Thomas

I can only hope that the A.I. bubble bursts in time when I need to buy a new computer.

Some context and discussion here: https://mastodon.social/@Edent/115048990801167629

Would be nice if it supported more languages and layouts.

I had a very similar problem as @Toralv@lemmy.world a few weeks ago. I repurposed a small, fanless x86 desktop computer as my new router. It has only one RJ45 port and due to its small size cannot be extended with a proper network card. As it has an unused USB3 port, I acquired a cheap Realtek-based USB3-to-RJ45 ‘adapter’ as the second network interface. It works without any further issues in Linux (Arch) and has no problems to handle Gbps traffic.

For the router configuration, I am using ‘nftables’ instead of ‘iptables’, as the former is supposed the successor of the latter. I only used the new nftables configuration, but there are wrappers available so that one can continue to use iptables syntax if desired.

For network configuration, I am using systemd’s networkd. Check systemd.network(5): Configuration option ‘IPMasquerade’ takes care of telling nftables/iptables to setup masquerading (rendering the iptables invocation @thebardingreen@lemmy.starlightkel.xyz exemplified unnecessary), options ‘IPv4Forwarding’ and ‘IPv6Forwarding’ renders manually changing ‘/proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward’ unnecessary.

systemd’s networkd has a built-in DHCP server; check option ‘DHCPServer’ and section ‘DHCPServer’ for that (same man page as above). This way you can skip installing/configuring a separate DHCP server, but systemd’s DHCP server has some limitations, such as only supporting DHCPv4 and lack of proper command line tools. For example, to retrieve the list of current leases, you would have to make a dbus call to networkd, e.g. via busctl or dbus-send.

Bridges can also be configured with systemd’s networkd, making a separate bridge tool unnecessary. Rather straight-forward with three small configuration files, telling networkd that you want to have a bridge, its name (e.g. br0), its MAC address, which NICs will be part of the bridge, and the bridge’s configuration like a NIC itself (e.g. static IP address, that the networkd’s DHCP server shall listen here, …).

Sounds like gagh.

Dropbox seems to be different than other companies. It is known to have migrated back from AWS to their own infrastructure at a time when ever other CEO was propagating to migrate into the cloud. Article is from 2019, though: https://techcrunch.com/2019/06/21/three-years-after-moving-off-aws-dropbox-infrastructure-continues-to-evolve/

https://archive.is/dgBUn

Microsoft tried the same idea about 10 years ago with Continuum, even including a hardware dongle: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Continuum https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/design/device-experiences/continuum-phone

Canonical had something similar, too, back in the days with their Ubuntu Touch and named it Convergence: https://www.linux.com/news/first-ubuntu-touch-tablet-brings-convergence-last/

Yes

From what I heard from a teacher who was on exchange to China is that traditional Chinese education values the memorization and ability to rephrase or reproduce previous scholars’ work, but neglects reflection and own ideas, especially if you are just a student. Western academic traditional to the contrast values the student’s ability to evaluate, compare, and reflect on previous work. Hypothetically, a report that would give you a pass with distinction at a Chinese university would make a plagiarism checker cry at a Western university and vice versa.

Many arguments call countries’ names, but actually prices are dictated by companies (directly or indirectly by their behavior) that want to make a profit. Sweden’s electricity prices, as a rule of thumb, are always lower than prices in Germany, so from an economic p.o.v. it makes sense to buy as much electricity in Sweden as can be transported south. Of course, that drives prices up in Sweden to historic level (but still cheaper than in Germany). Why are prices so high in Germany? Several reasons have been discussed here, but one I would like to highlight is that operators of gas and coal power plants, which are meant as reserves in cases of high demand and low supply, do not produce sufficiently much electricity: they simply earn more by selling little electricity at high prices than by selling more electricity at lower prices. The politicians’ fault is that they have created a mostly unregulated market where under the right conditions some actors can make huge profits at the cost of everyone else. This is why more nuclear power plants won’t help: even their operators will have to pay back the huge debts left from construction and thus also will try to maximize profits from high prices via low supply.

Germany’s government is a three-party coalition where all three parties have lost in recent regional elections, so they try to show their profile ahead of the national election next year. Especially the party which now causes the most trouble (by appeasing an opposition party in a bid for a future coalition) got close to 0% of the vote in those regional elections. The chancellor himself has an unresolved history of being involved in a large tax evasion scheme (“cum-ex”) back when he was head of a regional government. Otherwise, he tries to do nothing wrong by not doing anything at all (ok, he does the day-to-day business, but no inspiring long-term goals or other leadership things). In contrast, the vice chancellor (from the Green party) does a noticeable better job at explaining and motivating the government’s decisions. Unfortunately, even this party has people in leading positions where they should not be …

Please submit a second copy of that letter, but replace Windows with Android, PC with Mobile, Microsoft with Google, and Edge with Chrome.

My setup is smaller, but when my venerable old router died about a year ago, I acquired an Asus TUF-AX3000_V2 where I installed FreshTomato. One can login via SSH and dump all settings for backup. Likewise, individual or all settings can be done on the command line instead of the GUI. I have a script on my computer that reads CSV files with MAC addresses and more to apply changes in an automated way.

Did you just summarized the first episode of Gilmore Girl? 😉

KDE Connect has been mentioned before. You can supplement this and other tools by using a VPN so that both endpoints can see each other even if the underlying network does not allow this. My preferred solutions are Tailscale (managed, cloud-based) or Headscale (for self-hosting).

Yes, XMPP with proper TLS on the server side and Conversations or one of its forks (preferably fetched from F-Droid) using OMEMO encryption should be good enough. If you are brave or paranoid, give Tox a try: https://tox.chat/

Maybe the first question is what your budget is, both regarding money and time. For example, you could buy a pre-configured NAS from Synology or QNAP, which requires less technical skills but more money, or a home-made solution reusing used components (but fresh disks for reliability). Depending on your electricity costs, you may want to choose a low-power solution or something which you power off when not used. For storage, maybe a three-disk RAID5 is a good compromise. For backups, plain S3 cloud storage encrypted via restic is a good idea.

Those of us who remember ‘Alf’ may wonder if the name is due to taste as well.

If at all, you want to use Gentoo’s ebuild system, which can be seen as some kind of superset of PKGBUILDs. I guess one could write a Python script that “dumbs down” ebuild scripts to PKGBUILDs for simple packages (excluding complex stuff like kernel, KDE, …). The main challenge, as pointed to before, would be maintaining a table mapping package names between distributions in order to get the dependencies right.