I bet Nintendo has a lot of patent violations to choose from. They have a patent on such bangers as, rephrased from legal speech to human speech: “An air mount automatically turning into a ground mount upon landing” Source

According to Nintendo, if I understand this correctly, they have the sole legal right to make a bird mount that can also sprint on the ground if needed, because that sure was a special idea.

There are feet in the camera’s face within… eight seconds. I’m surprised, but I can’t say I’m shocked.

Aside from that, it is a curious decision to make the first person camera a woman. I thought their target audience would be young men? It’s certainly a larger potential audience than lesbians, although hey, not like I mind that choice ;3

As a German, I’d very much like to throw the first stone at AFD-voters. And the second… and third.

With how absolutely entrenched the CDU is in our political system, this is about as bad as you could reasonably expect it to be. The CDU is an overall incredibly dominant party and the others are often competing for second place, which the AFD has gotten now. Them actually competing on that level is frankly terrifying.

Yep, got Timeshift hooked up to make a snapshot each time I update my system and I can boot into them via GRUB. Haven’t needed that so far, thankfully, but it’s there just in case.

Btrfs because it sounded cool when I first read about it and worked fine so far :3

One thing I’ve found to be useful is just having my browser clear all cookies upon closing. It’s initially annoying while you set up all your exceptions for commonly used sites so you don’t need to log in again there every time, but afterwards you don’t need to worry too much, because once you close your browser, all the useless cookies are gone.

I did not use Photoshop particularly long, but I have been using the Affinity Suite both on a pc and a tablet for over a year now and can say it’s definitely quite good. Everything is where you think it should be, the workflow feels very usable with no major learning curve (looking at you, GIMP), and overall the only thing I don’t like about it is its lack of Linux support. I would assume that absolute professionals won’t be able to find everything they like/want, but if you’re reading this, chances are you’re gonna be more than satisfied, if FOSS options don’t quite work for you.

Wait, it doesn’t support caldav? That really kills the appeal of the convenience they provide as a one-stop-shop, as I’d have to deal with hosting my calendars in another way. I guess at that point I could just get SimpleLogin and use the rest as I have it, even if that gets close to proton unlimited price-wise…

That site is lovely, thank you!

As I mentioned in the post, my money budget is around 1000€ as a target, but it extends both up and down. I can stretch if needed, but if that’s comically overkill then I’d be happy to go lower. Time budget… not too high, but also not super low. I can certainly spend a day or two setting everything up. Electricity costs are certainly a factor, power prices here were some of the highest globally, even before the extreme increases lately.

Also thanks for the tip of the S3 backup, it’s probably a good idea to have an extra copy of important data off-site, yeah.

I still have my HP laptop from a few years ago, and despite running like crap nowadays, it still manages to warm my legs through my desk

If you’re an expert tightrope walker, you’re likely not gonna fall off. You can just do it without too much issue. When you’re doing it over a chasm, and you don’t plan on dying, you’d still probably prefer a harness though, wouldn’t you?

Edit: I’m not saying C is a bad language or anything, but for important applications the safety of actually memory safe languages is vital for lower-skilled programmers and still a good assistance for higher-skilled programmers, as we’re all humans and it doesn’t hurt to try and avoid the mistakes we will eventually make.

I was considering the VPN option, but as you mentioned for game servers that’s not reasonable, and for some of the collaborative tools I’d prefer being able to give people I don’t trust that much access, for instance people at work/university, to work together with them on whatever would be needed.

If I just decided to make the home server a home-only server, that would ease a lot of my worries. I guess I could get a personal one, with sensitive info but only home network access, and just rent a second one? It’s not like they’re that expensive if you’re just doing small-scale things and find a decent provider

Of course I can’t entirely generalize from this, however my 2080Ti worked perfectly out of the box on EndeavourOS. Game performance is also mostly similar to my Windows install - if they ran well, they still do, and if they ran badly, then the same goes for that as well.

Honestly, I’d say you shouldn’t do that prompt method. The auto type is genuinely great for the use cases which Excel is supposed to be used for, from someone managing their household finances to charting the growth of a business.

By all means, it absolutely should make assumptions about your data by default, as that’s incredibly convenient for the average user. You can always change the type of a cell afterwards if what you’re doing is special.

That is not what it was made for. It was made to do shenanigans with values like doing math on them and plotting graphs. If you merely want data storage, use a table. I agree, a database is overkill for most things, but that doesn’t change the fact that Excel is the wrong tool for the job. Maybe if they added a table mode where it’s basically just a frontend for a csv it’d work, but right now I’d still say it’s better to use a scalpel than a hammer, even if scissors do the trick just fine.

I’ve never used Access personally, so I don’t know if it’s any good or not, I’m just frustrated by people using spreadsheets for data storage.

This isn’t a fix. Excel wasn’t meant for this. While I do understand it’s convenient as a database, unless you’re doing something unimportant and small you just really should use something proper. And even now that this “problem” is gone, I am certain there are still more things that cause trouble. You can not satisfy everyone and Excel was just… not made for gene info storage.

Even if you don’t want to use stuff that isn’t Microsoft Office, that comes with Microsoft Access, which is a proper database management system. It’s literally in the same software package, so why do people refuse to use it?

I think that would just be illegal, although I am not certain… maybe it’s not

What I’d be more worried about personally is metadata. Sure, they might not know what you sent, but they know who you sent it to and when. The data is generally just gonna be “Oh, this person texts their mum every morning”, but Meta already provided message contents in an abortion case, so what if someone is accused of having an abortion (the fact that you can be “accused” of that now in the US is still fucked up imo, but that’s besides the point) and then Meta provides info that this teenager sent WhatsApp messages to a medical professional who can perform abortions. That would obviously not work as well as the contents themselves, but it does have value to the legal case.

In the end none of us have anything to hide… until we suddenly do

I know this wasn’t argued here, but I’d like to make it clear anyways: You don’t have to deal drugs or be a hired killer to want privacy. There are a bunch of reasons you could get in trouble with the government which fall into morally ambiguous areas. And sometimes we just don’t want our entire life being analyzed to have an algorithm decide what advertisement is the most effective in getting us to click on it.