monovergent

joined 11 months ago
[–] monovergent@lemmy.ml 3 points 17 hours ago

Nothing worked for me until I designed my own planner. I like to take things one week at a time so every Friday afternoon, I print out enough sheets for the next week on semi-A4 paper, folded and stapled to a semi-A5 booklet.

One full page for each day with:

  • Compact visual schedule of the day with a time grid (hours on the y-axis, 10s of minutes on the x-axis) and recurring events pre-printed
  • "Today" box to write down reminders and tasks that don't go on a time grid
  • Section to jot down miscellaneous thoughts and ideas
  • Right half of the page entirely for a journal entry

Front cover has the weekly overview and back cover has upcoming and assorted tasks.

No monthly calendar, any entry that needs to persist for longer than a week or so goes in a separate hardcover A5 journal that is usually in my bag.

[–] monovergent@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 day ago

Mouse cord getting caught on things. Makes me want to yank it forcefully.

[–] monovergent@lemmy.ml 3 points 6 days ago

It's usually confined to mobile workstation-class ones, which have Xeon processors. The 3612QE was intended for embedded machines and is one of the few i7 variants to support ECC.

 

After learning that the 3612QE itself supports ECC RAM in contrast to the stock CPU options and that the QM77 chipset also does, I purchased a DDR3 SODIMM with unbuffered ECC. I have not been aware of any other attempts to test this combination.

The machine did not POST and did not produce any beep codes. Absolutely no response to any input aside from shutting down when briefly holding the power button. Everything returned to normal upon putting the original RAM back.

I suspect the BIOS lacks support, but whether this changes with coreboot remains unknown to me, at least until I learn how to prepare and flash coreboot.

This is purely an exercise in curiosity.

[–] monovergent@lemmy.ml 4 points 1 week ago (1 children)

This stuff makes me grateful that my bank and your bank still maintain a fully-featured website. I would be quite upset if I were stuck with such an app and no website.

[–] monovergent@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Would like to, but never figured out how to get the TPM 1.2 chip in my X230 to work with cryptsetup. Everything seems to be written for TPM 2.0 only.

[–] monovergent@lemmy.ml 5 points 1 week ago

same here but with hentai on searx.be

[–] monovergent@lemmy.ml 9 points 1 week ago

XFCE4. It's intuitive and predictable without sacrificing the ability to customize it exactly the way I want (with Chicago95 ofc). The built-in panel widgets are nothing short of amazing: battery, CPU, RAM, network, and disk monitors with labels toggled off to save space and a clock with only what I need on one line: MM/DD HH:mm:ss

Enough features so that it "just works" (no nitpicking through config files), especially on laptops, without being bloated in any way. Bonus of its lightweight nature is that I can keep my Debian/XFCE setup consistent across all of my machines, both old and new.

Can't wait for the finished xfwm4 port to wayland so I don't have to sacrifice some security running X11 and so I can do fractional scaling on hidpi machines.

[–] monovergent@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

QR code reader and generator on both phone and laptop

  • Phone: SecScanQR
  • Laptop: ZBarCam and Zint

But I'm glad to have learned about LocalSend here so I'm no longer limited to short text snippets

[–] monovergent@lemmy.ml 14 points 2 weeks ago

I miss print coupons. Hearing "get the app" or "there's an app for it" makes me flinch these days.

[–] monovergent@lemmy.ml 1 points 3 weeks ago

Ideally, 256 GB + microSD. 128 GB today gives me ample room for my offline maps, music collection, podcasts, and Kiwix libraries. No gaming, only the occasional video, and one photo per day on average, so 256 GB would future-proof it.

As for a minimum, 32GB. For several years, I had a phone with 4GB of internal storage. Didn't use the microSD slot since it seemed to drain the battery. Android takes up much more space nowadays, but I wouldn't be too upset having ~16 GB usable space for myself.

The SD card would be separately encrypted as a portable backup of everything important to me, accessible on-the-spot whenever I need it.

[–] monovergent@lemmy.ml 3 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I'm curious, how did you build the BMS with a cheap controller? I won't judge. I've always wanted to build my own battery pack that reports percentage back to the machine, without worrying about killing the BMS if it loses power.

[–] monovergent@lemmy.ml 18 points 1 month ago (5 children)

School is where the passion for learning goes to die and the desire to cheat is born

In this day and age, hobbies are the last bastions of passion and curiosity. One who is engaged in a hobby is intrinsically motivated to learn and apply what has been learned in novel ways, just as the scholars of old have done. School, reviled by many a student, has earned its reputation by perverting the concept of learning and exploiting students' passions. The desire to cheat is most unnatural among students, a telltale sign that one's passion and curiosity for the topic at hand has been extinguished, replaced with a desire to rid oneself of a burden, the burden of learning only for the sake of becoming learned.

 

In an effort to keep my X230 snappy for a few more years until I find/make a newer laptop to my liking, I finally caved in and bought an i7-3612QE board. Posting some observations and thoughts based on the questions I had prior to buying. Previous CPU was the i5-3320M.

Setup

  • Debian 12
  • XFCE
  • 16GB DDR3L
  • Two SSDs
  • Hyper-threading disabled
  • 1vyrain BIOS with classic keyboard EC patch

Performance

  • Not literally twice as fast, but the improvement is quite noticeable
  • CPU no longer seems to struggle while loading Javascript-laden websites
  • Rarely hits 100% CPU usage, even on Youtube (sadly bloated enough to be a sort of benchmark)
  • Single-core tasks are only slightly better than before

Thermals

  • High 40s at idle to mid 60s when busy
  • Feels cooler compared to previous CPU, which I assume is due to the CPU usage being lower across all tasks.
  • Did not upgrade to the AVC cooler. Toshiba cooler works well and is quiet as ever.

Battery

  • About 4.5 hours of office tasks and light browsing from full to empty with an aftermarket 55 Wh 6-cell at 98% health
  • Wattage in the mid 9's at idle with brightness at a comfortable level for a well-lit room. Increase from low 8's with the i5-3320M.
  • When doing actual work, wattage hovers from 11 to 15 watts
  • 16 to 18 watts watching Youtube videos
  • SLT1 IPS display does consume ~1 W more than TN. I installed tlp but left it on default settings.
  • 65W Lenovo charger only works when in sleep mode or shut down. In normal use, however, it will not draw the full 65 W. A 90 W charger or a 65 W GaN charger that the X230 believes is 90 W will both work (my 65 W GaN charger worked well and did not overheat, YMMV)

Other

  • Make sure to enlarge the cutout on the black sticker on the underside of the cooler since the 3612QE die is larger
  • EC flashing will require a 90 W charger or a 65 W GaN that the X230 believes is 90 W.
  • Factory CPUs have BGA package underfill. I have not checked for myself, but it is likely that the upgraded CPU does not have underfill. This should not affect day-to-day use, but the lack of underfill will make the BGA solder joints more susceptible to fall and vibrational damage. Liquid may get trapped underneath in the event of a spill.

Value

  • With shipping and taxes, the upgrade costs about 200 USD and takes 2 hours. The total cost-to-date on my X230 built from parts is around 500 USD.
  • Do not think of this upgrade in terms of how much performance you get for the price. Think of it like upgrading and daily-driving a classic car. If it brings you joy to daily drive an X230 as it does for me, then it may be worth it.
 

I like my Linux installs heavily customized and security hardened, to the extent that copying over /home won't cut it, but not so much that it breaks when updating Debian. Whenever someone mentions reinstalling Linux, I am instinctively nervous thinking about the work it would take for me to get from a vanilla install to my current configuration.

It started a couple of years ago, when dreading the work of configuring Debian to my taste on a new laptop, I decided to instead just shrink my existing install to match the new laptop's drive and dd it over. I later made a VM from my install, stripped out personal files and obvious junk, and condensed it to a 30 GB raw disk image, which I then deployed on the rest of my machines.

That was still a bit too janky, so once my configuration and installed packages stabilized, I bit the bullet, spun up a new VM, and painstakingly replicated my configuration from a fresh copy of Debian. I finished with a 24 GB raw disk image, which I can now deploy as a "fresh" yet pre-configured install, whether to prepare new machines, make new VMs, fix broken installs, or just because I want to.

All that needs to be done after dd'ing the image to a new disk is:

  • Some machines: boot grubx64.efi/shimx64.efi from Ventoy and "bless" the new install with grub-install and update-grub
  • Reencrypt LUKS root partition with new password
  • Configure user and GRUB passwords
  • Set hostname
  • Install updates and drivers as needed
  • Configure for high DPI if needed

I'm interested to hear if any of you have a similar workflow or any feedback on mine.

 

Anyone here use an X230 with the quad-core mod? I'm looking into it and was wondering about the reliability and battery life compared to the stock i5-3320M.

 

Been using searx.be for a bit now and they had many results in Dutch and German, which can be expected for a site based in Belgium. But does anyone notice an influx of results in Russian? Did they change the server location or are users in Russia catching on to it? Yandex isn't toggled on in the settings either.

Not trying to judge security by language. I just kinda liked having results in a mix of languages I could read.

 

Banking apps seem to be a motif among things that don't play well with privacy ROMs. My bank's website does everything I could want out of it. I think I might be ignorant to something.

  • What about banking apps is especially compelling?
  • How often do banks put must-have features behind an app?
  • And should I be concerned that banks might move away from offering services through browsers?
 

I'm about to degoogle my stock Android phone. For the past few years, I've used it to handle the non-open source apps that I don't want running on my main phone. As I've finally weaned off GApps, I realize that I might as well go degoogle the rom as well.

edit: to be clear, I'll be using sandboxed Play services on GOS

But since that phone is my compatibility guinea pig, is it likely I'll still run into an app that demands unmodded Android with no alternatives? In your experience, has any bank or other service required the app on regular Android, with no alternative for the desktop, browser, etc?

 

As I understand it, X11 has many inherent security concerns, including programs being able to read the contents of other windows and intercept keystrokes. Wayland addresses these concerns but at the moment breaks certain functions like screen readers, cursor warping, and the ability of a program to resize its own window.

I am curious as to how the display protocols of MacOS and Windows handle these situations differently. How does a program in those operating systems gain permission to read the contents of other windows, if at all? What is to be done in Wayland for these functions to be more seamless or are there inherent obstacles?

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