Bring back your Advocacy division. Lower the pay for your CEO. Secure funding from other entities so that you are no longer dependent on Google. Focus more on implementing better security measures on Linux and Android, specifically within the domain of sandboxing your open processes. Keep about:config and manifest v2 options available.

Great work. They haven’t commented on this matter for some time now and its good to see an updated comment on this issue.

I use Graphene OS, but do use Mull. I also use Vanadium and base Chromium. Each for different uses. Mull for general browsing (I have many extensions, but I feel a bit more secure by running NoScript).

Vanadium is for when I need more functionality, and raw Chromium for inspecting responsive design of my own sites.

The GrapheneOS community is a great asset to the Android ecosystem, and their mentality has always seemed to be security above all else (even above privacy), which is a voice that is needed in any organization.

Again, thanks for doing this investigation.

Man this game and it’s sequel were so good. Were they the best writing or gameplay I ever saw? No. But the creators had a distinct and beautiful vision and they saw it through to the end. Really sad to hear this, but yeah, this is why Streaming Gaming Platforms need to offer the Download And Play Offline feature. You bought it, it’s yours. If you copy it and illegally distribute that, that’s your prerogative. But ultimately, that’s for you to decide, not the Gaming Platforms.

Even better. Thanks, been a while since I’ve looked up specific ddg bangs.

Just use ddg bangs if you use Duckduckgo and you can search reddit directly.

!reddit search term

It still picks up latest posts related to reddit, it just searches reddit directly instead of searching Bing’s results. It’s that simple.

Well that’s annoying. One work around is to use a redirect extension like Libredirect and you can still search via the !reddit bang on DuckDuckGo. Thusly if I type into my search bar which has DuckDuckGo as default:

!reddit some new post or topic, it will search reddit for the search term, then when it attempts to load the reddit page, the libredirect extension will redirect and show the results.

Requires a bit of configuring and sure is annoying, but hey, no Google search necessary to get the up to date reddit threads.

Lol. Emphasis on the H in IMHO. I meant no offense, it’s a valid point.

Linode Cloud Services (now owned by Akamai). Heard about them on multiple Linux youtubers channels. Been hosting multiple apps and websites with them for a couple years now on their lowest plan and it works well. I’m sure people have their criticisms of them, but I’ve yet to have any issues.

I have about 25 or so shell scripts I use somewhat regularly and well over 300 aliases. I actually specifically don’t wrap package manager related scripts for no reason in particular, but many often do.

My rule for an alias is if the amount of custom flags gets lengthy, and I use it often, yeah it gets an alias. Here’s an example of using yt-dlp:

alias ytdl='yt-dlp --sponsorblock-remove all --write-auto-sub -f "bestvideo\*+bestaudio[ext=m4a]/best" -f mp4'

For shell scripts, my rule goes that it should probably have multiple features related around a single idea, that way you can use getopts to create custom flags. For example, I have a script that wraps very basic, but commonly used, git commands, chaining the classic add, commit -m, and push behind a series of read prompts, it has -h flags for help -l for a minimal log output, -i to initialize a new repository (even using github api token to remotely create the repo if you want to use github), and -r to revert back changes to a specified commit.

Generally speaking aliases will get you what you need most of the time in a pinch, but shell scripting is more powerful, versatile, but potentially more time consuming.

Others have rightly pointed out that these abstractions can sometimes negatively impact muscle memory, but IMHO this only really applies if you work as devops or sysadmin, where you are often responsible for running many different Linux servers, but usually this isn’t an issue if you have access to the internet and can see your saved aliases and/or scripts (but yeah, instant recall of native commands trumps notes every time).

Additionally, another mentioned using git to keep track of your aliases, which I totally agree with. Whatever you do, back up your aliases and shell scripts, ideally with a git repo of some kind. This not only allows you to take your new scripts/aliases with you wherever you go, but also reference them later in case it’s not possible to use them on not your machine.

Hope this helps. Bash can be crazy powerful if you take the time to learn it, and aliases are a great entry point to recognizing that potential. Here’s one of my favorites that combines mkdir with cd:

alias mkcd='{ IFS= read -r d && mkdir "$d" && cd "$d"; } <<<' 

Good luck, and have fun.

Its not about letting anyone kill me. I’m just realistic. I run my mouth a lot when it comes to Nazis, and I’m not a fighter. It stands to reason one day my rhetoric will piss off the wrong person, and it stands to reason that’ll be what kills me. Depending on how sadistic said person can get, there are worse ways to go.

I’m an astoundingly selfish person, and unapologetic about it. Makes for having relationships, romantic or otherwise, pretty much impossible.

I’m middle aged, dated, had relationships in the past, etc., and honestly just don’t have the drive to make relationships work. I do the bare minimum to keep my professional relationships in tact, which honestly is exhausting enough, and otherwise just keep to myself. It’s so much easier than when I was trying so hard to pretend I was interested in where another person was coming from or what they were going through. Now at least that effort ends after I clock out for the day, and there’s less socializing where I work, so there’s less of those kinds of social expectations overall.

Probably just continue to talk shit to Nazis until one of them kills me.

Y’know, a life well lived.

This kind of happened with the xz hack already. I didn’t look into it heavily, so this is anecdotal, but accordingly the xz hack relied on systemd to execute the backdoor, so if you didn’t have systemd on your machine, the backdoor was essentially inert.

I use the AUR all the time, the only thing I have to do is look for systemd as a dependency and avoid that.

The Artix team generally provides init scripts for commonly used packages that rely on init. So for example, if you want to install openvpn, you’d have to install it alongside its script so:

sudo pacman -S openvpn openvpn-runit

Installs the runit init script. It does let you know that (for runit) to initialize it you have to create a soft link to the service directory so after installation:

sudo ln -s /etc/runit/sv/openvpn /run/runit/service/

And then initialize using runit’s service manager, sv:

sudo sv start openvpn

Anyways, that’s just one instance. I have only had one issue where I had to heavily troubleshoot for an obscure piece of software that relied on systemd as a dependency and there wasn’t any alternative…so I simply modified the source code, recompiled the binary and did it myself. But I’ve been using Artix for nearly 5 years and that is one out of thousands of packages.

Artix Linux. Basically Arch without systemd. It has four options for alternative init systems, so you get to see how it compared to systemd (ultimately it shows how a more minimal init approach is all you need in place of systemd, and where systemd has stepped outside of init into what should be part of the OS space, like elogind, etc.)

The Artix team have done an amazing job of writing various init scripts to keep the distro comparable with Arch, have written alternatives to systemd modules, like replacing elogind with their own implementation, seatd, and IMHO is the defacto standard for how you implement a non systemd distro.

Working without systemd, even if you like it from a sys admin standpoint, teaches you what you lose without systemd, which for the average user isn’t much. I game, code, administer web servers, etc., all without missing a beat on Artix Linux, and it honestly has taught me so much about Linux after I switched from Arch.

I would consider jumping to Gentoo or Void out of curiosity, but Artix is where I’ll be staying for the foreseeable future.

Sounds like the intial pitch probably went something like this, except they weren’t realistic about the timeline.

On Android, from FDroid you can install an app called Seal, which is a minimal frontend for yt-dlp. I discovered it while trying to circumvent issues Newpipe was having with some update to the YouTube API.

Unlike Newpipe forks, which can use the sponsor block API but not when downloading the video directly to your device, Seal allows you to input the custom flags available from the yt-dlp cli, so you can automatically skip annoying sponsor mentions even on your downloaded videos.

This is even more true if you subscribe to channels using rss feeds from invidious, then simply use yt-dlp to grab the video directly from the URL. You also can use the noscript extension to selectively block the google video script and instead use yt-dlp to download the video. Using this over a no logging VPN like Mullvad prevents google from tracking your IP. Finally yt-dlp not only allows for use with invidious, but has a sponsorblock flag, which will cut out the mentions of sponsors in the video and then paste it back together, essentially autoskipping the sponsor mentions.

On Android, you can download an app from FDroid called Seal that basically uses yt-dlp, and can be customized to use the same flags.

HTML, CSS, JS, served via Docker, NGINX, on a Linode VPS.

Cool blog. Good code.