monovergent

Middle click failure plagues nearly every mouse I’ve owned, OEM, Logitech, wired, or wireless. I take full advantage of the middle click shortcuts like opening links in new tabs, but I don’t think I’m putting it through undue stress either. As far as I can tell, I’m clicking it with the same force as I would the other mouse buttons and much less frequently than the left click. Failure usually starts with occasional missed middle clicks, which after some point, rapidly progresses until it’s failing to register more often than not. At that point, everything else will still work perfectly. No improvement even if I take it apart to clean out what little dirt had accumulated. One of my mice has managed to avoid this fate far longer than the others but I’ve just recently stopped using it due to the rubberized exterior turning all gooey and sticky. The only middle mouse buttons that seem immune to all of this are the ones on ThinkPads. Anyone else notice this or could recommend a good mouse that can stand up to a bit of middle-clicking?

That's the point of school and company computers. To keep all the nasty software you need for your work away from your personal laptop, which you'll want to buy yourself. No amount of privacy-friendly software you install on top of Windows thoroughly compromised with corporate MDM is going to save you. If you must use your personal machine during work hours, tether it to your phone's data connection or use VPN if it is allowed.

When the privacy laws in the US are so weak, it seems like maintaining the effect of data removal requires paying for the data removal service indefinitely. Is it worth it regardless? Are there any cases and criteria where one should pay for data removal, more so than the average person? Interested to hear if anyone here has seen noticeable benefits, beyond the mere fact that their PII have been scrubbed from data brokers and search sites.

It's fine to watch people critique Linux and compare it with Windows, but in my honest opinion, Mutahar is not worth your time.

Except for systems with very limited resources, systemd or not won't make much of a difference in performance. A lot of tutorials on reading system logs and managing background services will assume that you are using systemd.

I've only ever used distros with systemd, not necessarily with intent, but because it was the default and well-supported. Probably won't switch unless

• Debian switches
• there's a change that breaks my workflow
• it somehow starts phoning home to a big datacenter.

I've been daily driving Debian Stable for the past 5 years and I am more than happy to continue for the next five. It's also on nearly all of my machines and the majority of my VMs. I'm honestly not very keen on the latest features or hardware, but I am very keen on my software being predictable and consistent, so the Debian release cycle is perfect for me.

One less possible data point for tracking Also not invested enough in my profile to bother

In any case, minimize the number of parties that will have their hands on your data. Uninstall anything that's unnecessary, compartmentalize personal work in a privacy-respecting browser and office suite, and avoid unofficial Windows ISOs. If your school is going to install monitoring software on it, consider the laptop compromised. Only do coursework, accessing things licensed through the school, exams, the bare necessities, on the Windows laptop. Start saving up for a (refurbished) laptop to learn and use Linux without risk to your work laptop. If now is not the time to buy another laptop, consider installing Linux on a second SSD, if a slot is available, or even a USB 3.0 drive, if you're allowed to boot from one. Just back up and if possible remove the Windows SSD before installing so it's not overwritten by accident. Be judicious with debloat scripts as they can interfere with some more invasive programs (e.g. Adobe suite, Autodesk) you may need for your studies. Consider making full disk backups before doing anything drastic. Anyway, if you can't or won't use LTSC, the yearly Windows updates can and will undo your hard work debloating and ticking privacy checkboxes. At the end of the day, Windows is closed-source and we can't be completely sure what it's doing behind our back. It's fine for a dedicated work device, but the time spent on taming it for personal privacy could also be spent getting another machine and getting to know Linux.

Always did in apartments. Closing the bedroom door gives me another layer between the neighbors and street traffic. I added rubber door sweeps and seals to further dampen the noise. In a detached home, I'd leave the door open during the day but close it when I sleep for added fire safety. I used to have a *downstairs* neighbor who stomped loudly and my pleas didn't work. So I got a subwoofer and played some low-frequency white noise when I needed to drown it out. *After reading your comments, I'd highly recommend this if you can't move out yet.* They seriously need to build more apartments and condos with concrete instead of thin wood in the US. I miss my old apartment when I was in Germany. Nice sturdy concrete walls so my neighbor could blast music all day without bothering me at all.

If OP indeed has the 6th gen iPod Touch, not the classic, it won't be as rosy as most of the comment here suggest. From my experience replacing the battery on one, you need a hair dryer to loosen the glue and pry off the screen, then a soldering iron to replace the battery since its ribbon cable is directly soldered to the logic board. No storage expansion or custom firmware is available for such iOS devices, as far as I am aware.

Also watch out for low-quality replacement batteries, the first replacement I tried only lasted around an hour on a full charge.

As much as I have ideals for my technology use, I will admit that

• I have some audio in the background playing half of my waking hours
• If I'm tired of words, I'll put on music, vice versa
• If there's an unanticipated pause, I first check if it's still playing correctly
• Yes I am afraid of being stuck with my own thoughts when I go to bed
• I think of the time spent waiting in line as nothing but wasted unless I use it as an opportunity, perhaps to read a saved tab on my phone
• All of this might not be the cause of it, but it definitely doesn't help my mental fog and fatigue

Driver support for various old peripherals and nvidia cards

Pardon my ignorance, why would those be suspicious?

Are you able to source "IoT" cards without ID verification?

Got a job at a BYOD workplace, so I ended up having to repurpose my old devices as my work devices. Fortunately I had many from my hoard to choose from. Still get taken aback when I realize that most of my coworkers have all their work stuff connected to their personal devices without a second thought.

No experience personally with Lineage or eOS on a tablet, but if you end up with a tablet that doesn't have official support from either, I can vouch for the LeOS GSI (generic system image). Minimalist and with all pings to Google servers stripped out. That said, updates can be hit or miss with the GSI. The gold standard is still the Pixel Tablet with GrapheneOS, no fuss with complicated install and update methods.

Does that happen to be a variant? I replaced the battery in my aunt's iPod Touch 6 a few years ago and did have to desolder the battery ribbon cable as it was directly soldered to the logic board. Took a lot of patience just getting to the battery too (screen is held on by glue unlike the clips/tabs in an iPhone). Also interested to hear other people's thoughts on reusing these old iOS devices, got one sitting around just collecting dust.

About a 5. Thankful for what I have, only got the bare minimum done this weekend, appalled by the state of the world.

Validates my feelings as a Debian user

I don't, but there's always someone else in my family who's getting sick whenever we fly together. I've worn masks to the airport ever since the pandemic. Also tend to fall asleep shortly after takeoff, so I'm well-rested upon arrival.

Excessive. Spread across several devices and countless bookmarks.html exports from old system installs. I am too busy to revisit or even curate them. In my mind, I assume that I will be given notice of the day that the internet will be closed off, when Youtube ads will be completely unblockable, and I will rush to download every last article and video in those bookmarks, then live happily ever after off-grid.

Counting all injuries to date, I think I would. Probably with a concussion and blood all over me though. My face would be in very rough shape from how much I've picked at it in the past.

Bog standard keyring. To keep everything parallel, the folding multitool gets a tiny sub-keyring and the metal USB stick gets a tiny carabiner (detaches to avoid load-bearing USB ports). Keychain goes in a velcro pouch that also holds a multi-tool pen, mini flashlight, and lighter. Pouch goes into front left pocket.

I am familiar with a child abuse victim who feels this way. Not like actively seeking it out, but they wouldn't regret it much if it came to that point. But I'm not personally qualified to comment on it. If it's becoming more than a passing thought and starting to bother you in everyday life or causing actively homicidal thoughts, it's a good time to seek professional help before it gets you into trouble.

The average social media profile has just headlines and lead pictures, while a good blog also has articles

Focus follows mouse and unchecking the option to auto raise the active window. Couldn’t live without it and being used to it has made me extremely clumsy when I do pick up my Windows work laptop. I change the taskbar clock to be a one-line MM/DD HH:MM:SS format, drop in my customized locale (based on en-US for maximum compatibility, but without having to deal with US formats and units that I’m not fond of), and point the taskbar shortcut for my text editor to a script that creates a pre-named file and launches the editor with autosave enabled. Because having to manually save and come up with a name for your spur-of-the-moment notes sucks, automatically generating 20260831_text_1 is so much better than a, b, a2, etc. XFCE specific, I get rid of the second panel full of launchers. Acquired taste, but also Chicago95 theme and icon pack.

You could make it about equivalent to the protections afforded by the typical BIOS password, i.e. the attacker must first disassemble your laptop to reflash the flash chip or pull the hard drive. A grub.cfg like so would do, assuming everything in encrypted partitions: set prefix=(memdisk)/boot/grub set superusers="root" password_pbkdf2 root grub.pbkdf2.sha512.10000. cryptomount -u search.fs_uuid configfile ($root)/@rootfs/boot/grub/grub.cfg Assuming you boot directly to GRUB or locked out the SeaBIOS boot device selector, then GRUB will only ever look for a boot device matching your disk’s UUID; attempting to do anything else aside from entering the LUKS passphrase will prompt for the GRUB password. You’d still have your own recovery path by pressing Esc, entering your GRUB password, and dropping to the GRUB shell. Bonus points for patching the GRUB code so it doesn’t echo the UUID of your disk.

As others say, where the use cases are so specific to each machine, it’ll be a headache juggling all of those images if your needs and workflow change down the road. But I’d be remiss to say I don’t practice a form of what you mention, I would go insane if I actually had to reinstall from distro defaults. I have a single perfected VM image with customizations and software common to all of my machines. And yes, if you were to go this route, there are little quirks to iron out manually each time I image to a new machine, even old and well-supported ones. Some just cosmetic, some preventing graphical output. It works well enough for me, but it also frankly leads to a poorly-documented system that will accumulate cruft with updates, so interested too to see what other people here suggest. Particularly for those niche customizations that land outside of /home and /etc (e.g. /usr/fonts, packages not provided by the distro).