It’s on the agenda to get a dedicated audio device this summer. I’ve been building up a collection of FLAC music to prepare. There’s 3 reasons for this.

1. I bought a Remarkable device a few years ago. Yes, they’re over priced compared to a Kindle, but I wanted to avoid Amazon lock-in. As an aside, they’re fairly Linux friendly, you can even ssh into them. Anyway, before that I would read physical books or use a cheap tablet, but the tablet fell out of favor because it was too distracting. Constant notifications, request for updates, etc. I’m so happy with my current ereader. I use it all the time, and when I read, I don’t have any apps trying to grab my attention. I’m hoping an audio player can give me that same experience back for music. I hate mowing the yard and having Siri interrupt my music to tell me about some message.

2. My AirPod pros were nice for the two years they worked. I’d probably grab another pair if I was still in so many Zoom meetings. Eventually though they started making a nasty buzzing noise and are now useless. I want to use my nice pair of headphones I’ve owned for a decade to listen to music.

3. I’m sick of paying a monthly fee to listen to the same 500 songs (if that) over and over. I’m old. I don’t listen to a lot of new music. The new music I do listen to usually comes from an article I read on NPR, not from the algorithms. I want to depend less on streaming services and have more control over what I consume, and how I consume it.

Yeah, I could probably find workarounds to all these problems on my phone by fiddling with notification settings and buying a cheap headphone adapter, but why should I have to? Why do I have to go out of my way to make something as expensive as my phone less distracting and more capable? I’m just choosing to slowly opt-out of that battle.

I’ve been a daily Linux user for sometime between 25-30 years. I’ve used most major distros and the BSDs. For the last several years I’ve used vanilla Fedora Workstation. After a while you just want to use your computer instead of tinker with it.

I’ve noticed I spend less time on Lemmy than I did on Reddit. Some of that may have to do with content, but I think it’s mostly Lemmy isn’t manipulating what I’m looking at to keep the dopamine hits coming. It definitely feels like withdrawal at times.

I am learning to appreciate the joy of opening Lemmy after I checked it a few hours ago and not seeing anything new and having the freedom to close the app again.

It’s been a minute so I could be misremembering, but you’re not far off. Another word for public relations (the shaping of public opinion) is propaganda.

Edward Bearnays wrote a book titled Propaganda, where he talks about the need to rebrand the work of Propagandist after it became associated with negative influence during WW2. From what I recall he used the term public relations, but seemed to prefer the term propaganda.

He’s also the person infamous for convincing Americans that we should eat bacon and eggs for breakfast. Another interesting story is about how he advertised to make music rooms in homes trendy, so he could help sell more pianos.

He talks about some of the early manipulation tactics advertisers use. Such as trying to sell you an experience instead of a product. Think of how modern car commercials show a lifestyle more than they show you the car.

It’s an enlightening book that shows that before the war, calling an advertiser a propagandist wouldn’t be out of place. Those propagandist manipulated us into calling the PR now.

Oh, and if I recall correctly propaganda comes from Latin and means “to propagate.”

I have a NAS with four 8TB Western Digital Red drives that are getting up there in age. I have been looking for a good deal to upgrade then with higher capacity drives for the last few years. Now I’m thinking when they fail I’ll probably have to buy lower capacity drives and be more picky with what data I keep around.

Maybe I’ll look into burning Blu-rays and CDs. I’m definitely not going back to cloud storage.

I’m already there. It’s peaceful.

Patience. Same things will work differently than you’re used to, and that can be frustrating.

Also be really sure to help true beginners understand software centers and package managers. I’ve been helping a lot of young people use Linux for the first time this year. Even though I mentioned it the first day and remind them frequently, if for example I ask them to install Java, half of them will download installers from Oracle’s website or wherever.

In 2025, the package manager and frequency of updates are the only real differences between most distributions. I’ve been enjoying Flatpak for years now and hope it continues to build momentum. It offers the possibility of shared effort between distributions who depend on legions of volunteers constantly updating debs/rpms/whatever.

It feels like one of the last hurdles to eliminate so much of the duplicated effort associated with all these distributions.

I started using Linux right in the late 90’s. The small things I recall that might be amusing.

1. The installation process was easier than installing Arch (before Arch got an installer)
2. I don’t recall doing any regular updates after things were working except for when a new major release came out.
3. You needed to buy a modem to get online since none of the “winmodems” ever worked.
4. Dependency hell was real. When you were trying to install an RPM from Fresh Meat and then it would fail with all the missing libraries.
5. GNOME and KDE felt sincerely bloated. They seemed to always run painfully slow on modern computers. Moving a lot of people to Window Managers.
6. it was hard to have a good web browser. Before Firefox came out you struggled along with Netscape. I recall having to use a statically compiled ancient (even for the time) version of Netscape as that was the only thing available at the time for OpenBSD.
7. Configuring XFree86 (pre-cursor to X.org) was excruciating. I think I still have an old book that cautioned if you configured your refresh rates and monitor settings incorrectly your monitor could catch on fire.
8. As a follow on to the last statement. I once went about 6 months without any sort of GUI because I couldn’t get X working correctly.
9. Before PulseAudio you’d have to go into every application that used sound and pick from a giant drop down list of your current sound card drivers (ALSA and OSS) combined with whatever mixer you were using. You’d hope the combo you were using was supported.
10. Everyone cheered when you no longer had to fight to get flash working to get a decent web browsing experience.

I really don’t agree with choosing to release with the UEFI bug they found. They describe it as cosmetic but those entries can last the lifetime of your computer, even if you wipe your hard drive. It’s bound to cause some confusion for years to come for Linux tinkerers.

The research paper looks well written but I couldn’t find any information on if this paper is going to be published in a reputable journal and peer reviewed. I have little faith in private businesses who profit from AI providing an unbiased view of how AI works. I think the first question I’d like answered is did Anthropic’s marketing department review the paper and did they offer any corrections or feedback? We’ve all heard the stories about the tobacco industry paying for papers to be written about the benefits of smoking and refuting health concerns.

You can connect your HDHomeRun with Plex too. It’s really a nice setup. Plex can work like a DVR to record live channels and even has some capability to remove commercials. I’ve started letting NFL games be DVR’d and commercials stripped before watching the game. It’s a much better experience if you can tolerate the delay.

I have hobbies that are considered masculine and more popular amongst folks who lean to the right politically. It makes it hard to form any friends group. Hobbies are firearms, amateur radio, and cars.

I haven’t enjoyed this season so far. I’ve noticed when shows are as mysterious as Severance is right now it’s usually because the writers don’t know what story they’re trying to tell. Several episodes this season only moved the plot forward in small ways. Im probably going to skip out on season 3 unless season 2 starts picking up.

Psych. A cliche “murder mystery of the week” show has no business being as wholesome, kind, friendly, and upbeat as Psych. I realized a few years ago when I was going through some personal issues and had started rewatching Psych that it was helping me deal with the stress, and it wasn’t the first time I’ve done that with the show.

Maybe a year ago I went to Psych’s first convention near Chicago. It was both surprising and reassuring to hear other fans go up to ask the actors questions and they all shared similar stories to me. People have used to show to help them briefly escape from challenging situations from dealing with the death of loved ones all the way to someone using it as background TV while trying to study in medical school.

One of the few things I miss from Reddit is the active Psych subreddit over there.

Also, the 80’s references are fantastic.

I bought a new 2024 vehicle last year with a manual transmission. This will be the last manual I ever own. I don’t expect them to be around by the next time I get a car.

I’ve enjoyed driving stick since I was a teenager. It still makes my commute more enjoyable. A good rev matched downshift still makes me smile. I’m going to miss the experience when it finally comes to an end, but hopefully I can keep it up another 20 years.

I bought a new car with a manual transmission this year. It has a cool feature called “hill start assist”. Basically for the first 3 seconds I won’t roll backwards. It’s been nice.

I appreciate your feedback. Moving more local is definitely a goal. I buy a lot of specialized books which I can’t find at small bookshops so I tend to gravitate to larger companies.

All that being said, I’m going to downvote your comment because I can find no credible sources that supports your claim that Amazon owns Barnes & Nobel. I’d be happy to change my mind if you provide sources, but I dislike misinformation.

I’ve been able to successfully degoogle, and recently came to terms that I need to deamazon too. It’s going to take quite a while. I’m a prime subscriber and use AWS.

I’m looking into Barnes and Nobel for future book purchases. I recently did a larger purchase online directly from the vendor instead of purchasing through Amazon. I plan to do more of that.

What’s been frustrating has been the small things. I needed a pill splitter, so I stopped at Walmart on the way home from work, dealt with some crowd and retraced my steps around the pharmacy a few times before I found it, then had to deal with self checkout. This would have been quicker and wasted less of my time to use Amazon. That’s going to be the hardest kind of benefit to give up.

AWS I’ll probably start migrating this summer. I’m planning to switch to Backblaze for cloud storage. I still need to look into an alternative registrar, and ideally very cheap static web hosting. I also need to find providers that have good ansible support since I use that for all my local and remote configuration.

It took years for me to get off Google. I worry it’s going to take even longer to give up Amazon, but yeah it’s time.

I avoid getting political news from social media, including Lemmy. I don’t subscribe to any political communities. Once in a while I’ll scroll through all active posts to find new communities. But when I do that I know I’m going to run into political stuff and skip over it.

While most of the political posts on both Reddit and Lemmy lean the same way politically as I do, they can often be sensationalized so I have a general distrust of those stories. If something does happen to grab my attention I try to look it up from a reputable news source.

I use Apple News to track current events. I even pay out money for their “News+”. It aggregates many news sources. I can block sources I don’t want to see, and more importantly I can add a list of favorites news sources for quick viewing and to encourage those sources to take priority in my feed. As for my sources I try to pick the most boring and bland news organizations available. Think PBS, NPR, Reuters, etc.

Nothings perfect but this has been working for me for over a year now. I feel reasonably well informed without a lot of the drama.

Apple News isn’t perfect. I still get pushed a lot of celebrity gossip news no matter how many times I click “suggest less”.