Paris/ins3 (the RuneScape botting-related owner of AHK) had a fairly checkered past from what I understand, but most of it was before my time.
The direction RSBot took under his leadership was less than ideal. I lamented the loss of RSBot 2 and local scripts. The subsequent versions, dependent on the SDN, were never as good.
Glad to see more projects building on top of Lost City. This looks super fun and I can't wait to try it out. Writing RuneScape bots was how I first learned programming, and I think it's one of the most interesting ways to interact with the game.
How are the PineBuds Pro, anyone have them? The Pine64 IRC network doesn't have a channel for PineBuds discussion so I haven't had an easy opportunity to ask.
To be honest, I've never actually used them for their intended purpose.
No idea what the comfort or audio quality is like.
There's a Pinebuds channel on the Pine64 discord, you can ask questions there :)
Mine have been great. Full disclosure, I deliberately don't use ANC... in fact, I may have installed firmware that doesn't have it. So I can't comment on that. But just as Bluetooth earbuds, they do their job.
> At this very moment of writing this post, I don’t care about the lack of Microsoft support. [...] [U]sing Win10 as a regular desktop OS on a machine connected to the Internet past the last security update, I'm aware that the risk of a compromise only increases as time goes on...
Do they know about LTSC? There is no reason to run Windows 10 without security updates: https://massgrave.dev/windows10_eol (pirate site but you don't have to use their tools, all the information here about update tracks for Windows is still valid)
Haven't heard of Nova in a very long time, this was one of the original customizable launchers for Android wasn't it? If it's gone this long without being open-sourced, it might be time to let go. Been using https://kisslauncher.com/ for many years and have no complaints.
KISS is a complete paradigm shift from other phone launchers. It takes some getting used to. It has made me rethink how I use my phone from time to time because I have it set to sort by recently used: I only have a few apps I use regularly it seems.
Not for everyone, but it's my preferred way to use a phone now.
I suppose it doesn't matter because there is probably a search or something, but I only use my banking app and children's games every month or 2. I like knowing where they are at. 2 swipes away.
Also, doesn't this mean more attention to the screen? I can blindly pick apps without looking at my screen. Makes it useful when running + audiobook + taking notes.
Yes. Search works for finding things once every few months. Or, I've found that they tend to not really be that far down the list, because I only use a few apps per month anyway, so "1 month ago" is actually pretty recent in that regard.
But I also have specific apps pinned. Messaging, Browser, Camera all have fixed icons across the bottom of the screen, so I could blindly pick those as well as on any other launcher.
And in some cases, it means more attention, but more intent - which I find good. I'm far less likely to randomly open an app just because I see it on the screen. "Oh I havent played this game in a few months" never pops up (unless I scroll the complete app list, which it still has).
It's a trade off, for me, it means faster (but not no look - but tbh, I never have had that level of accuracy with any launcher) access to my most common used apps, and a slight decrease in rarely used apps. So I save half a second 10 times a day, and lose 5 seconds once a week. It's a tradeoff that I'm willing to make based on my particular usage patterns.
Yeah, I was rocking Nova on my Samsung Galaxy Nexus back in 2012. It was the first time I ever paid for an app. Back then Nova was a huge upgrade to usability, but stock launchers eventually caught up, and by the late 2010s I was really just using it to make my phone look cool. I've heard it's borderline abandonware at this point, which is a shame.
I've found a very comfortable home on Void Linux for nearly a decade at this point, and wouldn't consider any other distro for desktop use. I find Void to be rock-solid stable and relentlessly simple.
The author of TFA hopped from Mint -> Debian -> Bazzite -> Fedora -> Void -> Artix, so Void is an extremely obvious outlier here.
Aside from Void, every other distro he tried was either a newbie-friendly desktop distro (Mint, Debian, Fedora, Bazzite), or "Arch, but easier, with an installer" (Artix).
Bad luck with Void's package selection is fair enough, but I'm not sure what he meant by "driver compatibility was a big issue" - Void uses an upstream kernel and driver availability should be roughly the same anywhere.
He's using a Ryzen APU on desktop so graphics drivers shouldn't have been an issue there. The MacBook had problems with Broadcom Wi-Fi drivers on Artix(!), but I'd wager this would affect all distros out of the box, and Void has the Broadcom drivers[0] available as well.
It's frustrating that he doesn't explicitly mention what he couldn't find drivers for on Void. I assume it was Broadcom Wi-Fi and he didn't enable the nonfree repository. In fairness, Void's docs don't cover any Broadcom quirks so maybe this isn't as discoverable as it should be.
Very well-written, thanks for sharing. Stories like this are important!
> I went on looking for one of those browser extensions that made it easier to read. [...] I had to find the perfect one, with the cleanest user interface, the best features, the most convenient, across all cases and needs.
Examining the supply chain of those extensions and whether they were open-source and reputable should have been part of the evaluation process!
Also surely there is no reason to install any "dark reader" extension aside from the canonical Dark Reader...? https://github.com/darkreader/darkreader I thought this one was very well-known. I still wouldn't recommend _using_ it, you remain at risk of upstream's supply chain being compromised, but it's at least not malicious by default.
Firefox has dark mode built into its reader view feature which works on most websites, I'd imagine Chrome can do something similar. I greatly prefer and recommend this over installing an extension.
The Gulag Archipelago is on my shelf, when I rotate back to Russian authors (big fan of Dostoevsky, Nabokov, Bulgakov) I will hopefully get to it.
Here's my log for 2025, most recent at the top. Currently I am slogging my way through Heinlein's "The Number of the Beast" which I'm not a fan of. Halfway done with it though!
Gabrielle Zevin, "The Hole We're In" (not my usual genre, enjoyed this though)
Robert A. Heinlein, "Stranger in a Strange Land" (pretty good)
Robert A. Heinlein, "Time Enough for Love" (PHENOMENAL, highly recommended)
Robert A. Heinlein, "Methuselah's Children" (pretty good, required to understand "Time Enough for Love")
Richard K. Morgan, "Altered Carbon" (very good)
Robert A. Heinlein, "The Rolling Stones" (young adult, but good all the same)
Robert A. Heinlein, "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" (very good)
Piers Anthony, "On A Pale Horse" (very good, never got very far into the series though)
Lincoln Child, "Full Wolf Moon" (okay, not great)
Lincoln Child, "The Forgotten Room" (pretty good)
Lincoln Child, "The Third Gate" (very good)
Lincoln Child, "Terminal Freeze" (okay, not great)
William Gibson, "In the Beginning… Was the Command Line" (good, but outdated, look up what he's said about it more recently)
Lincoln Child, "Deep Storm" (very good)
James Patterson, "Along Came a Spider" (not my usual genre, okay though)
Jules Verne, "Around the World in 80 Days" (from childhood, revisited)
I couldn't get past the awful sex scenes of "Altered Carbon". OK, after having watched the TV series I should have known, but reading it is completely different. Also, the main character is so dislikeable.
It has been a while since my last Heinlein, you reminded me I should read more.
Dostoevsky's Memoirs from the House of Dead is a good companion to Gulag Archipelago to show how things got worse into the full medieval sadism in less than a hundred years.
Besides the gulag is a blueprint to basically all the forms of how totalitarian societies treat their subjects, especially if you can see the pattern working in less cruel and plausible forms.
"Time Enough for Love" is the only Heinlein I've felt any inclination to reread in the past few decades that held up at all (and it's still a good read).
I don't use Ubuntu anymore, partly because of their habit of running experiments like the coreutils switch, but I must say I do admire them for it. They seem committed to pushing the ecosystem forward, even if they have taken a leaf from Microsoft's book and are treating their users as test subjects.
The direction RSBot took under his leadership was less than ideal. I lamented the loss of RSBot 2 and local scripts. The subsequent versions, dependent on the SDN, were never as good.
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