• 5 Posts
  • 55 Comments
Joined 9 months ago
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Cake day: September 29th, 2023

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  • I agree that there should be a way for whistle blowers to anonymously leak details of wrongdoings of the governments and/or corporations if it servers public interest. And I agree that modern surveillance techniques are way more advanced than few decades ago. However, so called whistle blowing is still against the law and the person who does it should be aware that it will cause a legal response.

    My problem with anonymity is that it’s being abused by “shady” people. It could be a dark web drug dealing website or some hard-core child trafficking rings. Unfortunately we live in a world where real things happen behind the scene and no whistle blower is going to change that. Here’s an example (Secret Key Cryptography by Frank Robin)

    Circa 1975, IBM proposed the cipher now called DES, the Data Encryption Standard . It became a worldwide standard for secret key encryption. As IBM originally designed it, DES had a 64-bit key. The National Security Agency (NSA) required that the key be reduced from 64 bits to 56 bits, with the other 8 bits used as a checksum. This made no sense. If a checksum were really needed, then the key could be increased from 64 to 72 bits. It was widely believed that the real reason the NSA made this demand was that it knew how to crack messages using a 56-bit key, but not messages using a 64-bit key. This proved to be true.



  • I think the closest to you requirements will be Grocy. You can define list of products you use, current stock, rules to add product to the shopping list based on amount, what to do when you move product between storage locations (e.g. move from freezer to fridge), etc. There’s also a mobile app. Having said that I stopped using it after couple months. Few reasons: mobile app had no offline mode, mobile app was not compatible with the latest app server version, I had many issues setting up current stock (many times I had to manually adjust the amounts after using consume/purchase option). Overall I like the idea but it didn’t work for me.



  • Pass - Proton team picked up light theme recently so I’m guessing it will available in a year or so :)

    Drive - had no described issues. I can search photos using its names. However, photos are not searchable through the web app.

    VPN - true, dark mode only which sucks but honestly, I open it only where there’s an issue with the VPN which is rare nowadays.

    What I can say it that Proton products are for somehow “aware” users, which are not discourage by occasional issues. I would say it’s a late beta state of things. I’ve been a happy Proton customer for quite few years and cannot complain about it. The best thing is that when I had an issue, I’ve raised a support ticket and within a day or two it got fixed. Or if it was an user(aka me) issue, it got explained with as much details as I needed.


  • I’ve been using GrapheneOS for over a year. I cannot complain about it, it works as advertised and it does it the best way possible. However, here’s the list of things I find annoying/missing. Keep in mind, this is a subjective list.

    • some (quite a lot of for me) apps require Google Play Framework (or whatever the name is) to work properly
    • Aurora store tends to be unavailable randomly, which makes installation/updates difficult sometimes
    • some features are wonky, e.g. GrapheneOS has no issues with disabling wifi when leaving my home but I was never able to enable wifi when I’m back home.
    • default apps work ok-ish but it’s far from good old iOS/Android experience
    • Android Auto experience was a shitshow for me


  • Linux distros are barely just getting their feet wet in the tablet/mobile world. I would say “barely just getting their toe wet” :)

    Getting back to the point. I loved the way iPad was integrated with the stylus (Apple Pencil). My use case for a tablet back then was to write/draw stuff I did “remotely” and export all my, let’s call it drawings, to mac and work on that. Today’s example. I was planning a garden layout. It took me way too much time to get the stylus working the way I expected and when it did I had more issues trying to export the drawings to a usable format* I would be better off with a good old pen and paper.

    • I’m not a pro Linux user so there’s a good chance I missed something








  • I have a mild speech impairment. I don’t stutter on a daily basis but when I’m under heavy stress or when I’m tired I tend to stutter-ish. On top of that I live in a country where I don’t speak in my native language and sometimes I feel self-conscious about small mistakes I make (like using the wrong word or messing up the grammar) which induces the stress response. It’s not a big deal but it makes me crazy when I can’t express my thoughts in public.