Adding my “Me too” to Vorta/Borg. I use it with Borgbase, which I like because it’s legitimately cheap and they support Borg development. As well, you can set Borg backups with Borgbase to “append only,” which prevents ransomware or other unexpected “whoopsies” from wiping out your backup history.

I backup most of my computer every hour, but have pruning rules that make sure things don’t get too out of hand. I have a second backup that backs everything up to my NAS (using Vorta, again). This is helpful for things like my downloads folder, virtual machines, or STEAM library - things I wouldn’t want to backup over the network, but on occasion I do find myself going “whoops, I wanted that.”

I also have Vorta working on my Mom’s Macbook, then have Borgbase send me an email when there isn’t any activity for longer than a couple of days. Once I got automatic pruning working right I never had to touch this again.

I moved from Kubuntu to Tumbleweed and really like it. For some reason I really don’t like RPMs and that caused some hesitancy when I thought of switching, but really I never deal with RPMs directly. Zypper is ok and I’ve made peace with Flatpak. I update the whole distro every weekend and I’ve tested out reverting using Snapper.

In the year and a half of using it I can think of two problems I had from updating - one is fixed by removing the GPUCache directory of an Electron app when Mesa gets updated, the other is with Zoom which I mostly fixed by moving to the Flatpak version.

I did this this year for wildfire smoke, and it works great. Having said that, it is not quiet and the way I was using it was to run it at full blast for an hour, then leave it off for most the day.

If you wanted an always-on solution, I think I’d actually suggest a commercial air purifier.

The model for most the content on the internet doesn’t work without advertising. The people who are “zero tolerance” on ads are going to prevent possible compromises from being made and just encourage an arms race. I don’t think we win that arms race, we get more insidious forms of tracking and brazen advertising.

A 500lbs. bomb doesn’t get you very much. I’m surprised how little damage there is.

The general discovery I made was this: for the small price of foregoing pretty colors and buttons and chrome, you can get a computer to do exactly what you want it to do much quicker. Assuming a willingness to learn a bit of shell scripting, of course.

I find the emphasis people put on speed interesting, because by far the slowest part of any interaction I have with my computer is caused by me just figuring out what I’m doing next. When I’m functioning at top speed not needing to click around, or say, having the perfect keyboard shortcut, would save me only fractions of a second.

Actually… to add to this I think the cognitive load of visually navigating is much lower than typing specific things it. I think this is why I find I’d prefer to click around my bookmarks or files to find something than just pull up a “Find” dialog and type something reasonable in.

I tried using KOrganize which had KMail and some other stuff integrated together and ended up feeling like it was a gigantic, archaic codebase just hanging on by a thread. It struggled a lot with Gmail and several times I deleted my whole mail profile to try to fix some strange bug.

If I recall, what did me in was that it would stop sending emails after running for a while. The fix had something to do with restarting Akonadi. It was really disappointing, because I love a good UI/Plasma integration.

I use Thunderbird now and … eh. It’s ok.

Doesn’t VirtualBox use KVM if it’s available?

I likeVBoxManage. Any crazy thing I’ve ever imagined doing with a VM it’s already supported.

So, to answer your question - I use VirtualBox because it does everything I want and I’ve never had a reason to look elsewhere.

“Chaser” because we live out in the country and use it to pick up our dogs who sometimes wander off and we have to go retrieve. Also, because it’s a Chevy. It’s Chevy Chase_r_.

Wow, thanks for this. Those are two very similar flags and I missed this entirely.

Everyone - Now that you know my passphrase, be sure to keep it a secret!

VisiData may do what you want.

Are you happy with the Kiyo X?

I ordered mine from http://clove.co.uk/ and they happily shipped to Canada. It has worked fine in Canada, the US, and Barbados (eSIM and physical SIM).

I like the phone a lot, but whenever it’s talked about I’m surprised how many people feel the urge to chime in on why it wouldn’t work for them.

I’d say my biggest gripe is lack of accessories. I paid the huge price for the official screen protector twice. They both cracked relatively quickly and there are pretty much no other options. I’m using a flexible matte-finish screen protector from Amazon now, but it scratches really easily and will slide around on the screen if I keep my phone in my back pocket.

When you put about:support into the Firefox URL bar, do you see evidence that your GPU is being used? I’m not sure which settings, exactly, would indicate that, but mine, under “GPU #1” has “Active: Yes.”

Lots of GPU-related options are also disabled, but I still get a smooth Google Earth experience.

I can assure you there are many women out there who aren’t picking men just so they can brag about their interests. If your concern is trying to find a partner, making negative, sweeping generalizations about women isn’t going to work in your favour.

I mean “interesting,” as in, have some depth, be passionate about things. I don’t think it matters if it’s sky diving or stamp collecting, just don’t make “getting girls” your thing. There are people, and for a time I was among them, who just do things because they think that’s what’s going to woo the ladies. But, how interesting is that?

I’ll grant you that some interests may be more conducive to meeting potential partners, but surely there’s something you care about that has some aspect that can get you out of the house. I like computers and I also don’t care to leave the house. It turns out, I love computers enough that I will tolerate going to conferences and meetups. 🤷‍♂️

Do you like dogs (Or cats, I guess)? The animal rescue I volunteer with skews heavily towards women. Help some animals, make some friends.

Of course, don’t just do it to meet women. If current me had some relationship advice for younger me, it would be to be patient and just make sure you’re out there doing things you actually like doing. And be interesting, which, comes from getting out into the world and doing things you like.

I don’t really want to give some of your hyperbolic statements credibility by replying, but - I’ve been loving Mudeer for tiling. I’m not sure if it qualifies as a true tiling window manager and my setup does straddle the line between tiling and floating, but it works great for me.

I call what I’m doing “time journalling,” but that might not be the correct term. Every day I get a new note, I have a keyboard shortcut that puts in the time, and I write what I’m doing. I also have a template for meetings. I use a global shortcut to bring up this note no matter what desktop I’m in, so I always have a note taking surface an ‘F10’ away.

Next, I have “work tracking” notes. In my example below is “LRSF 2024”. So any time I’m working on that I just link to it from my daily note and for the most part, that note just exists so I can scroll through all the work I’ve done on that project using the “Linked mentions” section.

I also have some tags like “PersonalComputing” if it’s related to making something on my computer work, or another tag if it’s a fun/interesting story I might want to remember.

The overhead of this system feels a bit high, but, I have been sticking with it since December or so. I’d say it has been most useful for answering questions like “What happened this day?” I have been able to find things related to work by linking to work tracking notes, but, I’m not sure how that’s going to scale as time goes on.

Actually, a second thing I’m not sure about - I haven’t been very good about integrating information I want to keep accessible long-term in with my other notes. It used to be if I figured something out about ‘ibus’ (for example), I’d add it to some “Linux desktop” note. I’m more likely now to just let it live in my daily notes. On the one hand, I might be more likely to write things down because there isn’t the friction of going to find the right note and worrying about formatting. On the other hand, it seems likely this information will get harder to find if it all lives in date-titled notes.

Anyway, so that’s all my “work” vault. I do something similar for a “Journalling” vault, but I’m not as happy with that setup.

A late addition: I also like using check boxes for things I need to get back to - it’s super fast to do and lets me get back to it later. You can search for unchecked check boxes, so at my weekly review I have a saved search that shows me all the things I thought I should do. Then I either do them or move them to my to-do app. This way I know if there’s an unchecked check box in my “DailyLog” folder, it needs attention.

“Your teeth/eyes look pretty good for your age! 👍”