I’m with you with the fact that I don’t believe there to be any serious botting attempts, but I didn’t need a digital ID to sign from the Netherlands.

I think they will verify with the municipality of the person who signed whether they actually exist. Theoretically you could sign on someone you know this information for, but I think IP logging would burn you pretty quick if even one of those is bogus/duplicate.

Also, I don’t know whether such signatures would be counted before any verification would take place

I thought it was real until the part where he gives away the US to Canada and Greenland. Had that not been in there I would’ve fallen for it

Little update in case you were wondering. After the news of kernel 6.13 being out I decided to look up when that would be available on Fedora. I found some mentions of the display bug being resolved in 6.12.9, and it’s true! Now my saga of switching a parent to Linux can truly begin!

Did you ever end up getting that Brother scanner to work?

I’ve been living on Tumbleweed KDE for about a year now, and I love it. My mum recently got a new laptop, so I decided to make it a dual boot of Windows 11 LTSC (no Copilot or forced MS accounts) and Fedora KDE.

Apparently Windows doesn’t ship with the relevant network driver built-in, so that was fun to hunt down while Device Manager didn’t announce what network card was in there. The manufacturer’s site lists a certain driver as the “latest”, and that would “successfully” install without actually doing anything. Half an hour later, it turns out that pressing “more” on their website shows previous versions of the driver… and drivers for a totally different network card that also gets shipped with this laptop sometimes. Naturally, the hidden one worked first try. Most other drivers were borked too, so Windows Update had to fetch them.

I then got to set up Fedora, which I chose because from what I heard it’s neither boring nor too bleeding edge, without Canonical’s controversial Snap shenanigans and with some relatively easy enabling of proprietary codecs (which I still need to verify) and with okay package management through Discover. The network card and everything else worked perfectly out of the box, but I have never installed Fedora before and forgot to partition the drive in Windows beforehand. Eventually I finish the install, install some apps and do some updates (while feeling uncomfortable with having to guess how package management works in dnf). I’m finally done, shut the laptop, bring it down to show her, open the lid, screen comes on…

… and then it shuts off. Turns back on, flickers a couple times, then permanently shuts off. Turns out there’s a kernel bug around display power saving that’s causing this, and I don’t know when the fix will land on Fedora.

It’s been real fun trying to explain to her that I didn’t just break her fancy new laptop every 15 minutes and that everything I did was just a conventional procedure that should be supported (I’m lying)

Having or liking pets. Pictures of then I can see the appeal of, but the living beings are annoying at best or downright scary.

Never grew up with them, was always silently judged for being afraid of my classmates’ pets if I came over

This sounds solvable, doesn’t it? Have the extension cable have a chip saying it can do X at maximum, then compare with whatever is to be extended and communicate the minimum of both upstream. Might not become a sleek cable-like design, but would extend the 240W cable with the extender safely staying at 120W

This gave me a brilliant idea:

• Everyone adds a clause to whatever license they use stating “any part of this software may not be used for war purposes of any kind”
• We wait until software with these licences is spread across the supply chain of everything on Earth
• …
• World peace, as no country would be legally allowed to wage war

Is it the case where they postponed the vote again because they anticipated it being turned down and needing to wait ages before being allowed to vote again?

If so, perhaps Poland could host the next vote, deliberately not postponing when it seems it’s not going to pass. Maybe even start trolling and remove concessions that would’ve pleased other countries, forcing even more anti-votes and removing some risk of it passing unexpectedly (I don’t know if that would be viable to actually implement though).

We need it to properly fail big time if we don’t want to fear for our privacy every couple months

I used to use ADB backup to move from Android 6 to 8 to 10, but it refused to work from 10 to 12.

Not that it was fully comprehensive, but it was pretty dang close. Shame they never replaced it with something similar

This is the missing link in my idea. I suppose there to be a lot of reasons why Ukraine, if it wanted to enact this bottom of the barrel, shitpost-tier of international policy, couldn’t simply “stage” something that would force all of NATO to stand behind the invading country due to a technicality?

Learn of YouTube, go to youtube.com and there’s content.

Learn of Mastodon, ask “where’s that?” and be told to go to joinmastodon.org. When I did this, you had to pick an instance. mastodon.social was full, you had to find something else. So you look at every instance there is in the list, and try to filter for moderation rules as you’re told this is best practice. Don’t worry, all of Mastodon can see everything posted by everyone on every instance! Picking an instance is really choosing where your values are best aligned, nothing more. So you spend the effort, make an account, get asked a reason why you’re signing up (though I might be mistaking this memory for when I signed up to Lemmy), have to wait for approval, get an account, and sign into the official app…

… and there’s no content. The only way I ever managed to get content was to learn of Mastodon accounts outside of Mastodon and manually look them up. So I ended up following a whopping 3 accounts, one of which being some EU governmental account, another essentially being the XDA RSS feed. Needless to say, I didn’t stick around.

I don’t know if things have improved since then, or how Bluesky does things. But I’d imagine a platform supposedly started by the people who founded Twitter, built from what supposedly was once an internal test of modifications to Twitter, to have an easier onboarding experience than whatever Mastodon did back when I tried it.

Oh boy, does this also hold for people who don’t like any pets?

Regarding the second link, I’ve personally git pulled Ryujinx about once a week (except this week lol) ever since Yuzu was taken down. I don’t know enough about git to know if commits earlier in the history can be manipulated whilst keeping later commit hashes identical, but I can confirm that the commits from last Tuesday match up with my local copy in terms of hash, author and message

I installed a KDE latex math tool that came with texlive as a dependency. Shit’s awful when doing updates.

I ended up uninstalling the tool and texlive, and installed tinytex instead. I then tabood texlive and reinstalled the tool from software.opensuse.org as the YAST GUI allows you to ignore dependencies.

It works in the KDE tool and in one note taking app with latex math support, but I haven’t tried adding new packages yet. I don’t know how good of a solution this would be if you use latex outside of just rendering a couple of equations, but it could be worth a shot

There already exists a “Google Play licence check” permission apps can use to verify whether or not the app has been bought on a Google account that’s present on the device.

If people can crack the app to remove this (which is a thing for some of the popular apps), they’ll also figure out how to patch this out. This is strictly useful for free apps, and only serves to make it unviable to distribute verifiably clean apk’s outside of Google Play (so rip APKMirror)

It isn’t. I’ve personally had it happen where a relative who went to some country that bans video calling and VoIP (except for the unencrypted/honey pots of course) and used Signal to call people back home (only because I told them it would be unblocked due to censorship circumvention). Despite everyone in my household being familiar with WhatsApp, I was the only who did video calls with them and had to share my device so others could also call them. Even when I’d set up Signal on one of their devices, they still complained it was to difficult to use, insisted I’d uninstall it when the trip was over and used it a grand total of once.

I honestly think it’s partly to do with the nerd factor. This same relative turned out to also have installed the backdoored unencrypted app to chat with others, but hid it from us due to me being vocal about not using that. These other households, also WhatsApp based, managed to install, sign up and use that just fine. They also couldn’t be bothered to set up Signal for some reason, yet gladly accepted the suggestion to use the honey pot.
I think that these people in my circle don’t care about security at all and only care about the platform. If it’s “secure”, “private” and “censorship resistant” and they haven’t heard of it until I, the “techie”, explain the technological benefits of it, they’ll think it’s a niche “techie” thing they’re not nerdy enough to understand. If I get them to use it, they’ll keep thinking this whenever something is slightly different than WhatsApp and be frustrated. Meanwhile they can get behind the honey pot because “WhatsApp doesn’t work there, this is just what people in that country use”. It appears normal because “normal people” use it all the time, and they’ll solve any inconvenience themselves because “normal people (can) use this, and I’m normal too”.

My grandpa had developed the habit of falling out of his bed. The first time I was afraid that he was gonna die on the spot as I’d heard it, but it eventually became such a “regular” occurrence that I didn’t think of immediate death anymore. This particular day, he’d fallen twice. They brought him to a nearby hospital to get a check-up. I was worried sick that this time something was actually wrong, or that he might’ve broken a bone or something. Turns out he was fine! No broken bones or anything. Just one teeny tiny minor issue…

When he was brought to the hospital, he was accidentally placed in the area with people who were brought there with covid. I hadn’t been able to see him in months because of the restrictions, and even when I did go the months prior it was always with far distance, masks and in short bursts. I did everything I had been told to do to “keep him safe”, “ease up the workload in the hospitals” and all those government campaigns and all that, only for him to die because of this (seeming) serious neglect from medical professionals.

I once had a screw on a laptop that wouldn’t unscrew and eventually somewhat lost its shape. I had asked my uncle for help, who gave me the solution. I think it was slightly less bad than this, but it might help:

1. Apply WD40 around the edges of the screw, such that it could enter the hole
2. Apply it to the screw head
3. Hold your screwdriver in the hole and gently tap it with a hammer a couple of times
4. Slowly attempt to screw it out, whilst applying firm downward pressure on the screw

Note that the amounts of WD40 you have to apply are tiny. We’re talking drops of the stuff. It might be best to attempt to spray something else, and use the residue on the nozzle to apply it

The Netherlands only remains “neutral” because of the clause that forces companies to detect unknown CSAM and/or “grooming” material (last time I checked). It’s only a matter of one or two countries that can make the difference, with most neutral countries probably having similarly “minor” objections.

I’ve checked the Github when I read this to see whether they’re having trouble as well, and currently it appears that YouTube will block your IP if you use it too much