Maligators maligating

If a company is particular about me using Windows for work, I’ll be particular about choosing a company that uses Linux for work. But I’m in a unique/privileged position in this regard; my job involves making it easier for people to use Linux for business or personal use.

This is mostly true, but farming/ranching is constant work once you have even a modest amount of land and livestock.

I grew up in a low-net-worth family, working on a farm that has been in our hands since 1873. I worked 3 jobs while studying my butt off, and eventually got a degree in Electrical Engineering with a Computer Science minor. I was recruited into various government programs and defense contracting companies, made my way to consumer electronics and medical device companies, then finally free- and open-source hardware/software. I now gratefully hold a very prestigious position while living full-time in my RV while prepping a fully self-sustainable homestead back on my family’s ranch.

There is no substitute for the beauty of nature in the small amount of time we’re able to appreciate it. That said, there are many many many to enjoy nature without sacrificing vacations for the vocation of fixing fence, herding cattle, plowing fields, eradicating invasive species, calling the game warden on poachers, fixing fence…

I’d consider it a significant advancement. Phones have much tighter regulations than many consumer devices and this may not necessarily align with Valve’s long-term business objectives, however, so I have some skepticism but would be pleasantly surprised if they pursued such an endeavor.

Who else zoomed in on the screen to figure out what game they’re playing?

Musk, Voldemort, and Trump, I’m sure.

Void cattoos

How about Joernathan? He is a dog.

If we wish to change the status quo yet ignore the ones actively challenging it, what are we left with? I can almost guarantee you that a Canonical-produced phone would certainly progress mobile Linux but would not be released as OSHW.

And it sucks last I heard.

I’ve been using one as my daily-driver since March 2023. It’s not a phone for everyone; I wouldn’t recommend it to my parents, but it doesn’t suck as long as you are not expecting feature parity with flagship proprietary options in a trillion-dollar market. Bugs get squashed over time, and there is power in numbers. Even the iPhone started out somewhere.

And the hardware is very outdated.

I’m sure that Purism would appreciate ideas you may have for an OSHW/FOSS-friendly processor unencumbered by NDA, that’s well-documented, has long-term market availability, doesn’t take half the real estate of the L5’s PCB, would allow more than 2 hr of runtime, that… you get the idea. Available processor options are limited if the device should be even remotely open. Spinning one from scratch is prohibitively expensive.

The Librem 5 is a Linux phone and already has open board design files, available here.

Like the backpedaling of Trump’s T1 phone to initially be claimed as “Made in America” until being publicly called out, not only by inquisitive people but also by a company furthest along in producing a fully “Made in USA” phone. The T1 phone marketing has been relegated to featuring a “proudly American” design.

There are alternatives to Google and Apple products. I recommend the MNT Pocket Reform if you’d like a full keyboard, or a Librem 5 if you prefer a more typical smartphone form factor.

From my experience, rushing the front of a plane during deplaning is common in Asia. I noticed it the most in Thailand, China, and India, but I’ve admittedly only had a few travels there. I’ve asked a few Asian natives about this trend, and the general consensus so far seems to be that, especially for China and India, there is a sense of “everyone for themselves” due to the sheer population density in many areas. If you don’t push forward, you won’t make it onto a crowded train.

I have seen much less of this in Europe and North America, except for the occasional eager individuals or small group. In those cases, I haven’t noticed any perceivable pattern in ethnicity. If I had to pick out a trait that comes to mind, I most often notice it in younger men. It could be confirmation bias, though.

GuyFawkes entered the chat

Disable suspend when the laptop lid is closed:

sudo sed -i 's/#HandleLidSwitch=suspend/HandleLidSwitch=ignore/g' /etc/systemd/logind.conf
sudo sed -i 's/#HandleLidSwitchExternalPower=suspend/HandleLidSwitchExternalPower=ignore/g' /etc/systemd/logind.conf
sudo systemctl restart systemd-logind

If you are in a TTY, you can blank the screen before closing the lid to prevent burn-in. After running this, come back later and press a key to turn the screen on again.

alias blankscreen='setterm --blank=force; read ans; setterm --blank=poke'

This flood was devastating to the area. It is also quite shocking to look up at the aftermath and see dead animals in the canopies of trees. My family owns a ranch that was fortunately far south enough to only be indirectly affected by the flood. We worked all weekend to clear debris from fences and swing gates and, thankfully, did not see any corpses in the water.

Death toll update:

More than 100 people people have died after devastating floods hit central Texas. Camp Mystic, an all-girls summer camp that sits along the Guadalupe River, has confirmed that 27 campers and counselors died in weekend floods. Ten campers and one counselor are still unaccounted for.

Source

And those at Camp Mystic did their very best to save the girls, even at the cost of their own lives:

Camp Mystic owner Dick Eastland died while trying to rescue campers during the catastrophic flooding in Kerr County, Texas, as shared by his grandson in an Instagram tribute on Saturday.

“If he wasn’t going to die of natural causes, this was the only other way—saving the girls that he so loved and cared for,” George Eastland wrote. “That’s the kind of man my grandfather was. He was a husband, father, grandfather, and a mentor to thousands of young women. Although he no longer walks this earth, his impact will never fade in the lives he touched.”

A Camp Mystic employee, Glenn Juenke, told CNN Eastland died “remaining a true hero until the very end.”

“Eastland tragically lost his life while courageously attempting to save several young children,” Juenke said.

Source

I wrote this suite of scripts a few years ago and still use them to:

1. Boot into Ventoy and select a Debian Live environment
2. Optional: connect a storage device (local partition, USB drive, etc) for persistent storage
3. Modify cfg/cfg.sh if it’s the first time using the tool
4. Run setup.sh to configure the environment into a familiar/productive state

The tools are flexible on hardware (more directed toward x64 systems at this time), and I (almost) never have to worry about OS upgrades. Just boot into a newer live OS image once it’s ready. They are still a work-in-progress and still have a few customizations that I should abstract for more general use, but it’s FOSS in case anyone has merge requests, issues, suggestions, etc.