For most people, nothing drastic aside from college if they do start at the typical age of 18. Not that things won’t change, but change will be gradual. Depending on where you live, you may gain the privilege to vote, join the military, drink, smoke, or be tried as an adult. The former two are up to you, but the latter three make for bad habits.

If you are on good terms with your family, cherish the time you have with them. That is often the first thing to start drying up. The next decade is a good time to find out what you’d like to do, special skills you’d like to learn, the people you want to have by your side, and the things that will keep your mind and body happy.

Nice, that’s a better rugged laptop than I imagined. Seems to be a fortified variant of a regular Latitude, so you should have access to interchangeable parts for years to come.

The implications of the ageing feature mean that I wouldn’t ever use it, or I would never leave once I let it run. Unless that piece of media features time travel that translates into the real world.

I’d love to go for a walk through the museum on those old multimedia encyclopedia CDs. Probably would visit some childhood memories on old cartoon tapes as well. And go for a spin on the Death Star.

It is on the back of my mind, but there’s only so much I can do as a civilian. And I’ve already got enough personal stuff to keep me busy before turning to the news.

Some form of lentil or bean stew. Best if served over (brown) rice and vegetables, which are also easily prepared in a rice cooker / steamer combo.

I won’t pretend that I have self-hosted storage that is reliably accessible from beyond my home, but most people who have set up a self-hosted cloud drive report that it can be done in a matter of hours on cheap second-hand hardware, which would also save you on subscription costs. You’ll also be spending some time migrating files over in either case already.

A fine start, but I think the plan could be made a bit more sustainable.

1. Make a threat model. Hardware that is impenetrable today might not be as secure five years later as new security vulnerabilities are found. Who or what do you want to defend against?

2. If you don’t use an OS that phones home, options without AI-enhanced wiretapping will still be around for years to come. There’s also several existing layers of hardware-related wiretapping to consider: the Intel ME, AMD PSP, BIOS, embedded controller firmware, SSD firmware, input peripherals, etc.

3. I’d be happy to be proven wrong, but what you have sounds like specialty hardware, for which parts will become increasingly rare and expensive over 8 to 9 years. Ironically, common business-class laptops could be more future-proof by this metric, unless perhaps you plan on using one out in the field or in a metal foundry.

4. Laptops are fundamentally like desktop computers, just in a portable form factor. Any security measure on a laptop can be more or less replicated on a desktop computer.

Baidu and Alibaba might have you covered. But Chinese web services tend to require a laundry list of personal details and sometimes government ID to register for an account, if they’re even available to foreigners. Other considerations aside, the “security checks” and other knickknacks on Chinese web services are also just plain annoying. Is there anything that keeps you from self-hosting?

6 to 8 hours depending on the day. If it were up to me, I’d have a polyphasic system for a sum of 8 hours: 6 hours at night plus a 2-hour siesta.

Never. Data privacy aside, I can’t be bothered to fill out yet another form or create yet another account just for one item I purchased. I also can’t remember the last time I had something break on me before the warranty expired.

It’s tempting to cut it off like mold on bread, but like mold on bread, it can extend far deeper than whatever mole or irregularity you see. See a doctor. Skin cancer is not something that can be treated with home remedies.

I daily drive Debian and have a few loose .deb packages and tarballs installed. Also enabled the Librewolf repo. It mostly comes down to an issue of manageability and possible conflicting dependencies. The ones I have installed don’t introduce any dependencies, so they’ve been trouble-free and have survived the Bookworm to Trixie upgrade. They are installed as a last resort option in the absence of a satisfactory equivalent via the official repo, Flatpak, or AppImage.

Loose .deb packages can be installed and uninstalled like any other normal Debian package, but won’t be automatically updated and don’t have any compatibility guarantee. Tarballs are nothing more than a collection of files, which may need to be placed in system directories. You’re on your own for those since there’s no standard and automated way to manage them and it’s possible to overwrite important system files if unpacked and copied in blindly. It’s a good idea to keep a manual record of what was put where in case any issues with them pop up down the road.

My personal ranking:

Official Debian repo > Flatpak > AppImage > Docker/Podman > Snap >> Reputable and known compatible third-party repo > Loose Debian .deb > tarball > Loose Ubuntu .deb >> Unfamiliar third-party repos and PPAs

There are certain occasions where a loose .deb or tarball won’t hurt, but sticking to options further up the list closes off the biggest routes of breaking Debian.

Agreed 100%. Would give up driving daily if we had better public transit, but my 90s truck is comfy without being oversized, stupid easy to repair, and free of spying gadgets. Also paid in full with cash, so no monthly loan payments.

I only have enough lucidity to reverse an incident and prevent a nightmare from taking hold. Like if I drop a fresh lasagna on the floor in a dream, I’ll think to myself, “hey, isn’t this just a dream?”, after which I get time to briefly reverse and the lasagna flies back into its correct place. Then I’ll continue with the dream, without the incident and without any further lucidity.

timeful.app, an open-source alternative to when2meet

Loving th𝖾 us𝖾 of “𝖾”!

an antivirus program has to be installed on the PC used for online banking

How would they know?

I’m more concerned about rogue browser extensions that may be innocent when you install them, but then change owners, and after an update that you don’t even notice are going to do bad things.

Exactly why the only extensions on my browser are uBlock Origin and LibRedirect. Was a victim of one user agent switcher extension that went rogue back in the day.

Gotta love how the mascot accompanying that error message is the spitting image of a smug Redditor.

For sure, I’d like to post a (trivial) invention of mine, but it’s documented elsewhere in a way that’s easily traceable to my real identity.