The last DVD burned was a release candidate for Debian buster. The last CD was a full i386 install of OpenBSD 6.4 for a ThinkPad T43p. Both happened in the last decade (2010’s).

I’ve ripped several music CD’s and movie DVD’s since then, but using it as a storage device just isn’t a thing any more.

It would be better to attract people who actually want to use an OS that is different to Windows, rather than ones that just want a Windows that works. Linux is not a version of Windows.

Absolute agreement.

Around the turn of the century, we used to say something like, “Linux is for people who hate Microsoft, BSD is for people who love UNIX.”

Not much has changed in the larger discussion about Desktop Linux. General discussion is driven by how “safe” and “comfortable” Windows users feel installing and using it for the first time. It’s a bullshit discussion.

It’s a weird relationship, like a new girlfriend who is always comparing you to the last boyfriend who beat her. She may even go back to him because he is familiar, without ever recognizing that you are better in every way.

Linux as a desktop is perfectly fine and usable on it’s own, without comparison to Windows. I’ve used it for over a quarter century and had a normal life, from middle school through postgrad and a decade-long career. My kids use it for everything including school and gaming and have no problems making friends and turning in assignments. People need to get out of the poverty mindset that Windows is the standard for a desktop. It’s fucking terrible. Linux has been usable for the desktop for 25 fucking years for those who want it. Windows itself copied many things from the Linux desktop, going all the way back to the first themes on Windows XP, and now there’s an entire Linux subsystem for Windows, all because Linux has been been better at package management and dependency resolution since the Clinton administration. Windows is fucking awful as a desktop.

They’ve also become really, really good at outsourcing R&D to other companies. This lets them outsource the expense of trial and error, and swoop down with a mature product once everyone else has paid for it.

15 years ago they famously patented, and then leaked that they were working on a fingerprint reader authentication method, and then they watched the Android manufacturers bend over backwards to implement it so they could say they did it “first.” In those early days of smartphones, being first to implement something and then claiming Apple copied it was a big deal for people who wanted to be first movers (today they are called “techbros”). Motorola Mobility ate the cost of R&D, was never able to recoup the costs, and ended up being sold to Google for their patent portfolio. By the time Apple released Touch ID two and a half years later, Motorola Mobility was a shell of itself, and ended up being sold a second time to Lenovo.

Foldable phones have been a thing for a while, and Apple just sat back and took notes on what everyone else was doing. Surface Duo killed Microsoft’s last attempt at a mobile device. Now it’s a relatively mature market (we have tri-fold phones for two years now and tablets that fold into a laptop with a bluetooth keyboard) and now Apple will swoop in and bring the rest of the market.

The money isn’t in being a first mover; it’s in making a reliable product that everyone can use. It shouldn’t be lost on anyone that Apple made a trillion dollars while OpenBSD (upstream for a lot of Apple’s ecosystem) struggled to pay its light bills.

. I personally think that a lot of this could be resolved by turning display brightness levels down, but people like what they like.

It’s the opposite: turn the brighness on an OLED display to 100% and the eyestrain ends because the flickering goes away. Pulse width modulation is used for dimming OLED displays – that means turning the screen off and on again in a very quick manner – to simulate a darker screen. It’s fast enough for your brain to think it’s a dimmer screen, but slow enough that the muscles in your eyes still react to the sudden on/off again flashing, which results in eyestrain and headaches. A lot of cheap OLED panels flicker at only 240Hz at anything below 100% brightness, resulting in eyestrain. Chinese phones have gotten around this by using things like DC dimming (lowering the voltage to the diodes) or increasing the rate of the flicker to greater than 1KHz (called high frequency pwm dimming), which is fast enough that your eye muscles don’t notice the flicker.

It’s enough of an issue that Apple followed suit, having just moved to high frequency pwm dimming as a “new” feature on the iPhone 17 last month. They call the feature “Display Pulse Smoothing” and describe it as:

“Disables pulse width modulation to provide a different way to dim the OLED display, which can create a smoother display output at low brightness levels. Disabling PWM may affect low brightness display performance under certain conditions.”

Note that the pwm flicker rate is different than the refresh rate, which has to do with how quickly things are drawn on the screen.

How it relates to e-ink, I do not know. About a decade ago, most e-ink e-readers got backlights and I remember buying the then newest Nook that had a backlight. I would read before going to bed, and as I closed my eyes, I would see flashing light in the outline of the Nook, like a residual effect of screen flicker. I am on a Kobo Libra 2 now and no longer have this flickering issue.

Regarding the Boox, this is a form factor that I’ve always wanted for an e-reader, to use on public transit. I think it’s a fine size for my kids as well. But I’ll wait and see after launch if the current version is discounted and get it from Taobao.

There is a national law called in China called PIPL, modeled after the GDPR, that limits what companies can do with the private data collected about individuals.

Outside of California, not much exists in the USA to protect privacy.

I’m not going to pretend that either country is not authoritarian. But a lot of the narrative about China is just propaganda. Here at least I can bicycle safely to work, take an electric car if I need a taxi, not worry about medical bankruptcy from a hospital stay, and not be deported because we are brown or worry that my kids will get shot at school.

Ask me ten years ago and this was a different answer. But conditions change (in both countries), we must adapt, so here we are.

Maybe my perspective is skewed because I live in Beijing and spent most of my life in the USA, but I think the US is worse on privacy.

Yeah when doorbells sell your facial recognition to the USG just because you walked by someone’s house, when your wifi password is stored by Google or Microsoft or Apple and sold for profit, when every company under the sun has been breached with no financial or legal repercussion, when everyone is complicit at selling your information while censoring your speech based on Trump’s whims, who cares about privacy? China privacy fears? If China wanted your information, they would just buy it from the American companies you “trust” who are selling it on the open market.

When American cars are being recalled because the engines are dying under 20k miles (Chevy V8) and $50k “rugged” vehicles come with plastic oil pans (Ford Bronco), and nobody domestic makes reasonably sized sedans any more, and our only good electric vehicle maker turned out to be run by a fascist, why would you ever buy an American vehicle?

Sounds like the pragmatic thing is to buy a Chinese electric vehicle at half the price of an American vehicle and it will last twice as long. So now the narrative begins to keep them banned, just like they did to Tiktok and Huawei phones.

No, but it is in the 2024 iPad Pro.

Fairphone 4 with PostmarketOS?

I love this.

Even a Raspberry Pi Zero is going to be faster than some of the physical beasts that served us pages back in the late 90’s and early 2000’s and they will run on just the tiniest drip of electricity.

Oh look a western article about China doing something and not casting doubt on it with the phrase “BUT AT WHAT COST?”

Carbon offsets are like net carbs. It’s just bullshit to make people feel like they are doing something.

I deleted TikTok a few days ago and I had lots of videos there. Lots of fond memories and even met some people on the platform and found my barber on that app. But it’s going to be another Instagram because the content curators all think the same and promote the same ideology and try to incite people over the same false narratives.

This is going to be like when Fox bought MySpace.

It wasn’t doing anything that Facebook wasn’t already doing, but it got banned. The CEO was brought in front of Congress and racially profiled, gave strong answers, and then got banned anyway.

Wonder why?

TikTok hate was a bot farm. The algorithm was always a reflection of the user.

Shame … North Carolina was once called the “Rip Van Winkle” state because it was so far behind everyone else. And it woke up briefly and briefly gave us a great public university system as well as Red Hat Linux. Then around the turn of the century, every racist boomer with a small pension from Jersey and New York sold their assets and moved down and bought up all of the old farmland and turned it into cardboard McMansions everywhere and made it MAGA heaven. That combined with all of the Fort Liberty homesteaders who spread out from Fayettenam like a cancer with their perpetual war contracts completely changed the state overnight.

A few years ago we had the biggest solar lobby in the country … the old families had turned the tobacco fields into solar farms and it was going well. But I guess even they have been crowded out of their own state. It’s a violent place now where people can shoot up the power stations to protest books and go unpunished, and spec ops guys can shoot working immigrants 200 yards from their property in “self defense” and not even be arrested.

It’s now just a stew of MAGA that keeps brewing to the point that the original flavor has been lost. It will only get saltier. The “University” system is now run by MAGAts. It takes generations to set up infrastructure like what was set up around the RTP area, and only a few years to undo it all.

Sorry North Carolina, I had to leave.

Because they are controlled opposition.

The only time something not controlled got popular was TikTok and you saw how quickly both parties went to ban it in 2024 after normal people started talking about Gaza genocide in every day conversation. The American Congress worked together to ban it even though they couldn’t agree on anything else.

It went from an Asian platform where Asian people in the West connected with each other outside the mainstream blue pill/red pill false choice and shared culture as well as history that isn’t taught, to “here’s the truth about Jesus” and “the world is flat debate me” after that vote. Now it’s full on MAGA.

Mastodon is harder to control because servers can pop up organically, but I guess Threads was a hedge against that threat.

Crape Myrtle is the Bradford Pear of our time.