Are you happy with the Kiyo X?

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.

When you put about:support into the Firefox URL bar, do you see evidence that your GPU is being used? I’m not sure which settings, exactly, would indicate that, but mine, under “GPU #1” has “Active: Yes.”

Lots of GPU-related options are also disabled, but I still get a smooth Google Earth experience.

As someone who lives rurally, I just want to make sure everyone is aware of how important mail service is. FedEx, UPS, DHL won’t deliver to us - not even to our nearest town. If we absolutely need something and they won’t ship Canada Post, we have it sent to a friend’s house a 1.5 hour drive away.

Do this! Years ago a very nice post lady asked me if I wanted to get flyers in my mail. I said “hell no.” And, now I don’t! Now I just get junk mail from companies that send their junk as actual mail. So, 100% my credit card company.

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.

I call what I’m doing “time journalling,” but that might not be the correct term. Every day I get a new note, I have a keyboard shortcut that puts in the time, and I write what I’m doing. I also have a template for meetings. I use a global shortcut to bring up this note no matter what desktop I’m in, so I always have a note taking surface an ‘F10’ away.

Next, I have “work tracking” notes. In my example below is “LRSF 2024”. So any time I’m working on that I just link to it from my daily note and for the most part, that note just exists so I can scroll through all the work I’ve done on that project using the “Linked mentions” section.

I also have some tags like “PersonalComputing” if it’s related to making something on my computer work, or another tag if it’s a fun/interesting story I might want to remember.

The overhead of this system feels a bit high, but, I have been sticking with it since December or so. I’d say it has been most useful for answering questions like “What happened this day?” I have been able to find things related to work by linking to work tracking notes, but, I’m not sure how that’s going to scale as time goes on.

Actually, a second thing I’m not sure about - I haven’t been very good about integrating information I want to keep accessible long-term in with my other notes. It used to be if I figured something out about ‘ibus’ (for example), I’d add it to some “Linux desktop” note. I’m more likely now to just let it live in my daily notes. On the one hand, I might be more likely to write things down because there isn’t the friction of going to find the right note and worrying about formatting. On the other hand, it seems likely this information will get harder to find if it all lives in date-titled notes.

Anyway, so that’s all my “work” vault. I do something similar for a “Journalling” vault, but I’m not as happy with that setup.

A late addition: I also like using check boxes for things I need to get back to - it’s super fast to do and lets me get back to it later. You can search for unchecked check boxes, so at my weekly review I have a saved search that shows me all the things I thought I should do. Then I either do them or move them to my to-do app. This way I know if there’s an unchecked check box in my “DailyLog” folder, it needs attention.

“Your teeth/eyes look pretty good for your age! 👍”

There must be more to it than this. As a Dr. Pepper connoisseur I can tell you that Dr. Pepper from a can tastes far superior than from a bottle.

I kind of feel this way about tabs, but everyone loves tabs so much I’m often too embarrassed to say anything.

Plasma (KDE) and Windows can both stack lots of windows just fine, so, why not let the window manager handle this and keep the browser more focused on browser tasks?

I blame AI. I notice ChatGPT is always trying to put that into my emails. Maybe because of that, I’m also noticing it in lots of emails I get.

Really? There are some pretty serious trade-offs that Qubes requires if you’re going to use it as your daily driver. I’m far more security-conscious than anyone I know, but I couldn’t bring myself to make those trade-offs.

That’ll depend on the server you’re connecting to to test your speed, and also if you’re using wifi.

Shaw (in Western Canada) seems to route everything through Seattle so there’s like a built-in 20 millisecond delay for every destination.

I’ve reconsidered my view of Anker being a quality brand. I bought a USB C hub of their’s that was supposed to provide 100W power delivery, but it couldn’t keep a 65W Dell laptop happy. So, I powered the Dell separately and still used the hub. After a while the display port started to cut out.

I’ve also bought a USB C PD cable of their’s that was supposed to support 100W power delivery. With my 85W MacBook I noticed that the cable was starting to get hard (non-bendy) spots in it. Soon after my MacBook would report being unplugged when I did anything that would draw significant power.

Ok, so I go over to Amazon and start looking at reviews that are 2 or 3 stars and holy shit. I got the distinct feeling that these were the real reviews. They’re not good.

Their rechargable batteries are so incredible deal.

Well, I submitted a “support” request:

For whatever it’s worth - I’m disappointed to see that XXX is pushing for its customers to download Chrome rather than ensure that their website supports proper web standards. A website that supports web standards will work well on all browsers and will save you from trying to pressure your customers into changing their preferred browser.

Thank you for your time (and, this is my personal opinion, not the opinion of the organization I’m here supporting).

NotAnArdvark

If you’re strictly doing backup you could checkout Hetzner’s “Storage box” (or something like that name). For something more S3-like I like StorJ, but, that might be a lateral move price-wise from Backblaze, I’m not sure.

I have similar feelings, but I’m not sure how to put them into words. Maybe “disappointment”? Like “Oh, not you too, Israel.”

It felt like a huge relief to get names put on things I had been experiencing for most my life. It helped me pull apart a “me” and a “challenge I have.”

Before, it was all “me,” and I had a guilt around why I struggled so much in certain areas where so many didn’t, and why I seemed so hard to help. But with a name to apply to these struggles, now the “me” was the part that had just been trying to cope with challenges many other people didn’t have to worry about.

This is much better for feelings of self-worth. I can reasonably think “well, they too might be acting this way if their brain was kicking up shit like mine tends to do.”

It also helps me understand my history and why I may have done things I did. I believe this more the longer I’m on medication. With a clearer head I start to drop coping mechanisms that no longer serve me, and I have a longer time line to notice what actually works for me - for all areas of life that everyone deals with. I guess… Like, it’s not all just mental chaos now, I can actually pin down cause and effect. Like, I like a regular bed time because I like being able to concentrate the next day. In the past I would have no idea how an irregular sleep schedule might affect me because my ability to concentrate was constantly in flux with no discernable cause.

Of course, the help you get is better too once everyone knows what they’re dealing with.

I really enjoyed reading this, thank you.

I’d be interested in reading more about the benefits of using an atomic distro, if you were looking for ideas on things to write about. I imagine it must make system upgrades easier but what about replicating your setup elsewhere? Like if I was doing some development and now I need to throw some serious hardware at the problem, could I just backup all my Flatpaks some configs, and spin up my desktop on a cloud VM?

I’m pretty sure that’s what Nix is all about, but the learning curve seems steep.