It is for most people. For narcissists and sociopaths the calculation works differently.

Ah, some actual government. Stay sane, Minnesota. Don’t get sucked into the vortex.

Windows feels less stable today than it has been for a long time. I spend so long, on every Windows computer, waiting for windows that have turned white and say “not responding” in the title bar. I use Linux for almost everything, partly out of principle, but largely because the Windows experience is so slow and frustrating these days. For the most part, the friendlier Linux distros do a better job of just working.

There are more privacy-respecting forks of Firefox. Might be time to move to one of those. Librewolf springs to mind.

But they are dependent on the continued existence of Firefox, so it’s still concerning when Mozilla alienates their users.

I don’t think you can call landlines from it though.

I only used Skype for one thing: cheap calls from Canada to international landlines with no time limit and without having to pay a monthly subscription. Can anyone recommend a good alternative? A lot of the options out there look a bit scammy.

Actually we are working hard to accelerate it.

“Call me a nice doggy one more time…”

Maybe if the USA weren’t being such an upfront asshole about screwing everyone else it would have more luck dealing with other countries? But that’s too subtle a concept for Trump.

Signal has done a very good job of making it easy to get started with the app. The alternatives (Matrix, Simplex, Briar etc.) are all more awkward.

Smart to stop at 5pm. I keep thinking “I’m almost there - just another 15 minutes” until way too late.

The company might one day pay but the individuals responsible for its behavior will almost certainly not, except if they’re still alive when climate change kills them as well as the rest of us.

Zuckerberg hung out with Trump at Mar a Lago and attended the inauguration, then got rid of Facebook and Instagram’s fact checking, relaxed their rules on posting hate speech and discrimination, ended Meta’s diversity initiatives, removed bathroom facilities at meta for transgender and nonbinary employees, made speeches in defence of Trump and expressed gratitude for finally being able to have “a productive partnership with the United States government”, while removing communications channels for employees and threatening them with being fired if they talked to media about any of this. He has gone full MAGA.

This article covers some of it: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/30/technology/mark-zuckerberg-meta-trump.html

https://archive.is/7Gvby

There are virus scanners for Android - I have Bitdefender on mine - but I don’t know how effective they are. Back in the day they were a bit of a gimmick; I don’t know whether they’re better now.

I have seen other apps from F-Droid do this. NewPipe, I think, used to prompt me for updates even though I had installed it from F-Droid. But I was always a bit unsure so I tended to just go back to F-Droid to install newer versions. Maybe it’s a thing some apps do but I don’t know why they should need to and I don’t entirely trust it.

I have the one installed from the Play Store, and it hasn’t done that.

Yes it’s very powerful and a bit daunting at first, but for most simple networks it won’t actually be that complicated. I set up multiple VLANs and that was a bit tricky, getting the firewall rules right. I like having VLANs so I can wall off some devices from the main home network, and I like the Suricata intrusion detection, which gives an extra level of protection and can help reveal malware infections on the network.

Also, as a very dull man, I kind of enjoy watching the dashboard and the logs.

I run OPNsense and it’s another excellent option.

If it’s any consolation, my Dell XPS 13 with Windows 11 and a healthy battery gets about 40 minutes’ battery life and throttles due to heat when plugged in. It’s quite useless. Dell cares more about them looking slick than being actually useful. I also have an older XPS 13 with Tumbleweed and it runs cooler and lasts a bit longer, though battery life is still nothing special.

Absolutely. With a bit of investment this is an opportunity for any other country to poach some of the world’s best scientists. And Canada has geographical and cultural advantages in that competition. It would be a good investment for the long term.