• 2 Posts
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Joined 9 months ago
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Cake day: September 29th, 2023

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  • I agree that there should be a way for whistle blowers to anonymously leak details of wrongdoings of the governments and/or corporations if it servers public interest. And I agree that modern surveillance techniques are way more advanced than few decades ago. However, so called whistle blowing is still against the law and the person who does it should be aware that it will cause a legal response.

    My problem with anonymity is that it’s being abused by “shady” people. It could be a dark web drug dealing website or some hard-core child trafficking rings. Unfortunately we live in a world where real things happen behind the scene and no whistle blower is going to change that. Here’s an example (Secret Key Cryptography by Frank Robin)

    Circa 1975, IBM proposed the cipher now called DES, the Data Encryption Standard . It became a worldwide standard for secret key encryption. As IBM originally designed it, DES had a 64-bit key. The National Security Agency (NSA) required that the key be reduced from 64 bits to 56 bits, with the other 8 bits used as a checksum. This made no sense. If a checksum were really needed, then the key could be increased from 64 to 72 bits. It was widely believed that the real reason the NSA made this demand was that it knew how to crack messages using a 56-bit key, but not messages using a 64-bit key. This proved to be true.



  • I think the closest to you requirements will be Grocy. You can define list of products you use, current stock, rules to add product to the shopping list based on amount, what to do when you move product between storage locations (e.g. move from freezer to fridge), etc. There’s also a mobile app. Having said that I stopped using it after couple months. Few reasons: mobile app had no offline mode, mobile app was not compatible with the latest app server version, I had many issues setting up current stock (many times I had to manually adjust the amounts after using consume/purchase option). Overall I like the idea but it didn’t work for me.



  • I’ve been using GrapheneOS for over a year. I cannot complain about it, it works as advertised and it does it the best way possible. However, here’s the list of things I find annoying/missing. Keep in mind, this is a subjective list.

    • some (quite a lot of for me) apps require Google Play Framework (or whatever the name is) to work properly
    • Aurora store tends to be unavailable randomly, which makes installation/updates difficult sometimes
    • some features are wonky, e.g. GrapheneOS has no issues with disabling wifi when leaving my home but I was never able to enable wifi when I’m back home.
    • default apps work ok-ish but it’s far from good old iOS/Android experience
    • Android Auto experience was a shitshow for me


  • Linux distros are barely just getting their feet wet in the tablet/mobile world. I would say “barely just getting their toe wet” :)

    Getting back to the point. I loved the way iPad was integrated with the stylus (Apple Pencil). My use case for a tablet back then was to write/draw stuff I did “remotely” and export all my, let’s call it drawings, to mac and work on that. Today’s example. I was planning a garden layout. It took me way too much time to get the stylus working the way I expected and when it did I had more issues trying to export the drawings to a usable format* I would be better off with a good old pen and paper.

    • I’m not a pro Linux user so there’s a good chance I missed something








  • Before I start, a little bit of a background story. Since I was a teenager, I’ve lost my close friends and family - suicides, health issues, tragic accidents, etc. Eventually I got to the point where the relationships with people I know and cherish were at most few years old. I cannot tell if the everyday drama made me the way I’m now or was it how I was born but I always was “alone”. Not lonely, alone. I had significant others, in fact for most of my adult life I was in a happy relationships. It’s a different story why I’m not longer in those but I have no regrets.

    To answer your question, I’m pretty happy with my life. I have fulfilling career, clear plan for what’s next, some disaster recovery plan if things go awry and I go with the flow to some extent. I lived through some hard times but “whatever doesn’t kill you, simply makes you stranger”.