I still have an official retail copy of pre-RHEL Red Hat Linux (5.1). I wonder where they would be today if nobody had bought copies back in the day? I know that they lost me the day they stopped shipping retail boxes.

Don't throw around the "freeloader" crap. I'd be happy to be able to buy a retail box again. I'd not be happy to dick around with license servers and activation schemes and phoning home and "Mother, may I?" whenever I boot my system.

This is it, or more precisely, the centralized platforms that have defined it. Got a niche subject you want to discuss and there isn't a place for it? Web 2.0 was great - it's a lot easier to create /r/$TOPIC than it is to set up and run your own forum for the subject. Unfortunately, once you're on someone else's platform, you're at someone else's mercy, as our recent Twitter and Reddit dramas have shown us.

It looks like the pendulum is swinging the other way now. Aside from federated systems, there are quite a few of the old forums that never went away, and I wouldn't be a bit surprised to see their resurgence.

Search is also pretty far into the enshittification cycle. Lately, I've noticed that both Google and DDG cheerfully ignore the minus operator. No more adding "-ebay -pinterest -tumblr" to clean up your search results! We can't let those pesky users have any control, can we?

You're not the only one to notice how smoking and cooling fans are a bad mix. Back before the pandemic, my lifetime-smoker sister came to me thinking that her laptop had a virus on it. We fire it up, and the fan is sounding like a jet taking off. I went through it and found no trace of malware. At this point, I opened it up, and found it was just choked with tobacco fuzz. After cleaning that out, the laptop ran a lot better, for some reason.

I'm just glad she didn't run a heavy-duty gaming rig in a high-airflow case. *gaaaack*

Aside from the already-mentioned exposed die, this could have been back in the era when CPUs were often in ceramic packages. In the 386 era, that wouldn't be as much of an issue (no need for a cooler), but ZIF sockets were like hen's teeth. Later on, you might have a ZIF socket for your K6, but if you botched the cooler installation, you could once again crack it. I'm always worried, even with today's metal-packaged monsters, but have managed to avoid breaking a CPU or socket.

Exposed dies seem to be more of a laptop thing, and something you need to be aware of if you change the thermal compound. Otherwise, I've heard of it being done by overclockers decapping their CPUs. No thanks, that's a lot of trouble and a lot of risk.

There's nothing quite like the light show you get from spilling your soft drink onto a vacuum-tube audio amplifier. Did that one when I was a wee lad and such amplifiers were the norm.

Not that it really matters anymore, but T-Mobile's (US) LG phones had unlocked bootloaders. The catch is, though, that running a custom ROM became such a hassle in general, and the Stylo 5's Android skin good enough, that I've never bothered.

Sucks that I won't see a followup to the Stylo 5, which has been rock solid. They always seemed to offer a bit more for the buck than Samsung.

To be fair to PulseAudio, ALSA hasn't gone away at all; it is just one of many backends available to PulseAudio. It also has some nice capabilities - as long as I enable it on the receiving machines, I can stream audio to them over the network. I'm already finding this handy - I can have a Raspberry Pi upstairs with an SDR stick receiving radio transmissions and sending the audio downstairs to my desktop. In spite of its rocky start, I actually like PulseAudio now.

As an init system, I'm OK with systemd - unit files are a much cleaner solution than init scripts, and they work the same across distros, and I'd take systemd over Solaris SMF any day.

That being said, this new home directory thing is a complete non-starter for me. I don't carry $HOME around on a USB stick, and won't do so, ever. I don't want the delay of decrypting $HOME every time I log in, and then there's the problem (already pointed out) of what happens if the machine dies during the process. This is a recipe for data loss, plain and simple.

This proposed new home directory scheme sounds like it could be easily weaponized into ransomware, perhaps even by vendors themselves.

"Hello $USER. We see you haven't kept your subscription paid up. Until you do, and fork over a $1000 late fee on top of that, we've encrypted your home directory with our own key. Thank you for being a loyal customer of $VENDOR."

Seriously, hands off my home directory!

I hope that Ix has made his getaway by now, since it might be too late otherwise.

I'm gonna have to steal that one...

I went over there on the weekend before Christmas. I first thought something was off when I saw how few cars were in the lot. When I walked in, it looked less like the Fry's I'm familiar with and more like a pop-up store that used to be a Fry's. I walked around a minute, kind of shell-shocked, wondering WTF happened, then walked right out. That was the lowest-profile "going out of business" sale I've ever seen.

My dad just got hit by that one this morning while using Edge. Killing Edge, disconnecting from the network, restarting Edge, and closing out the tabs was the only way out.

It's sheer stupidity that the "restore all tabs" behavior can't be disabled other than by a registry edit.

Just pray that you don't fall victim to some zero-day RCE in a service you run.

Indeed. I suffered through the G Stylo, which, in spite of its wonderful camera, fell horribly short in GPS performance due to its silly antenna setup. They fixed that issue with the Stylo 2, but took away the laser-focused camera (though the camera is still quite good), the battery life is great and overall I'm quite happy with the Stylo 2. I'm still running it even though it's approaching three years old.

I think some of the battery life comes from it using a basic 400-series SOC instead of something more power-hungry. That, and I don't spend my day with my face glued to my phone, but even when I run Strava (screen off) on an extra-long bike ride, I still have plenty of juice for the whole day.

As it is, I think I'm going to wait for the 5G dust to settle before getting a new phone, unless I break it. However, I'm not going to be brand-loyal, and while LG still has a shot at selling me a new phone, there are some Nokia models that look intriguing to me.

The link on the Github page points to rg-adguard.net, under an anonymous Russian registration. Sounds legit!

Not really. If I were even considering the idea of running Windows on a Pi, I'd rather get it directly from Microsoft.

Not only that, but even if your bootloader is unlockable, that doesn't necessarily mean that you will find any ROMS, and even if you do you might find things not working, such as VoLTE. That latter issue makes a custom ROM a non-starter for my three-year-old LG.