hersh

It's as open as most Android brands. I don't use any of Boox's services or apps. I installed F-Droid and use open-source apps from there. I use Librera as my ebook reader, with Syncthing to sync my book library between my desktop, ereader, and phone. It's possible to set up the Play Store but I don't bother, personally.

It's not a 100% smooth experience but I'm very happy with the F-Droid compatibility. I absolutely refuse to get locked into a walled garden.

I've done this to give myself something akin to Cliff's Notes, to review each chapter after I read it. I find it extremely useful, particularly for more difficult reads. Reading philosophy texts that were written a hundred years ago and haphazardly translated 75 years ago can be a challenge.

That said, I have not tried to build this directly into my ereader and I haven't used Boox's specific service. But the concept has clear and tested value.

I would be interested to see how it summarizes historical texts about these topics. I don't need facts (much less opinions) baked into the LLM. Facts should come from the user-provided source material alone. Anything else would severely hamper its usefulness.

Related feature on my wish list: I'd love a way to basically fork a feed based on regex pattern matching. This would be useful for some premium feeds that lump multiple podcasts together. For example, one of my Patreon feeds includes three shows: the ad-free main feed, the first-tier weekly premium feed, and the second-tier monthly premium feed.

I don't want to filter them out because I DO want to listen to all of them, but for organizational purposes I don't want them lumped together. I'd prefer to display these as two or three separate podcasts in my display.

Another example is the Maximum Fun premium BoCo feed. They include the bonus content for ALL their shows (which is...a lot) in a single feed. I only listen to about half a dozen, and even that is a bit of a mess in one feed!

BTRFS can work across multiple disks much like ZFS. It supports RAID 0/1/10 but I can't tell you about performance relative to ZFS.

Just be sure you do NOT use BTRFS's RAID5/6. It's notoriously buggy and even the official docs warn that it is only for testing/development purposes. See https://btrfs.readthedocs.io/en/latest/btrfs-man5.html#raid56-status-and-recommended-practices

Edit: Another interesting thing to note between the two file systems is deduplication. ZFS supports automatic deduplication (although it requires a lot of memory). BTRFS supports deduplication but does not have built-in automatic dedup. You can use external tools to perform either file-level or block-level deduplication on BTRFS volumes: https://btrfs.readthedocs.io/en/latest/Deduplication.html

Good advice!

This is also available with BTRFS. Personally I am leveraging this feature via Snapper, simply because it was the default on OpenSuse and was good enough that I never bothered looking into alternatives. I've heard good things about Timeshift, too.

This has saved my butt a couple times. I'll never go back to a filesystem that doesn't support snapshots.

I really liked ZFS when I used it many years ago, but eventually I decided to move to BTRFS since it has built-in kernel support. I miss RAIDZ, though. :(

If you got a problem, reinstall and do the same stuff again, you’ll almost certainly get the same problem again

Sure, but nobody's likely to do that. If I wiped my system now, I doubt I could get it back to exactly the same state if I tried. There are way too many moving parts. There are changes I've forgotten I ever applied, or only applied accidentally. And there are things I'd do differently if I had the chance to start over (like installing something via a different one of the half-dozen-or-so methods of installing packages on my distro).

For example, I have Docker installed because I once thought a problem I had might have been Podman-specific. Turned out it was not. But I never did the surgery necessary to fully excise Docker. I probably won't bother unless and until there is a practical reason to.

They have a big IRL ad campaign in major US cities. See https://mullvad.net/en/blog/advertising-that-targets-everyone

These ads certainly aren't the worst, but they're still a bit misleading. Using a VPN is not going to prevent tracking in general. Your phone apps will still send GPS data to all the same places. Web sites will still use all the same cookies. Facebook is still gonna be Facebook. 🤷

That said, Mullvad does include domain-based ad and tracker blocking with their DNS server (which is free and available to the public, btw), and that's also optional on the VPN, so it does help to a point.

(Pinging @countrypunk@slrpnk.net to avoid double-replying. )

Sure. I'm referring to the ones that run big ad campaigns, like Nord and Mullvad. They tend to overstate how a VPN can protect you, sometimes in ways that barely make sense. There is no epidemic of criminals stealing personal credit card information over insecure wi-fi, for example. The ads play into ignorance and fear.

That said, yeah, I'd rather be on a VPN when on a public wi-fi network. But I'm not really worried about someone sniffing my encrypted HTTPS traffic (which is pretty much everything nowadays; Firefox by default won't even load unencrypted web sites).

Some VPNs allow multi-hopping, similar to Tor. I couldn't give you an exhaustive list but most popular ones support this. Mullvad and Proton do, for example. There are also strategies to add noise into VPN traffic.

This is not a silver bullet, of course. Tor has similar problems as you describe if an adversary has visibility into enough nodes. As always, this comes down to your threat model.

On the one hand, I find the advertising of VPNs outright dishonest. On the other hand, I would trust any reputable VPN provider much more than I trust my ISP or cell carrier.

Great points, thanks.

Can you clarify what you mean by "local decryption"? I thought Proton and Tuta work pretty much the same way, but perhaps there's a distinction I'm missing.

One thing I like about Tuta is that it has the option to cache your messages in localstorage in your browser so you can do full-text search. FWIW, I think Proton added a similar feature recently, though I have not tried it. I imagine neither would work very well with large mailboxes; probably better to configure a real email client.

Do they offer cloud storage now? From what I can see on their web site, it's 500GB...just for email. I mean sure, that's cool, but it would take me several lifetimes to accumulate 500GB of email so it's not much of a selling point to me.

It's a good email service, anyway. I've been using the free tier for a few years. Similar to Proton, and in theory Tuta is more private because they encrypt the headers as well as the message body.

First I'd like to clarify how I interpreted OP's phrase: I think they meant "check out book" to specifically mean "borrow from the library". Seems like you came to the same interpretation, but I just wanted to mention that for anyone else who might be confused reading this, because "check out" has broader usage that could just mean "look at" without any implied reference to a library,

In that context, "visiting the library" is a prerequisite of checking out a book, so it's less extreme. You cannot possibly check out a book without first visiting the library, but you can (as you point out) visit the library without checking out books.

"Nobody visits the library" would imply that nobody checks out books, while "nobody checks out books" does not imply that nobody visits the library.

The part after "let alone" should already logically follow from the part before. If you were to break down the task into steps, it should follow the pattern of "nobody finishes step 1, let alone step 2".

Step 1: Visit a library

Step 2: Check out a book from the library

Does that make sense?