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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • No need to tell me all this; I’ve been using Linux for more than 15 years and I don’t freakin’ care what’s happening to Windows.

    Now either you haven’t read properly what I said, or my wording was not clear - apologies in the latter case. Either way, I’ll try to explain what I meant.

    1. It’s pointless for Microsoft to make Recall (or anything) unremovable, since someone will find a solution to it pretty quickly. So those who use Windows, most likely will still have the option to continue to use it without Recall, in my opinion.
    2. I also highly recommend everyone to just use a usable operating system instead.
    3. Telling the average user to use a better operating system is one thing. That’s fairly doable nowadays, I don’t see basically any obstacle to that, and I wouldn’t even mention it, because you just tell them the facts, and the smarter ones will listen and think it through, the rest of them will do whatever they want, it’s their problem. What I find very problematic, is industrial environments. There are tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands or millions of workstations, terminal computers, controllers in companies of varying sizes, where it’s absolutely not cost efficient to switch from Windows to something else (well, at least not until they get into their first data breach attributed to Recall or other shady Microsoft services). They have highly specialized tools complete with documentation and support and everything made for the one specific platform they are operating on, and it’s certainly not easy to change that, especially without halting production. If there’s one IT advice I could give to those companies, it would be to start creating a strategic plan to drop their Microsoft dependencies, and then execute their plan. It would take probably years, but they gotta start doing it like ASAP. And along the way, while porting their toolchains, they could as well do it the smart way: make it highly portable, so whatever platform they switch to, wouldn’t be the only option. Should that platform go south just like Windows did, they’d have the option to switch again to something else, just much easier this time.
    4. According to my experience, customization tools to remove bloat (including Recall) are not permissible in work environments, and spyware (such as Recall) are not (supposed to be) tolerated either. If this doesn’t make them switch to a better platform, nothing will.

  • Just because Microsoft makes Recall “unremovable”, doesn’t mean anything to me. We’ve seen debloater tools, alternate start menus, someone even ported explorer from Windows 7 to Windows 10/11.

    I’m pretty sure there’s gonna be a solution for this in no time.

    That being said, just use a better OS ffs. I get it, some companies cannot easily switch from Windows because of tools specifically built for Windows, or due to strict policies or regulations or software support, but damnit, somewhere you have to draw a line and start a migration process to an alternative system. And maybe learn from this, and make your tools portable next time.

    Having spyware on your system is certainly a big no-no at companies, and probably the aforementioned debloater/customization solutions as well.






  • Check again.

    At least the T580 I worked on was the best quality laptop I’ve laid my hands on. My current M1 MacBook Pro is close, to some extent. It’s a great machine too, and obviously better in performance as it’s newer, but in laptop keyboards, ThinkPad’s is still no.1, not to talk about the track point that, to this day, no other manufacturer could properly reproduce. I worked with a Dell Latitude (a couple of years ago they were great), but the track point is shit on it.

    Regarding maintenance, Lenovo provides detailed disassembly and repair guides, plus you can get replacement parts anytime.

    Of course there are shit decisions on the ThinkPad line as well, but I still only can recommend them.




  • Buying HP products is bad investment.

    I only had the chance to two of their inkjet printers and one of their office laser printers, plus an elitebook laptop. In short, all of them suck.

    Much better (to me, the best) alternatives, that I can safely say are good investments: Canon for inkjet printers, ThinkPad T and P series for laptops. Those are quality products. Unfortunately I don’t have any experience with other office laser printers, so I cannot recommend one.

    Edit: specified which series of ThankPads are still good.


  • Just as a mildly interesting story, I thought I’d share:

    The best self checkout experience I had so far, was at a Japanese clothing store in Germany. There was a box at the checkout station, and each clothing item had an RFID in their labels. You just toss all your items in the box, it detects which exact products you’re gonna buy, and if the list of items shown is correct, you just pay and go.

    A few years ago I heard of a similar concept for groceries, but that one was experimental and I don’t think they’ve implemented it ever since. But this one at the clothing store was not a test, and it worked flawlessly.






  • In my opinion, social media is extremely harmful to society. Fediverse has implemented some proper moderation, while those more popular platforms tend to amplify what makes this world crazy (and eventually completely destroyed).

    If there’s one reason why it’s not okay that those platforms are more popular than the fediverse, it’s that at least the Fediverse has the chance to properly moderate content, while on those platforms it’s either unmoderated, or even worse, the quality content is oppressed.





  • I know this isn’t a popular view, but as for me, if Google makes the user experience worse (or blocks services entirely) for Firefox, I’ll just stop using those services. I’ll find alternatives for the essentials, and those that aren’t essential… well, hello, extra free time.

    It was a thing of the past, when different browsers rendered websites differently, thus some services didn’t work in certain browsers.

    Nowadays all browsers are pretty advanced, they render websites more or less precisely according to standards, so it’s really not hard to make a website work in all major browsers. So if a service doesn’t work in the browser of my choice (whether it’s intentional or not), then that service sucks and isn’t worth my time messing with it.