I just wanted to say, I enjoy your writing style. You very vividly illustrated your emotions

I have said “schfourteen-teen” about once per week for the past 20 years

…I’m not sure anyone has ever gotten the reference

I did that too, but back then it was called Backtrack Linux. I bought a special Atheros chipset WiFi card for my laptop’s PCMCIA slot. The built-in 802.11b WiFi card worked under Linux but only by using the Windows ME driver in NDISWrapper, which didn’t support promiscuous mode.

The Atheros chipsets could be configured (by flashing the firmware with a blob I got from a BBS, if I recall) to capture the traffic from nearby wireless networks. In particular, I wanted to pick up the signal from when a device first connects. There was a bug in Windows XP that could cause the WiFi to drop briefly, then promptly reconnect. By triggering that bug over and over I could capture a lot of reconnect packets in a short time frame.

Then I’d save the data to a big file and pipe it to Aircrack and extract the Wired Equivalent Privacy password.

I was a 1337 H4XX0|2 B-)

For web browsing I can navigate alright using spacebar to scroll. Naturally, that works best with a bluetooth keyboard attached, but you could resize the window and use the soft keyboard if you prefer. The “vimium” extension for Firefox makes keyboard navigation much nicer.

I also have one and agree with your conclusion. My PineNote is so cool and really fun to use!

I use mine most often for displaying and editing my character sheet while playing tabletop RPGs.

The display looks great and mine doesn’t have the stuck pixel or the buggy lines issue you experienced, though I do have very noticeable ghosting artifacts. Probably this is because I mainly use the “performance” optimization setting rather than “quality”. Animations play very poorly, so I found it necessary to use extensions to disable animations wherever possible.

Also, of course, the screen is only black and white so sometimes you lose out on information. E.g. if my GM says “the goblin that stole the flask is highlighted yellow. The one highlighted pink is standing his ground. What do you do?” I would not be able to tell them apart.

I get acceptable but not fantastic battery life. Usually after about 3 hours I’ll have around 60% life left. It would probably be better if I was using a lighter program than Firefox. Mine also has phantom battery drain and loses maybe 15% battery life per day if left unplugged while suspended.

I paid $460 USD for mine, shortly before the import tariffs were implemented.

Overall, I would recommend it for someone who meets these criteria:

• is a Linux enthusiast comfortable with the command line and willing to read and follow various guides (there’s a long README that opens on boot which has crucial information in it, like how to fix critical bugs)
• wants to avoid proprietary lock in wherever possible
• wants to avoid shovel ware and use mainline Linux
• wants to support FOSS development and doesn’t mind paying extra to do so
• understands the severe limitations of an e-ink display

I would not recommend it to most people because it is an enthusiast Linux device with an e-ink display. If you’re the kind of person that specifically wants an enthusiast Linux device with an e-ink display then I think you’ll love it

These algorithms are not solely based on the things you watch. I believe it’s also based on your location and even close contacts. So if, hypothetically, I live in shithole Trumpistan with my racist uncle and he likes watching Hitler Youth “own the libs” then YouTube will recommend it to me too

The internet got a lot less annoying after I learned how to use uBlock Origin’s “Enter element picker mode”

On desktop I really like Vimium. It enables keyboard navigation on basically any site

…Or to go first bright flashes in the distance

This is the one I use on my work PC: https://github.com/Raphire/Win11Debloat

Mostly what it does is change things back to how they were on older Windows versions. E.g. the start menu is aligned to the left corner instead of the center. It is great at removing unnecessary bloat apps like Xbox Game Bar, and disabling various telemetry and ads such as the spam Bing search in the start menu.

I also found that PC had an annoying driver suite (resource hog) called something like “AMD Adrenaline Edition” that the debloat script missed. I had to uninstall the factory graphics driver and reinstall the “minimal, driver only” version from AMD.

Use at your own risk of course. Microsoft often breaks these things with Windows updates

A very similar thing happened to me a while back. Mine was “only” a 10% pay cut but it was extremely demotivating.

Of course, since I was in the US I had no such thing as a tribunal

It sure looks like a Dell XPS to me. Those old XPS cases were nonstandard so it was very hard to upgrade the parts later on.

eMachines had cases that look like that too back on 2006

In addition this was back when airlines had strong restrictions on wireless being used on planes, so many devices had physical switches to turn WiFi/Bluetooth off. Maybe it’s still turned off

I called 911 a few years ago and they had a police officer call me back when he got to my neighborhood. I had to do this a few times as the incident repeated a few days later. Each time the officer called me his number was hidden.

That’s the only time I’ve ever had a call from a hidden number that was not a scam, but I would be hesitant to block them all

That also makes it illegal to nuke hurricanes

Also an old fart, also love XFCE

I am a longtime fan of Debian Stable, for exactly that reason. I installed the XFCE version using the custom installer about 8 years ago and have had very few issues.

Initially my GPU wasn’t well supported so I had to use the installer from Nvidia, forcing me to manually reinstall the driver after every kernel update. That issue has been fixed in recent years so now I can just use the driver from the Debian repos.

I installed the unattended-updates package about 2 years ago and it has been smooth sailing since

I have some bad news for you - any random idiot with a driver’s license and a two-ton death machine already puts your ass at risk, all the time. We call it “traffic” because we’ve just gotten used to it

Everyone I know who has had a skunk spray was due to one of two causes:

1). They ran it over with their car or 2). Their dog attacked it

In general skunks are very reticent to actually spray. I’ve never known anyone to get it from just walking by. I knew someone who blocked a skunk with their shoe from running in the house, because they mistook it for their cat.

From what I understand, they have poor eyesight and hearing, so in my experience they usually don’t even notice you. They are a wild animal though so the important thing would be to not surprise them. I think if you make noise, keep your distance, and never corner one you should be fine.

I came to the comments to mention that exact experience. There must be historical reasons that SCP uses -P and SSH uses -p but I certainly didn’t expect it since they’re both from the same package (openssh)