• 4 Posts
  • 62 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • I switched to Tumbleweed from Ubuntu but was wary of the rolling release idea. I went in thinking “Well yeah, they need a file system like BTRFS to back out of bad updates.” And this was the case for me when Zoom stopped working after an update during a month when I really needed Zoom to be working. But, somehow, BTRFS has turned into a personal requirement for me everywhere. Things went wrong on Ubuntu too, wouldn’t it have been nice to be able to easily roll back the change that did it?

    So, I still find it irritating how often little things change with Tumbleweed, but I love having BTRFS in the background making sure I can back out of any major issues.




  • Adding my “Me too” to Vorta/Borg. I use it with Borgbase, which I like because it’s legitimately cheap and they support Borg development. As well, you can set Borg backups with Borgbase to “append only,” which prevents ransomware or other unexpected “whoopsies” from wiping out your backup history.

    I backup most of my computer every hour, but have pruning rules that make sure things don’t get too out of hand. I have a second backup that backs everything up to my NAS (using Vorta, again). This is helpful for things like my downloads folder, virtual machines, or STEAM library - things I wouldn’t want to backup over the network, but on occasion I do find myself going “whoops, I wanted that.”

    I also have Vorta working on my Mom’s Macbook, then have Borgbase send me an email when there isn’t any activity for longer than a couple of days. Once I got automatic pruning working right I never had to touch this again.


  • I moved from Kubuntu to Tumbleweed and really like it. For some reason I really don’t like RPMs and that caused some hesitancy when I thought of switching, but really I never deal with RPMs directly. Zypper is ok and I’ve made peace with Flatpak. I update the whole distro every weekend and I’ve tested out reverting using Snapper.

    In the year and a half of using it I can think of two problems I had from updating - one is fixed by removing the GPUCache directory of an Electron app when Mesa gets updated, the other is with Zoom which I mostly fixed by moving to the Flatpak version.




  • The general discovery I made was this: for the small price of foregoing pretty colors and buttons and chrome, you can get a computer to do exactly what you want it to do much quicker. Assuming a willingness to learn a bit of shell scripting, of course.

    I find the emphasis people put on speed interesting, because by far the slowest part of any interaction I have with my computer is caused by me just figuring out what I’m doing next. When I’m functioning at top speed not needing to click around, or say, having the perfect keyboard shortcut, would save me only fractions of a second.

    Actually… to add to this I think the cognitive load of visually navigating is much lower than typing specific things it. I think this is why I find I’d prefer to click around my bookmarks or files to find something than just pull up a “Find” dialog and type something reasonable in.


  • I tried using KOrganize which had KMail and some other stuff integrated together and ended up feeling like it was a gigantic, archaic codebase just hanging on by a thread. It struggled a lot with Gmail and several times I deleted my whole mail profile to try to fix some strange bug.

    If I recall, what did me in was that it would stop sending emails after running for a while. The fix had something to do with restarting Akonadi. It was really disappointing, because I love a good UI/Plasma integration.

    I use Thunderbird now and … eh. It’s ok.











  • I ordered mine from http://clove.co.uk/ and they happily shipped to Canada. It has worked fine in Canada, the US, and Barbados (eSIM and physical SIM).

    I like the phone a lot, but whenever it’s talked about I’m surprised how many people feel the urge to chime in on why it wouldn’t work for them.

    I’d say my biggest gripe is lack of accessories. I paid the huge price for the official screen protector twice. They both cracked relatively quickly and there are pretty much no other options. I’m using a flexible matte-finish screen protector from Amazon now, but it scratches really easily and will slide around on the screen if I keep my phone in my back pocket.


  • I can assure you there are many women out there who aren’t picking men just so they can brag about their interests. If your concern is trying to find a partner, making negative, sweeping generalizations about women isn’t going to work in your favour.

    I mean “interesting,” as in, have some depth, be passionate about things. I don’t think it matters if it’s sky diving or stamp collecting, just don’t make “getting girls” your thing. There are people, and for a time I was among them, who just do things because they think that’s what’s going to woo the ladies. But, how interesting is that?

    I’ll grant you that some interests may be more conducive to meeting potential partners, but surely there’s something you care about that has some aspect that can get you out of the house. I like computers and I also don’t care to leave the house. It turns out, I love computers enough that I will tolerate going to conferences and meetups. 🤷‍♂️


  • Do you like dogs (Or cats, I guess)? The animal rescue I volunteer with skews heavily towards women. Help some animals, make some friends.

    Of course, don’t just do it to meet women. If current me had some relationship advice for younger me, it would be to be patient and just make sure you’re out there doing things you actually like doing. And be interesting, which, comes from getting out into the world and doing things you like.