Russell Brand

Uh-oh

The algorithm should already give you plenty.

The sink. It never occurred to me that people regularly brush their teeth in the shower until now.

I used to brush without wetting the toothbrush, but ever since I saw a fruit fly on my toothbrush, I’ve rinsed it off before using.

A noble goal in mind and I’m glad that the output of ChatGPT works for you. I’m not against LLMs in principle, but anything freshly spat out by an LLM is for you and you only. If AI was only used as an aid but you understand the codebase, document it and make it clear. Otherwise, you leave the assumption of vibe-coding open.

Mint is a very good option for this purpose. In my case, it’s Debian, but with a much more involved process.

The only ones who ask me to help with installing Linux are either very close friends or people in my family with whom I spend more time, and they tend to be curious about the exact setup that I’m using. I just so happen to have a fully-configured system image in a VM that I duplicate onto my machines, so I work with my friend or family to figure out what they need and how they want it to look, then I clone that VM, customize it to taste, and let them try it out. If they like it, I image it to their machine, make sure it’s bootable, work out any machine-specific issues, set a new password and encryption key, and make sure that unattended-upgrades is working.

Everyone else just asks me to help install Windows. I have a penchant for LTSC, with an obligatory trick up my sleeve.

For most people, nothing drastic aside from college if they do start at the typical age of 18. Not that things won’t change, but change will be gradual. Depending on where you live, you may gain the privilege to vote, join the military, drink, smoke, or be tried as an adult. The former two are up to you, but the latter three make for bad habits.

If you are on good terms with your family, cherish the time you have with them. That is often the first thing to start drying up. The next decade is a good time to find out what you’d like to do, special skills you’d like to learn, the people you want to have by your side, and the things that will keep your mind and body happy.

Nice, that’s a better rugged laptop than I imagined. Seems to be a fortified variant of a regular Latitude, so you should have access to interchangeable parts for years to come.

The implications of the ageing feature mean that I wouldn’t ever use it, or I would never leave once I let it run. Unless that piece of media features time travel that translates into the real world.

I’d love to go for a walk through the museum on those old multimedia encyclopedia CDs. Probably would visit some childhood memories on old cartoon tapes as well. And go for a spin on the Death Star.

HP also made laptops with a Blu-Ray drive built right into them. I got one for a few bucks at a flea market and ended up swapping the BD drive into my old ThinkPad.

I’d look for an alternative. Failing that, I would try every trick to fake that selfie.

It is on the back of my mind, but there’s only so much I can do as a civilian. And I’ve already got enough personal stuff to keep me busy before turning to the news.

The cheap secondary phone is the approach I have gone with for work apps. Powered up only when needed and doesn’t connect to my main home network.

Some form of lentil or bean stew. Best if served over (brown) rice and vegetables, which are also easily prepared in a rice cooker / steamer combo.

Great for my tablet which is too weak to run IronFox smoothly. One annoyance is that it’ll insist on a refresh if your internet connection is interrupted or changes in any way. The reason for it is not immediately obvious and neither is the option to turn it off (Settings > Homepage > Ask to restart on connection change)

I won’t pretend that I have self-hosted storage that is reliably accessible from beyond my home, but most people who have set up a self-hosted cloud drive report that it can be done in a matter of hours on cheap second-hand hardware, which would also save you on subscription costs. You’ll also be spending some time migrating files over in either case already.

A fine start, but I think the plan could be made a bit more sustainable.

1. Make a threat model. Hardware that is impenetrable today might not be as secure five years later as new security vulnerabilities are found. Who or what do you want to defend against?

2. If you don’t use an OS that phones home, options without AI-enhanced wiretapping will still be around for years to come. There’s also several existing layers of hardware-related wiretapping to consider: the Intel ME, AMD PSP, BIOS, embedded controller firmware, SSD firmware, input peripherals, etc.

3. I’d be happy to be proven wrong, but what you have sounds like specialty hardware, for which parts will become increasingly rare and expensive over 8 to 9 years. Ironically, common business-class laptops could be more future-proof by this metric, unless perhaps you plan on using one out in the field or in a metal foundry.

4. Laptops are fundamentally like desktop computers, just in a portable form factor. Any security measure on a laptop can be more or less replicated on a desktop computer.

Glove Prints

Problem: Thin gloves like surgical gloves can still leave fingerprints on surfaces.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glove_prints

Mitigation: Wear thick, textured gloves

Finally found an explanation for why my phone’s fingerprint sensor works through thin gloves.

Baidu and Alibaba might have you covered. But Chinese web services tend to require a laundry list of personal details and sometimes government ID to register for an account, if they’re even available to foreigners. Other considerations aside, the “security checks” and other knickknacks on Chinese web services are also just plain annoying. Is there anything that keeps you from self-hosting?

Have a NAS, Jellyfin server, and LLM on my LAN so far. Next step is to make them available outside my home, but I’ve been procrastinating.

6 to 8 hours depending on the day. If it were up to me, I’d have a polyphasic system for a sum of 8 hours: 6 hours at night plus a 2-hour siesta.

Never. Data privacy aside, I can’t be bothered to fill out yet another form or create yet another account just for one item I purchased. I also can’t remember the last time I had something break on me before the warranty expired.