Brandon @bsharitt@fosstodon.org

I find my position in privacy as payment for services shifting regularly. Don't get me wrong, some sketchy app or website that wants to follow me around for the ad dollars is right out, but if Amazon of Google wants to make my life a bit easier and just shave off some of the rough edges, I might be willing to talk about a trade.

Finally got most of my stuff unpacked at the new house and I'm on my Linux desktop for the first time in 3 months. Sadly things didn't go smoothly in retro-land. The hard drive in my Windows 98 seems to be dead and and Commodore 64 was dropped. At least 3 keys are broke and there's internal rattling. I'll have to take a closer look tomorrow.

As I prepare to move and taking my Nextcloud instance and blog off line for up to 24 hours, I think I now have another privacy vs convivence trade off post post brewing.

Been rewatching a lot of Star Trek the past couple weeks(mostly TNG and DS9 so far) and it's interesting to see where they 'predicted' the future of computing but still got it sort or wrong. Flat screen computers, but they're really thick. Tablet computers, but they pass them around in stack like they're paper rather that single devices that can access a multitude of information.

New blog post: Am I bad at being an introvert?
https://sharitt.com/2020/08/24/am-i-bad-at-being-an-introvert.html

After the 5th try, I think I may finally have a working laptop. It's the cheapest I've tried too.

Had to return my new laptop and waiting on another, so with no dosbox I had to go with the real thing to get in some Ultima 4

Apparently these new fangled Ryzen 4000 series laptops need newer kernels for full hardware support, so it looks like switching from Ubuntu to Manjaro will be the path of least resistance. GIves me an excuse to give Manjaro a second chance.

Trying to learn to make some passable vector graphics in Inkscape so I'll have something to finally make a game with the Godot engine.

I've always had a lot of social anxiety and similar issues, but I made a lot of great strides through 2019 and early 2020 having friends I would regularly hang out with and being more willing to go out and do stuff. Unfortunately COVID made my old shut in ways necessary. I slightly worry that I may be have lost some of that progress and I'll basically have to start over to get it back, but I don't think I'll have to start over at the beginning.

Sometimes I wonder if I using Jekyll has raised to usability barrier(i.e. needing access to a real computer with git) just enough so that it's the reason I don't blog much. But then I remember I didn't blog any more regularly when I had Wordpress or Blogger blogs with the app right on my phone. 🤷

Gave the preinstalled Windows on my new laptop about 24 hours and now I'm back to Ubuntu. I will miss the the facial recognition login(unfortunately Howdy doesn't seem to like this camera), but that wasn't quite enough to put up with the weirdness of Windows. Is this how long time Windows users feel when they try Linux?

Looks like AT&T may actually be doing something about spoofed spam calls? I hardly get those anymore. Unfortunately spam SMS has increased significantly. It was a lot easier to turn off calls for unknown callers, but my iPhone doesn't give me that option for SMS(just iMessage, which I don't get spam from really)

Tough choice, an Asus Vivobook with a Ryzen 5 4500U and a better screen or an Acer Swift 3 with Ryzen 7 4700U with a worse screen. Both within $20 of each other, same RAM at 8GB, the Acer has a larger SSD(256GB vs 512GB), while the Acer has an integrated GPU, the Asus has a comparable discrete GPU. I've not has fantastic luck with Acer over the years, but usually have pretty good luck with Asus. The Asus also just looks better and lacks the chin of the Acer.

So what’s everyone’s favorite OS for the PinePhone? I’ve tried postmarketOS and UBports, and while they’re both a bit rough around the edges, I’m liking postmarketOS more so far, but curious if anything else runs better. I get that this is a dev device and they’re all rough right now, but it’d be cool to have such an open phone that’s also pretty usable. I wonder how hard it is to build AOSP for it? If I were to get into some development, I’d probably go for LuneOS.

This Raspberry Pi 4 is continuing to impress me more than its predecessors. It's pretty competent at DOSBox, though later games like Warcraft II are big sluggish, along with Windows 3.1 and games I play on it like SimTower and Civ 2. But still playable for the most part. Older DOS games play with out a hitch. Probably try to get some Amiga emulation going later.

With Roku's fighting with streaming platforms, is there a neutral streaming box with a wide variety of streaming service support?

Due to moving limbo, a RaspberryPi 4 I picked up to be an emulation box is now my desktop computer. It's still sluggish, but far more usable than my previous attempts as raspberry pi desktop usage.

Jellyfin has been working great so far, so I'm going ahead with full Plex removal. Feels good.

Finally got my Pinephone. Probably going to get postmarketOS on it and try to daily drive it for a few days. Can already tell that UBports Ubuntu Touch isn't going to work for me. I'd like to give LuneOS a shot at some point too. The Pre hardware was terrible, but I really liked webOS.