No. Just no. Enough internet for today.

This is my way of doing it too, but at the end always a lot of milk remains in the bowl and I have to refill it with cereal multiple times.

If I add less milk in the first place, then for the major part of the cereal it’ll feel like I haven’t added any milk at all. Weird stuff.

Some publishers do that. Manning, for example.

I don’t know, there are a couple of books that have Adobe DRM on them at every bookstore where I found the book.

Are you saying, it’s possible to get Amazon books onto a non-Kindle device? That’s actually pretty much the only bookstore where I never looked at before.

In my use case it doesn’t have any relevance, as my device lasts for months with one charge. During that timespan I have plenty of opportunities to charge.

I prefer ePub. Much more convenient for me than a paper book.

• I simply don’t have the space to physically store a lot of paper books
• It’s much easier to bring my Kobo with me when commuting or traveling
• Much easier for me to buy eBooks than physical books
• Even though I’ve been having my device for like 8 years, I’m still fascinated by how cool the e-ink display is

On the other hand, paper books have only one thing to offer that sometimes holds:

• They’re all DRM-free, while some eBooks I’ve been wanting to buy are DRM-enshittified. Still hasitating about those, as I’m not willing to spend money on such books.

I use Brita, but I’m absolutely disappointed with it and I don’t even know if it’s worth for me to waste my money on it.

The other day there was yellow water coming from the tap, probably it has to do something with the construction outside. But I only noticed it while filling up my Brita jug, and guess what - it remained yellow after filtering it. I mean, no change at all. Not even slightly clearer, no. The same. And I use original Brita cartridges which are expensive af. I was in two weeks of usage that time, so the cartridge wasn’t even near the end of its lifecycle.

The other part of my disappointment is that these Brita jugs are extremely brittle. The first one cracked on the bottom after one year, the second one cracked at two places also after one year (although the second one isn’t leaking yet). And I have no idea why they crack so easily, it’s not like I’m slamming them to the kitchen counter in any way. I’m actually quite careful with it, knowing how poor quality it is. Absolute garbage.

So I’m also seeking for a high quality brand, but I’m not ready for those reverse osmosis things, just a pitcher.

I truly believe in Scrum, as it can make a team’s work very efficient when it’s done right. Been there, done that.

Now the thing is, it forces people to actively collaborate, and I’m quite an introverted person. Also, a good Scrum workflow includes regular demo sessions (perhaps even with customers), and I absolutely hate that. But I accept it, it’s part of the game and I think it did contribute to my own self improvement as well.

Every hardware is beautiful from every angle.

I thought so too, but about a year ago or so this same question popped up, and some of the comments were really eye opening.

The essence of it was something like this: if you use the upvote/downvote buttons as agree/disagree, then you’re contributing to turning this platform into an echo chamber, which is the particular thing that makes social media such a shitty place.

You should use this feature on posts to indicate if it’s relevant to the community’s rules or not, meets the community’s guidelines or not, contains factual, useful information or not.

On comments, you should use it to indicate if it’s relevant to the topic or not, valid argument to what they’re replying to or not, regardless of your own opinion.

A great example someone commented was, when he explained they were browsing lemmy together with his girlfriend, they had a great laugh at a comment, and then he promptly downvoted it, to her surprise. And it’s because, even though the comment was fantastic, it was off topic, it wasn’t useful for the actual conversation.

Oh, and actually, there was a thing, even on Reddit - believe it or not - which acted as upvote/downvote guidelines, describing how you should use those buttons.

I’ll try to link the original post here if I find it.

Edit: Here’s the comment I was referring to on the original post: https://lemmy.world/comment/5219066

Firefox because it works perfectly for me, and it’s customizable with extensions.

I guess, that’s not the biggest issue. Everyone has that, who’s sorting their trash. The real annoying part (at least for me) is taking the effort to physically take the trash apart. For example removing cellotape from cardboard, removing metal clips from cardboard, washing food remains from containers, removing paper labels from cans, etc. It takes time, and sometimes it’s not even easy to do.

I go to great lengths to do all that, but when it turns out to be impossible, I just throw it in the general waste and I don’t care.

Here’s a mixture of applications, some for Linux, some for Android, some for both. And some of them might work on other platforms as well, but I’m not sure.

Borg for making backups. For the first glance it could look overwhelming, but after reading through the quick start guide, it’s really easy to use.

VeraCrypt for encryption of removable media.

Megalodon as a Mastodon client.

Voyager as a Lemmy client. It has a very weird and unintuitive UI, but there are no ads and the content is well readable, well presented.

OsmAnd for offline navigation. It’s especially great for cycling and hiking, as even the most insignificant trails are on the map. It isn’t free, but it’s cheap.

Thunderbird for emails. Until recently I just used the online interface for my emails, but ever since I got a Proton subscription and multiple aliases with it, I started to use Thunderbird so I can see everything in one place, and also it has advanced filtering capabilities (the best of any email client I’ve ever used).

Proton Calendar, just for the sake of not to use Google.

Firefox with uBlock Origin. These two together is the bare minimum nowadays if you are thinking about browsing the internet.

VS Code for smaller stuff. Not gonna list my extensions here, but there are a few less known ones that I always install.

Zed is in early development, but if it gets as mature as VS Code, I’ll consider using this instead.

JetBrains IDEs for software development. It makes me cry every year when I spend a buttload of money on renewing my license, but for me it’s worth it. No other IDE ever made it so easy for me to set up and work with projects.

Dia for UML or database schema diagrams, and bunch of others. Sadly it’s a bit outdated, but it’s simple and easy to use.

I’ve used KDE for more than a decade, and then about 1.5 years ago I decided to give Gnome a try. A few months ago I wanted to see KDE again, but I quickly switched back to Gnome.

KDE:

• Feature-rich desktop with feature-rich tools by default. Everything is so advanced and customizable, I really miss this.
• Lately I’ve encountered many annoying bugs (this was the main reason why I tried Gnome in the first place). Crashing while trying to unlock the screen, fractional scaling issues, and random crashes here and there (although these are rare). And I would love to dive into it and fix them, but there are so many other stuffs I wanna do, I don’t have the capacity for this.
• Setting color profiles for monitors is not trivial.
• There are many annoying UX issues that are really negligible, but if they worked well, my experience would’ve been much smoother. Here’s an example: start to type your password on the lock screen, while the monitor is sleeping. On most OS and also on KDE, the first interaction must be to wake up the screen, and then you can type your password. On Gnome, just start typing and hit enter. The screen might wake up halfway while you’re typing, but it still does what you’d expect. These kind of small things make my experience so much smoother and so much more comfortable.

Gnome:

• It just works. Flawlessly and smoothly, to my surprise. Sure, it’s easy to accomplish when it’s so minimalistic, that almost nothing is in there. But whatever there is, at least it works.
• Fractional scaling is a pain in the ass here too, but in a different way. It’s still an experimental feature though, so we could say this feature doesn’t even exist, which is a huge disadvantage.
• Feature-rich software can be installed afterwards. So it’s not really bothering me that the pre-installed tools are too minimalistic.
• Setting color profiles for monitors is very straightforward, but there’s way to improve here too.

To sum up, my preference is less bugs over more features, so I pick Gnome.

I guess, it depends on the dictatorship. For example if it’s the one being formed in the US currently, here are some ideas: https://theintercept.com/2024/11/14/trump-agenda-organize-protest-movement/

Ever since I got my own place, I’m significantly less stressed. So much, that my health condition pretty much got back to normal after living with a colon disease (AND my mom) for a long time.

Folks, do not underestimate the power of stress.

The good things:

• It really is an advantage over normal USB, that I don’t have to trun the plug three times while trying to connect it, as it can be plugged in either way.
• I find the extra protection also cool, so in case you accidentally try to plug in something you are not supposed to, it just simply won’t work instead of, I don’t know, supplying too high voltage or something.

So far it caused a lot of headaches though:

• Way too often I found myself in a situation, where I couldn’t use some devices, because I didn’t have the necessary adapter. This issue should be temporary though, so I’m not complaining.
• Some cables are not compatible with some devices, and it can be really confusing. Before I knew this, I was certain that a monitor and a laptop of mine weren’t compatible for a long time, until someday I read about this and tried it again with a different cable.
• In most cases this is not an issue, but rarely I find that the USB type-c plug is not as robust as a micro USB for example. On my girlfriend’s Samsung S8 it always slipped out, so the contact was terrible, while a micro USB plug does have some clamps to properly attach. Again, in most cases the type-c plug is clicking in properly, so it’s not an acute problem.

No need to tell me all this; I’ve been using Linux for more than 15 years and I don’t freakin’ care what’s happening to Windows.

Now either you haven’t read properly what I said, or my wording was not clear - apologies in the latter case. Either way, I’ll try to explain what I meant.

1. It’s pointless for Microsoft to make Recall (or anything) unremovable, since someone will find a solution to it pretty quickly. So those who use Windows, most likely will still have the option to continue to use it without Recall, in my opinion.
2. I also highly recommend everyone to just use a usable operating system instead.
3. Telling the average user to use a better operating system is one thing. That’s fairly doable nowadays, I don’t see basically any obstacle to that, and I wouldn’t even mention it, because you just tell them the facts, and the smarter ones will listen and think it through, the rest of them will do whatever they want, it’s their problem. What I find very problematic, is industrial environments. There are tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands or millions of workstations, terminal computers, controllers in companies of varying sizes, where it’s absolutely not cost efficient to switch from Windows to something else (well, at least not until they get into their first data breach attributed to Recall or other shady Microsoft services). They have highly specialized tools complete with documentation and support and everything made for the one specific platform they are operating on, and it’s certainly not easy to change that, especially without halting production. If there’s one IT advice I could give to those companies, it would be to start creating a strategic plan to drop their Microsoft dependencies, and then execute their plan. It would take probably years, but they gotta start doing it like ASAP. And along the way, while porting their toolchains, they could as well do it the smart way: make it highly portable, so whatever platform they switch to, wouldn’t be the only option. Should that platform go south just like Windows did, they’d have the option to switch again to something else, just much easier this time.
4. According to my experience, customization tools to remove bloat (including Recall) are not permissible in work environments, and spyware (such as Recall) are not (supposed to be) tolerated either. If this doesn’t make them switch to a better platform, nothing will.

Just because Microsoft makes Recall “unremovable”, doesn’t mean anything to me. We’ve seen debloater tools, alternate start menus, someone even ported explorer from Windows 7 to Windows 10/11.

I’m pretty sure there’s gonna be a solution for this in no time.

That being said, just use a better OS ffs. I get it, some companies cannot easily switch from Windows because of tools specifically built for Windows, or due to strict policies or regulations or software support, but damnit, somewhere you have to draw a line and start a migration process to an alternative system. And maybe learn from this, and make your tools portable next time.

Having spyware on your system is certainly a big no-no at companies, and probably the aforementioned debloater/customization solutions as well.