I’m trying to utilize a couple of core 2 duo macbooks for the same purpose and it’s not going great. I have twice the cores and RAM but they’re stuck at 800 MHz, because of no batteries.

anyhow, very slow and issues with a lot of codecs I throw at them. try mpv without a DE/WM.

awesome! now onwards to romsfun, 1337x, etc. and figure out how to install, transfer, archive, etc. then you get to upgrade the disk and so on, barrels of fun await!

air tags function by utilizing the ad-hoc network all Apple devices create - if you run an Apple device, you’re involuntarily part of this P2P network, even when your device is supposedly off. otherwise, said tags wouldn’t be able to send you status reports from the other side of the planet. that’s just how they and find-my-shit apps work, there are no alternatives to global availability.

all that’s kinda antithetical to the whole privacy thing, so you’ll have to balance the good with the bad and determine how much spyware you will tolerate to gain this sort of convenience.

sure, that’s also viable. I just never had the console experience, so was inclined to share.

come to think of it, I tried it a few months back but it was pretty slow (tried RDR1 on a R5 5600/RX 570 with Fedora 40 KDE). supposedly it’s way better now

yeah, that was a big dissapointment that it supports only like three FW versions, and even then it’s a tethered JB. but, that would be an awesome machine, very competent hardware, supports large disks, SSDs make a huge difference, newer gen hardware so way less heat related deaths, etc.

the way I understood it is CFW allows all models to play PS2 games. I tried God of War and some Tekken, forgot which, started up without issues. I also have some settings to upscale PS2 games, don’t know if that’s a CFW thing or if that’s standard.

also, some fat models have real PS2 hardware in them, so no need for emulation.

goddamn that’s a first! do those even have hard drives? what is the virus infecting, i.e. how does it gain persistence?

I’m sorry for being slightly off-topic, but ONE THOUSAND clams for an easily breakable/losable thief magnet is just bonkers to me. my desktop, laptop, tablet and phones cost way less than that in total.

you sure you separated your “needs” from your “wants”?

this is a nothing-burger. the same “article” from days ago, rehashing the same bullshit, quoting a totally unknown security researcher firm (that, conveniently, also sells some turd that’s gonna rid you of this scourge) with zero details, followed with less than zero fact checking from arse technica, like how did they establish the 1.3 milsky number, the “infection” vector and other similarly “unimportant” shit.

portals like the mentioned arse thing are hungry for content and are willing to publish any old thing that even resembles quality content. keep your eyes open, your wits about you, and question everything.

from a bot farm “news” site, linking to the shallowest description from a “Dr Web” antivirus of which I’ve never heard before.

zero details as to how those devices got compromised or how they got to the 1.3 MM number.

searching for anything resembling a reputable source reveals nada.

my god… thank you GloriousEggroll for all your hard work, but please find someone else to write the documentation. it’s hella confusing and explains nada, despite your best efforts.

anyone up to date with jailbreaking a PS4? I’ve read that only 11.0 can be liberated, whereas the current version is 11.52. seems unlikely I’d find one in the wild that stopped being updated at precisely that version…

recently I got me a pair of Soundpeats Air4 Pro; initially wanted to repurchase a pair of Air3 HS Pro that I had and was very satisfied with the sound but lost one earpiece and found out that replacing it is nigh impossible. so, Air4 was like $5 more and I wanted to try the ANC part of it. none of those models are in-ear headphones, I’m done with shoving things in my ear canals.

so the sound is OK to me (I have tinnitus and don’t hear that well to begin with, so I’m not an expert on judging these things) but the ANC is not what I expected it to be. to me, what it does is just flood my ears with bass. the music i listen to and the occasional podcast sound OK to me but I don’t perceive any noises to be “cancelled”, i still hear all irritants (buses passing me by, dogs barking, people talking, etc.) but they’re somewhat droned out by the bassy sound.

the way I understand ANC, it uses multiple mics to generate an inverse sound that cancels out the ones reaching the microphones. so this should work without music, i just turn ANC on and I “hear” silence. nothing close to that is happening.

anyhow, both of those have some app that you need to get from google play and I haven’t done so for either of them. judgging by the screenshots the app doesn’t do anything of value, so you’re safe to run it without.

edit: I just checked and it appears I was the victim of wanting things to be true; the website lists the feature as “Hybrid ANC” (emphasis mine). I’m not even gonna bother with reading up what their definition of it is, so I guess it was a con job from the start.

if they run hardware that’s not cutting edge, by all means, that’s the best solution as a first distro.

ubuntu is important as a stepping stone. myself and everyone I know that’s on Fedora et al started with Ubuntu. we learned what’s what and how to go about doing things and after hitting the ceiling one too many times, we tried other stuff, found better havens and finally abandoned it forever.

so I’d caution against any action aimed at hurting it. leave it be and know that it’s still the most user-friendly solution out there and the one that’s most likely to “just work” for most people. it’ll convert people over, whether from Windows or MacOS. once they’ve crossed over, they’re more likely to wander further.

a combination; some have swap as a btrfs subvolume, some as a swapfile in root and those are encrypted, when the system boots it requests the encryption passphrase, regardless if it coldboots or restores. restores from swap are way faster than coldboot plus all your stuff is how you left it.

on some systems I have a separate swap partition outside of luks2/btrfs and that one’s unencrypted. when it restores from there, it doesn’t request the passphrase and the boot is even faster. that’s obviously less secure but my threat model is a lost/stolen laptop, I seriously doubt someone’s gonna forensic the shit out of my swap, it’s more likeky it’s gonna get wiped and sold.

to fully utilise this tech, it’s essential to set up suspend-then-hibernate, another awesome feature that’s way too cumbersome to set up. the laptop suspends for like 60 minutes and if it’s not woken up, it hibernates to disk.

I’ve made it work on arch, debian and fedora, on a T420s, T480s, T14 AMD, MBPr 2012, each on luks2 + btrfs with systemd-boot, and it works flawlessly on all of them. the setup is super-involved and cumbersome though but it’s easily accomplished once you get the hang of it.

the links posted here along with the arch wiki is what I used. it helps if it’s not your primary and only device, so you have time to retry until you get it right.

I feel the 50 years support claims, whether in hardware or software, should be of little concern; you’ll grow tired of it, no one is going to rock the same phone for 10 years, replacing components as they fail and whatever Fairphone’s delusion is.

as to concrete recommendations, take a look at Xiaomi phones (Mi/Redmi/Poco/etc.). they ship with a bloated spyware called MIUI which is such a horrific mess on so many levels I can’t begin to count the ways it sucks. even moderately competent phones have trouble keeping up with the bloat, they glitch out, drop frames, freeze, etc. so people just get rid of them and upgrade to something snappier. as a consequence, they can be had for cheap on the used market.

the good news is, they have snapdragon models with super competent hardware and a good portion of them have lineageOS support (and by extension, many other derivative OS) - Poco F1 is one of the rare semi-modern phones that also has postmarketOS support.

the bad news is, the bootloader unlock process takes a week, just because; do yourself a favor and don’t connect this monstrosity to your LAN while you wait for the timer to expire. also, they’re chaotic (to say the least) with their model naming, with zero consistency what each suffix means (T, Pro, etc.) and it’s not rare that they do a model “refresh” where they replace snapdragon with mediatek in the “updated” version.

I don’t think any Thinkpads have AMI firmware, which is the source of this fuckup.

that’s radically different. although the serviceability is still nonexistent, that’s a very useable machine. just be prepared to toss the thing if anything breaks.

for me, that would be a deal breaker but I understand the itch to try it out. just make sure it’s not icloud locked.