Dropbox seems to be different than other companies. It is known to have migrated back from AWS to their own infrastructure at a time when ever other CEO was propagating to migrate into the cloud. Article is from 2019, though: https://techcrunch.com/2019/06/21/three-years-after-moving-off-aws-dropbox-infrastructure-continues-to-evolve/

I guess it is like bicycling: there is a price to pay in blood 😉 My suggestion: in Romania, take a few hours of driving lessons with a professional teacher who can explain everything to you.

https://archive.is/dgBUn

Microsoft tried the same idea about 10 years ago with Continuum, even including a hardware dongle: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Continuum https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/design/device-experiences/continuum-phone

Canonical had something similar, too, back in the days with their Ubuntu Touch and named it Convergence: https://www.linux.com/news/first-ubuntu-touch-tablet-brings-convergence-last/

LaTeX packages are available, too:

• https://ctan.org/pkg/atkinson
• https://tug.org/FontCatalogue/atkinsonhyperlegible/

Yes

Things had “2000” in their names to make them sound cool or futuristic, like Video 2000 or Windows 2000.

From what I heard from a teacher who was on exchange to China is that traditional Chinese education values the memorization and ability to rephrase or reproduce previous scholars’ work, but neglects reflection and own ideas, especially if you are just a student. Western academic traditional to the contrast values the student’s ability to evaluate, compare, and reflect on previous work. Hypothetically, a report that would give you a pass with distinction at a Chinese university would make a plagiarism checker cry at a Western university and vice versa.

Many arguments call countries’ names, but actually prices are dictated by companies (directly or indirectly by their behavior) that want to make a profit. Sweden’s electricity prices, as a rule of thumb, are always lower than prices in Germany, so from an economic p.o.v. it makes sense to buy as much electricity in Sweden as can be transported south. Of course, that drives prices up in Sweden to historic level (but still cheaper than in Germany). Why are prices so high in Germany? Several reasons have been discussed here, but one I would like to highlight is that operators of gas and coal power plants, which are meant as reserves in cases of high demand and low supply, do not produce sufficiently much electricity: they simply earn more by selling little electricity at high prices than by selling more electricity at lower prices. The politicians’ fault is that they have created a mostly unregulated market where under the right conditions some actors can make huge profits at the cost of everyone else. This is why more nuclear power plants won’t help: even their operators will have to pay back the huge debts left from construction and thus also will try to maximize profits from high prices via low supply.

Germany’s government is a three-party coalition where all three parties have lost in recent regional elections, so they try to show their profile ahead of the national election next year. Especially the party which now causes the most trouble (by appeasing an opposition party in a bid for a future coalition) got close to 0% of the vote in those regional elections. The chancellor himself has an unresolved history of being involved in a large tax evasion scheme (“cum-ex”) back when he was head of a regional government. Otherwise, he tries to do nothing wrong by not doing anything at all (ok, he does the day-to-day business, but no inspiring long-term goals or other leadership things). In contrast, the vice chancellor (from the Green party) does a noticeable better job at explaining and motivating the government’s decisions. Unfortunately, even this party has people in leading positions where they should not be …

Why would you study anything with literature if you had never read a book before? This sound like a colossal waste of time and money. My theory is that if you were good at anything or had an interest in a particular topic, you would study something else like engineering, medicine, or law (I exclude the case that you may be genuinely interested in literature). Thus, many of those who study literature have no idea what they should study else and probably think that they can always get through a course which is about book. Why? Probably rich family pressured them into studying instead of posting stuff on Instagram or TikTok.

If you do not trust Tailscale as a company, here is an open source re-implementation of the server called headscale. Some/all clients are open source as well. So, you can review all components yourself or pay for a professional third-party review. Otherwise, if you take a binary blob from any origin, including Tailscale, and have it run with privileges on your server, there are few limits on what this blob can do. Yes, backdoors are technically possible, but probably bad for Tailscale’s business if that ever came to light.

Please submit a second copy of that letter, but replace Windows with Android, PC with Mobile, Microsoft with Google, and Edge with Chrome.

My setup is smaller, but when my venerable old router died about a year ago, I acquired an Asus TUF-AX3000_V2 where I installed FreshTomato. One can login via SSH and dump all settings for backup. Likewise, individual or all settings can be done on the command line instead of the GUI. I have a script on my computer that reads CSV files with MAC addresses and more to apply changes in an automated way.

Did you just summarized the first episode of Gilmore Girl? 😉

KDE Connect has been mentioned before. You can supplement this and other tools by using a VPN so that both endpoints can see each other even if the underlying network does not allow this. My preferred solutions are Tailscale (managed, cloud-based) or Headscale (for self-hosting).

Yes, XMPP with proper TLS on the server side and Conversations or one of its forks (preferably fetched from F-Droid) using OMEMO encryption should be good enough. If you are brave or paranoid, give Tox a try: https://tox.chat/

Maybe the first question is what your budget is, both regarding money and time. For example, you could buy a pre-configured NAS from Synology or QNAP, which requires less technical skills but more money, or a home-made solution reusing used components (but fresh disks for reliability). Depending on your electricity costs, you may want to choose a low-power solution or something which you power off when not used. For storage, maybe a three-disk RAID5 is a good compromise. For backups, plain S3 cloud storage encrypted via restic is a good idea.

Well, you have Finland in the north-east, Ireland in the north-west, and every land border faces a Euro-zone country. Few other countries can claim the latter.

If at all, you want to use Gentoo’s ebuild system, which can be seen as some kind of superset of PKGBUILDs. I guess one could write a Python script that “dumbs down” ebuild scripts to PKGBUILDs for simple packages (excluding complex stuff like kernel, KDE, …). The main challenge, as pointed to before, would be maintaining a table mapping package names between distributions in order to get the dependencies right.