i use a feature phone / dumbphone that has an sd card slot. load up the sd card with music, and the player is super simple and works great for me. bluetooth earbuds work too, but the rechargable battery of mine died after owning them just a few months longer than the warranty lasted, so i’m back to using wired earbuds (with a usb-c to 3.5mm adapter, do NOT buy the cheap shit from temu, get one that actually sounds decent).

the phone was like $50, and a prepaid sim card inside it makes it so i can use it as cheap backup texting/calling device too when i want to disconnect from all the bullshit the smartphone comes with for a while (still trying to get fully rid of smartphones but it’s very hard these days)

it’s somewhat vibe coded but the one i probably use the most is this one to swap between speakers and headset. the device name to look for is just put directly in there, it’d take some adjustment to run it on different machines. this is in my .bashrc:

# switch sinks
toggle_audio() {
  # Find headset sink ID dynamically
  headset_id=$(pactl list sinks short | grep "Plantronics" | awk '{print $1}')
  
  # Find speakers sink ID dynamically
  speakers_id=$(pactl list sinks short | grep "pci-0000_05_00.6" | awk '{print $1}')
  
  # Get current default sink
  current_sink=$(pactl get-default-sink)
  
  # Get current sink ID
  current_id=$(pactl list sinks short | grep "$current_sink" | awk '{print $1}')
  
  # Toggle between the two
  if [ "$current_id" = "$headset_id" ]; then
    pactl set-default-sink "$speakers_id"
    echo "Switched to speakers (Sink $speakers_id)"
  else
    pactl set-default-sink "$headset_id"
    echo "Switched to headset (Sink $headset_id)"
  fi
}

generally i try not to use too many custom things because for work i regularly work on all kinds of different servers and i’ve just been too lazy to set up some solution to keep it all in sync. someday…

the cursor locking still happens in a handful of games for me - most work perfectly fine but sometimes i do end up running something with gamescope with the --force-grab-cursor argument to fix it.

this is when running games with either steam or wine/bottles/lutris.

strange that it happens in virualbox, i would think it “virtualizing” an entire display would fix issues like that. does virtualbox itself “grab” the cursor, or allow it to go off the screen by default? sorry i don’t really know virtualbox, never used it much

I’ve just recently set up a blog usign Zola (https://www.getzola.org/) because i am looking for something where i’ll actually keep making posts. not quite ready to share it yet, but if it keeps going well i might.

The reason i chose Zola is because it’s easy to write new posts. it’s also simple to setup and very lightweight. a single exectuable (set up a systemd service to start it when the homelab server boots), forward web traffic to it, choose some theme you like and make simple markdown files as posts.

The simple markdown files as posts was the main criteria for me - a small header with title, date and categories, and after that just… pretty much plain text write your post, as a markdown file on the server it’s running on. No special login, no “publish” button, no fancypants UI with all kinds of fields to fill out and formatting options… just write. Zola detects itself it the filesystem changed and automatically reflects your changes on the site.

Plenty of distros do package closed source software that does who knows what. i wouldn’t worry about it for now. if you are on a distro that takes a hardline stance on privacy, it was probably gone a while ago, but i don’t actually know any such distros right now.

easiest thing for me was to just… uninstall the app and use it in a browser.

the experience is so terrible, i don’t spend much time on it anymore. seriously, go to reddit.com and see what it looks like with no account and no extensions.

instagram is even worse, once in a while i try to open a funny post someone sends me in the browser, and … it usually works for the first post (after clicking away a bunch of popups) but if i open a second one i get completely blocked. thanks meta 👌

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luckily i can wipe my work laptop and install linux (for now, there are discussions about not letting unmanaged devices on the network at some point…), but what annoys me is seeing how much tax money we send straight to microsoft. i work in the education sector in europe and the majority of the company’s funds comes from the government, to send millions of that straight to the US, especially with the politics going on right now, seems like a horrible idea. and SO many others are doing the same thing, i swear if we invested just 10% of it into FOSS the world would be a better place already and we’d all save money.

well you can never be 100% certain your laptop won’t spontaneously die either.

for any new arch user, i do recommend keeping an archiso live USB around in case something really does happen - since every arch user should know the basics of how it works, it should be easy enough to recover as well.

knowing that, i really only check the news out of curiosity, since i’m not a grub user i haven’t had arch be unbootable since i started using it years ago. even if it did i’m confident enough it’d be a quick fix.

hard disagree on this… while for people who don’t know it it might look like programming, it’s really not much different than editing config files (which people who don’t know it will assume is programming too).

Sure, the language used by bash can be used to write massive programs. But in 99% cases using the CLI is like using a gui with a button and a text field - type some text into the field and then click the button, letting whatever software you’re running take the content of the text field and do something with it.

way closer, in fact, to executing a discord bot command, than to actual programming as in software development (what i’d argue people think of when talking about programming)

funnily enough, i see it as one of the advantages of arch, and a reason i’ll keep putting up with the constant updating for the forseeable future - nvidia support has gotten way better recently, and since arch has very recent packages i haven’t had nvidia issues in quite a while now.

Once it all lands in debian i’ll consider giving debian another shot on desktop… but that’ll take a while.

while you do have a point, i’m still having issues with taskwarrior printing it’s update notifications, even after opening an issue and the maintainers patching it.

The thing is, i use arch on 3 different devices, and i don’t need to see every news entry 3 times, so yes in my case having it as default in pacman would indeed be bloat.

That said, there is PLENTY of places where I think arch could have saner defaults. but the beauty of arch is that it is made to be configured exactly the way you like it, so you really can’t fault arch as much in this case, compared to other distros that try to take all decisionmaking away from the user.

gammastep works just fine for me on sway, and it appears the maintainer is still replying to issues on that repo. i wouldn’t worry too much just yet.

that said, it seems to not work for hyprland, so for anyone using that, look for something else

In my view, by far the biggest reason to switch is that Telegram doesn’t end-to-end encrypt chats by default.

Yes you can start encrypted chats specifically, but i’ll bet 99% of chats on telegram aren’t encrypted - meaning whoever has access to the telegram servers can read all the messages.

Signal claims to end-to-end encrypt all chats by default, and if you want to be 100% sure you can in theory read the source code and compile the app yourself. this means signal cannot read any of your messages, even if police asks them to or servers get seized. That’s a massive advantage in privacy.

who’s doing the gunning? we dont have that many combat robots yet, and i still have hope that communication is open enough and most people aren’t too brainwashed to realize firing on your own countrypeople is bad.

but we better do sonething before these change.

light. used to struggle hard to wake up even with several loud alarms, but a bright light turning on before my alarm made it so much easier. especially nice is a smart bulb that brightens slowly.

I know stuff is missing from it and it doesn’t have reviews, but when i’m on my own i just check organic maps first, if i find something that looks decent i just try it.

when traveling with others i often have to turn to tripadvisor or google maps to make sure to find something they like, not everyone is as happy to just try as me.

i think flatpak has done a lot to make this easier, but at the same time… i’ll admit i’m not a fan of it (mostly due to random issues).

the way i see it, more distros need something like arch linux’ AUR. if an application is reasonably easy to build, it really does not take much to get it into the AUR, from where there’s also a path towards inclusion in the official repos.

i don’t know too much about other distros, but arch really makes it amazingly easy to package software and publish everything needed for others to use it. i feel like linux needs more of this, not less - there’s a great writeup that puts why linux maintainers are important way better than i ever could:

https://web.archive.org/web/20230525163337/https://kmkeen.com/maintainers-matter/

i’d suggest starting by finding out what package in your distro actually decides where audio goes - mostly it is pulseaudio (older) or pipewire (newer).

depending on the details of how your distro and the dongle work, it could either be a simple “pactl set-default-sink <headset-name>”, or a more complicated set of udev rules or pipewire/wireplumber scripts.

note that distros using pipewire still often support a lot of pactl commands, so it may be worth looking at the simple option even when not using pulseaudio.

my phone won’t even do “force stop” anymore… fairphone 5 running whatever os fairphone ships, and all force stop does is put the app in the background or whatever, if it has an issue the issue will still be there when opening it again.