all subpoenas and any kind of snooping requests from law enforcement on the simple basis that they plain can’t even decode the notifications in the first place.

The very fact that they do have access to the notifications in clear-text is undeniable evidence that they actively want and do collaborate with law enforcement.

Meaning Apple’s stance on privacy is utter BS - something anybody with a modicum of critical thinking suspected from the start, but now the evidence is crystal-clear.

Powered by open web standards

That’s the state of computing in 2023: a browser disguised as a native app running 15 layers of Javascript is used as a friggin terminal. And nobody bats an eyelids, as if the utter insanity of it made any sense.

And the installer is 117M compressed. That’s MEGABYTES… For a terminal!

The mind boggles…

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Well no, it’s factual: the man very generously did invaluable work for years. And then he sold out. That’s just what happened, however grateful I am to him for the work he did for all those years.

I assume there were no other companies willing to buy Simple Mobile Tools, otherwise he wouldn’t have sold to that particularly hateful bunch of sumbitches. One doesn’t provide free tools with total abnegation for so many years and then choose the worse possible buyer this side of the law without a good reason. So I accept his choice and his reasons - whatever they may be.

But surely there were other ways to handle this. Like for example, telling the community that money has run out and he will be forced to sell to unsavory characters, and appealing to the community to fund him if they wanted to keep Simple Mobile Tools ads-free. But instead, he went about it all hush-hush and sprang it on everybody - users and contributors alike. Not cool.

Finally, remember that some people actually paid for their copies of Simple Mobile Tools, and they paid precisely to prevent this happening. They must feel pretty betrayed, and rightfully so.

This is open source at its best: the original developer somehow decided to sell out to the dark side and someone rescued the projects within a couple of days. Brillant!

And thank goodness for that too: I used SMT Calendar but Etar misses a couple of features I really need that would make it a good replacement, so I’ll be sure to install FossifyX Calendar as soon as F-Droid picks it up.

You don’t have to:

Create a work profile managed by Shelter. then install the sketchy Microsoft app - along with all the other sketchy apps you don’t trust - in the work profile where they won’t have access to any of your important data or contacts, won’t have any permission you don’t want to give them, and where you can freeze them and neuter them completely when they’re not in use.

Here’s a good howto for Shelter and work profiles. Work profiles are great: they’re just as good as separate accounts to keep unstrustworthy apps from accessing data you don’t want them to get at and putting you under surveillance, but they’re a lot more flexible than separate accounts.

Work profiles are a standard Android feature that everybody who cares about privacy should use.