the title is more than enough to skip it.

I mean as long as you need a buncha copy-paste operators that somehow command multiple hundred thousands a year in salary per head (along with additional costs and perks and hardware and whatnot), you need bottomless coffers i.e. venture/vulture capital.

if those costs are somehow alleviated, e.g. by hiring people who are fine with less than a 10th of that, are willing to partially work for equity, not handing apple a truckload of cash for supposedly must-have hardware, etc., your options for financing expand dramatically.

I’ve stood up a number of startups and NGOs and the first step is always slashing the ludicrous spec sheets for hardware, offices, manpower and such.

tried seedvault, that’s a broken mess that apparently nobody ever tested IRL.

like, I have two similar phones and I’d like to clone my main device, by trying the built-in seedvault backup thingy. perfect use case to test it, I did the backup, lost the device and I’m now trying to restore it to the new device. in the past was put off with the idiotic “verify you really got the passphrase” screen (you’re supposed to type in TWELVE words with your phone’s keyboard) and was like nah fuck that.

well, this time I persevered and entered the hidden interface for said operations. in it, two choices - backup to phone’s storage or to webdav. don’t have one of the latter ever since I booted the nextcloud atrocity off my systems so let’s try the on-device thingy.

naturally, it won’t let you choose where to store the fucking thing, nor tell you about where it’s at. ddg where the fucker stores the backup - it’s in /sdcard in a dot-folder. for some reason syncthing doesn’t want to sync the fucking thing even though I tried it with a non-dot copy in another folder… man, fuck this, no normie is going through this shit so it’s a moot point even if it works.

let’s try the webdav thing. I have nginx in front of all my self-hosted stuff and apparently it can do a simple webdav share, let’s go with that. after dicking around with paths and users and permissions it sorta works. fine, let’s connect it… nope. the internal webdav client doesn’t like that there’s no user/pass. setting up a basic-auth .htpassword file, trying to remember how to hash the password… ok, you like me now? nope, won’t work over http. seven hells fuck the fucker who conceived this crap.

wait, there’s a separate DAVx option, I’m already using it for calendar and contacts for radicale without https, maybe that works… it most certainly does not, one cryptic error after another, fuck you and the calyx “institute” and whoever let this loose on the populous.

so I give up - I’ll spin up a nextcloud docker instance; talk about waste, this bloated stack only for my FOSS device to talk to my FOSS server, because two devices I have root on, residing on the same fucking LAN 10 cm apart can’t talk to each other, madonn’…

so, phone #1 happily accepts DAVx and starts the backup. I’m observing the molasses-like “speed” and I’m trying not to dwell on all potential points of failure in this stack. after some time has passed, it’s finally done… or is it?

tapping the notification about it being “done” informs me that a buncha apps weren’t backed up because they weren’t used “recently”… who fucking told you to do that!? reviewing the backup UI shows there’s no way to fix this.

fuck it, let’s go over to phone #2 (fresh LineageOS install) and restore what did get backed up. the 12-word screen, fine, start restore… internal webdav - no go. DAVx - no go, you need to install it first. sigh… fdroid, davx, add mount… we done? yep, restore starts!

except, it doesn’t. every app is marked with an icon, indicating that you need to install it first. by hand, individually, 60+ of those. so not only does this useless piece of shit not restore the apps, it also doesn’t restore its data. before you ask, “backup my apps” is toggled ON in both places in the app and the restore flow lists app data (500 MB) and apps (1.6 GB) separately. at this point, I am fucking OUT.

how is a non-techie supposed to use any of this?! this is in its 10th or whatever version, don’t those people have relatives and/or friends who do other shit for a living, can’t you put one of those things in their hands and observe the uselessness of this crap?

software that’s a hassle to use (not to mention, doesn’t do what it’s supposed to do) is never ever getting used, that’s like the definition of useless.

external player (haruna in my case) invoked from freetube works fine.

aside from the usual counterpoints (it’s not hiding it’s deciding what to share), the main thing I see too often overlooked in such diatribes is that the decision you’re making now is coming to bite you in the ass five or 10 years down the road.

our chicken brains can’t comprehend that, we need a feedback loop; i.e. hot stove, touch it once - ouch, you ain’t touching it no more. that works.

but, light a cig and 20 years later you might get emphysema, wear a mask or you might catch COVID and get the long kind, don’t let the app with its kompromats firehose away your data or you might get pigbutchered or whatever - we don’t innately understand those things, not really.

so we have to make an odyssey’s pact - in our (rare) moments of lucidity we need to ensure that we’re not in any position to make any of those slip-ups.

it’s a forever moving target and you’ll never achieve full security. but you’re better off with it than without.

yeah, this. paying attention to good OPSEC is predicated on the idea that you pass as a “native” (which by some crazy logic nazi logic is white hetero dude) and that slipping in that regard is your only threat vector.

if you’re obviously outside of that minority, any number of LE-adjacent thugs can make up any pretense to fuck with your shit. or not even bother with pretenses, as things stand right now.

I don’t see how them two things are related, my email has nothing to do with my chattings. it also doesn’t explain why it’s needed as it supposedly acts like a aggregator for the different protocols. upon signing up with a throwaway, it reveals itself as a matrix client and all them chat bridges are hosted by them. I have no idea as to their reputability, credibility, and longevity and at this point this is way too many things I need to get to the bottom of in order to consider it, so I’ll check back in a year or two and see how it’s holding up.

first time I heard of it. why is it that, the knees? looks like a trillian type-of-thing. wants my email. only appimage available. oh it’s electron crap. website isn’t great, the copy is super-amateur hour. it got acquired by the wordpress lunatic. I mean, OK, but doesn’t look very promising.

yeah, that’s how I’m doing it now. it bugs me though that it’s not exactly 33%…

I’m using macast. no recent development but works fine for what I need it (play full-screen video with mpv when sent from mobile device). on the phone you need allcast or similar app that you share the e.g. youtube video to.

any idea how I can divide the display into thirds? I only have the option to split horizontal/vertical which gives me halves…

doesn’t have to be just the controller in the enclosure, there’s a multitude of connectors i.e. points of failure between the CPU and the HDD, they all have to be 100% perfect in order for your drive to function correctly. any one of them is a tiny bit off - your data is corrupted, the error-correction in consumer drive models notwithstanding.

although the models you mentioned aren’t the cheapest, I wouldn’t put any significant amount of trust in them; there’s a reason enterprise-level devices cost a multitude of those.

first off, the bezel is like $10 wherever you are, so if that’s the only reason to upgrade that’s easily fixed. if it’s just a final push, then look no further than T480/T490/T495/T14, whichever you can get the cheapest. excellent linux support (spotty fingerprint support though; shouldn’t use that anyway), infinitely ugradeable and repairable and absolute stellar performance compared to what you got. make sure you get a good, original battery as aftermarket ones are hit/miss.

I made the same upgrade years ago. skip the carbons and the S-suffix models as they’re only marginally slimmer but way more limited in terms of upgrade and repair.

there’s this thing https://furilabs.com/ but not FOSS; hopefully some of their hacks can make it into mobian or sumsuch

or live in a city where the air quality meter never ever dips below “poor” so them little bastards can’t exist!

unless you really need it, set up sync to work only on your home network. you enter a new event when away and it stays on your device.

once you get home, it then syncs with radicale/syncthing/nextcloud/whatevers.

they can get fucked with those prices, along with the fat fuck with the skinny jackets. tech is supposed to get better and cheaper at the same time.

RX 570, a midrange GPU, was introed at $170 in 2017. almost a decade later, midrange starts at $600? gtfo.

anyone care for a tl;dw?

when I see random folks sticking their mugs into the camera for the entirety of the video I just have the urge to close and block.

https://www.thefreedictionary.com/words-that-end-in-os

coupla good ones in there

it comes down to how you use your system. if you’re fine using is as described and you’re on a distro that gets newest versions, keep on truckin’.

for me, I hate rebooting. I like to leave my system and return to it, be it laptop or desktop, and continue where I left off. sometimes that goes on for days, sometimes weeks. that’s virtually impossible when updating both system and app stuff constantly, i.e. to get new apps you also get new kernel, mesa, plasma, whathaveyous.

so I keep my system stuff that’s handled with the package manager and my app stuff separate. almost all of my GUI apps are flatpak and they are on a systemd timer so they get updated daily. my systems don’t bother me with update alerts, don’t do shit in the background and that’s how I like it. once a month or so I do a system upgrade and reboot.