data1701d (He/Him)

From what I can tell, you wouldn’t use it instead of Ansible or another automation system, but rather just support for a config file you can plot in to make setting up automation with any automation system easier by allowing you to put it into a file rather than a gigantic Flatpak install command.

You know, GNOME does some stupid stuff, but I can respect them for this.

Interesting project, but not pulling me off XFCE terminal.

The name sounds like a Romulan senator, though.

At least they provide an official Flatpak now.

Also, this isn’t an official repository, but https://github.com/palfrey/discord-apt works pretty good for me. If you look at the source code for the fetching script and the Github Workflows, you can see that they just pull directly from the Discord website, and comparing file hashes further confirms it. I no longer use it since the official Flatpak is an option now, but it’s still useful.

I would ditch Discord, but the TMBW server is just so darn good and I can’t leave that behind. Maybe I could convince them to set up a Matrix bridge (they already self-host MediaWiki), but then they’d probably end up basically doing this just for me.

My university’s Linux User’s Group is on Discord, but they have it bridged with a Matrix server; due to the current state of things in the US, they only allow political discussion in certain encrypted channels that are exclusive to the Matrix server.

I also recommend dd on a live USB, but with some advice.

First off - and I’m really surprised nobody’s warned you - be EXTREMELY CAREFUL with dd; it is a very powerful tool, but with great potential for data loss. Check your command over and over again to make sure it’s doing what you want before running it, and make sure you have a backup beforehand; it will happily mow over any disk you tell it. Also, do it when you’re fully awake, not at 1 AM or something.

I would call myself an experienced dd user, and even I messed up once recently; I was trying to create a bootable USB when I was really tired. Instead, I overwrote a drive. Luckily, it wasn’t my root drive, and I had a full backup of its contents, so I was able to reformat the drive and restore from backup.

Also, don’t run a bare minumum dd command like dd if=/dev/whateverdevice1 of=/dev/whateverdevice2; it’s going to be an absolute pain in the rear.

dd bs=1M oflag=sync status=progress if=/dev/whateverdevice1 of=/dev/whateverdevice2

• bs=1M: The size of block it tries to copy at a time. Play with this a bit, as different drives have different optimal block sizes.
• oflag=sync: Basically, most operating systems don’t actually write data to the drive right away, but store it in a buffer in RAM to be written later. This is usually fine, but sometimes, you want to be certain that data has actually been written to a drive; this flag turns off that buffering so that when dd is done, the data will for sure actually be on the drive. In lieu of this, you could also just run the sync command afterwards, which forces it to write the current buffer to disk, but I prefer the dd way. It should also do it automatically during shutdown, but I have had cases where a system hangs during shutdown and I’m not certain if syncing is done or not.
• status=progress: Gives the command a progress bar. It’s just really darn convenient and allows you to see how much time is left, how fast the drive is going, etcetera. I don’t know how anyone uses dd without this. Otherwise, it just shows nothing, and you’re left anxiously wondering when it will be done.
• if is input drive, of is output drive. I prefer lsblk for looking at the list of drivers.

You’ll usually need to run dd with sudo.

Once you do a successful copy, you’ll need to extend your BTRFS partition using GParted or similar. If you have a partition after your main one, like swap, you’ll need to delete the swap partition before extending, then recreate the swap partition and update fstab accordingly.

Cool. Probably still not using it. If I want to run an out-of-tree COW filesystem, I might as well be using ZFS - stable and with less drama.

Also, depending on the time of year, some E series models can drop to pretty low prices on clearance. E series used to suck, but they’ve upped the build quality and they’re pretty good budget Thinkpads now. Most things should be swappable (check Hardware Maintenance Manual to be sure), so back in 2024, I was able to snap an E16 gen 1 with 8 GB RAM 256 GB and upgrade it to 24 GB RAM, 2 TB storage for not too expensive.

The really nifty thing about the E16s is they have dual NVME drive slots; I just kept the OEM 256 GB drive in it and eventually threw a Windows 11 LTSC install on it, as I unfortunately have to use Windows to do a few assignments, which luckily only come up every couple weeks, usually.

For the record, I rationally hate AI*, and this title already raises suspicion for me.

“AI” is a buzzword, and seeing it in the title or slogan for project or product reeks of some business major jumping on a bandwagon that they don’t truly understand, and where there’s business majors, there’s probably encrapification.

*: Of course, one of the big problems is “AI” is a misnomer - there’s no “Intelligence” to it. “ML” is closer to capturing the nature of the technology without ascribing to it some magic power that it doesn’t have.

I think I have a bit more nuanced feelings on the MIT license. If I actually write something useful, GPL all the way, baby!

However, I don’t necessarily think the MIT license is the embodiment of evil; I find GPL a bit overkill for hobby projects. I’m not talking things that have the potential to become critical pieces of infrastructure like a kernel or something; I’m more talking about emoji pickers or hacky little Python scripts that would be pretty useless to a Fortune 500. In the minute chance someone actually cares about my silly little toy to fork it, I see very little point in encumbering it with the full heft of a copyleft license and stopping them from doing whatever the heck they want.

PDF forms are often horrible when done wrong; however, PDF files are really good for when you really need a document to look the same everywhere and don’t want to worry about what fonts the recipient has.

The accessibility issues are legit, though.

I otherwise agree, but what’s particularly wrong with PDFs? Almost anything can generate a PDF these days.

I need to play with HomeAssistant more. My last bit of hesitation was I was struggling to find a replacement for the announcement and intercom functionality, which is half of what my family uses Alexa for.

It looks like it got announcements with the “broadcast” intent in February; for the intercom, there may be a plugin. This seems like it might have me covered on the intercom front: https://github.com/JoeHogan/ha-intercom

Perhaps I’ll mess around with it again once the semester’s over; a lot of my family would really like to jump the Amazon ship and certainly be willing to try it if I give them the option.

Yes. In fact, almost every XFCE component can ran on Wayland now. At this point, they’re just a few bugs to hash out and figuring out what they’ll actually use for the compositor.

https://wiki.xfce.org/releng/wayland_roadmap

From what it sounds like, there will be a somewhat usable Wayland release in late 2026 alongside X11, and I imagine we’ll get a more polished release in late 2028.

I haven’t used Nautilus in ages, so I can’t say for certain, but Thunar is a more traditional-feeling file manager. It feels more like an older version of the Windows file manager but with tabs, while Nautilus seems more Mac-like.

Reminds me of when a client walked in to the help desk I work at the other day with a 2015 Macbook Pro still running El Capitan. I upgraded her to Monterrey - it’s been EOL for a year, but it’s better than sending her away with El Capitan. Monterrey is the best I can do since OCLP would be outside our policy.

That’s precisely why secure boot and TPMs exist - the TPM can store the keys to decrypt the drives and won’t give them unless the signed shim executable can be verified; the shim executable then checks the kernel images, options, and DKMS drivers’ signatures as well. If the boot partition has been tampered with, the drive won’t decrypt except by manual override.

The big problem is Microsoft controls the main secure boot certificate authority, rather than a standards body. This means that either a bad actor stealing the key or Microsoft itself could use a signed malicious binary used to exploit systems.

Still, it’s at least useful against petty theft.

TPM sniffing attacks seem possible, but it looks like the kernel uses parameter and session encryption by default to mitigate that: https://docs.kernel.org/security/tpm/tpm-security.html

That joke’s so funny, it’s making me a bit wheezy…

Didn’t Debian drop i386? Are you running Debian Bookworm?

Personally, Super Star Trek is my favorite terminal game.