A few years ago, when I cared little about my privacy, I would fancy buying a new car. Thanks to privacy concerns, I became proud to have my old car, which also happens to be highly repairable.

It’s nice and easy on the eyes. I conjecture that glossy and matte (as seen here) styles of skeuomorphism gave way to more abstract design since:

• Skeuomorphism is hard to get just right without being excessive and tacky
• Saturated, simple blocks of color pop out more, particularly on the increasingly prevalent mobile UI
• And thus also have better shelf appeal

If it were up to me, the red line would be when buttons and interactive elements are indistinguishable from text. The stock Android settings is probably among the worst offenders in this regard.

What I really miss is light mode that isn’t hated for blinding users and dark mode that doesn’t plunge the user into the void. Those “toolbars” look lovely, perfect for any lighting condition or time of day. I’ve yet to understand why, at present, designers insist on pure white everywhere when it comes to light mode. Maybe everyone is using the night light filter so it doesn’t matter? At least pure black dark mode makes sense for power efficiency on OLEDs.

Microsoft shouldn’t revoke license keys unless it’s a leaked VL key being spread around for piracy or the like. The semi-annual major updates seem to count as “versions” like Windows 11 22H2 (now end of service) vs Windows 11 24H2 (current). That said, it’s a poorly worded error message and it doesn’t help that Windows 11 will cry wolf at every opportunity.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

Makes me wonder how far the closest alternative, glim, could be upgraded to match Ventoy given the confines of GRUB.

Someone had mentioned that Fedora fails to verify when booting from Ventoy. Now I’m thinking if I could dd the media loaded via Ventoy and compare with an original copy to see what changed.

Wayland, but I’m patiently waiting for xfce to support it