It’s probably habit, but it just feels somehow wrong to blow my nose without a piece of paper snugly against my nostrils. Like trying to poop without being seated on a toilet bowl.

In general, I wish more things would have a common design that manufacturers get to reuse and incrementally improve upon. Take, for example, plastic chairs and office chairs. There’s probably a million variations in existence and someone had to model, prototype, and make tooling for each and every one of them. Sure, there’s varying price points, design languages, and use cases. But even for the same price point there’s at least several thousand chairs with the same overall look and feel. All of that duplicated work and effort, only to make several thousand variations, none of which have a distinct advantage, and each with their own completely solvable problems. Why don’t they just pool their efforts and design one example with as few flaws as possible for that overall design and price?

Perhaps a design where both mating surfaces are plastic with metal for the rest of the body? A lot of vacuum insulated bottles have plastic bonded to metal in the cap, they just have to repeat that with the bottle itself

They come in handy when air drying heavy, damp shirts

Reusable water bottles, especially their lids. They build up microorganisms faster than a petri dish and the more complex the bottles are, the worse it is.

Worst offender are the ones with integrated straws. Sure, they look nice and are a good idea, but cleaning them thoroughly is a nightmare. Also, I don’t know how people tolerate the ones with exposed straws or mouthpieces. Isn’t that incredibly unsanitary?

More generally, why doesn’t anyone except for Nalgene make reusable bottles without rubber gaskets? Gaskets get stinky, then you have to peel them out, scrub like mad, and then awkwardly stretch them back in. I’ve been looking for a metal water bottle without a gasket for ages. They literally just need to shove the Nalgene-type screw-on top into a metal body.

Bonus points if someone designs a gasket-less bottle that opens in the middle so I don’t have to fiddle with a bottle brush every time I wash it.

Same here. Gives me a new appreciation for in-app language settings, in case an app is too complicated or weirdly translated.

1. Separate rubber pieces from earbuds
2. Plug drain in sink and wash rubber pieces in soapy water, then let dry
3. Fold a sheet of tissue paper over and saturate with 70% isopropyl alcohol from a dropper bottle
4. Wipe earbuds thoroughly with the saturated tissue and let dry
5. Reassemble and repeat once every 1 to 2 weeks

A modern, power-efficient replacement motherboard for the Thinkpad X220/230

Would be absolutely fine if it were just a low-profile SBC that sat in the SATA compartment with some barebones connections out to the ports, keyboard, display, speakers, and battery. It can’t be that crazy of a product. There’s already million super-niche SBCs out there, literally the only hurdles would be interfacing with the proprietary keyboard (a solved problem) and the battery.

I’m jealous of my friend’s workstation that has an easily accessible filter in front of the case fans

I fancied the opportunity, but there were no other speakers of the language at my school.

When maximizing uptime, Debian is the no-fuss way to go.

No, I don’t want to attract thieves and weird fans.

Well said. LUKS implements AES-256, which is also entrusted by the U.S. government and various other governments to protect data from state and non-state adversaries.

Possibly overestimating the value of the data entrusted to me, but whenever I see that xkcd, I like to think that I at least have the option to remain silent and die with dignity if I really don’t want the contents of my disk out there.

I wish I found a guide like that back when I first made the move to FDE. Regardless, I was adamantly against reinstalling and painstakingly replicating my customizations, so I came up with a hacky way of tacking on FDE.

It went something along the lines of:

1. Shrinking the root partition as much as possible
2. From Live CD, dd root partition to external drive
3. Perform minimal encrypted install of Debian
4. From Live CD, open LUKS container of the newly-installed Debian and overwrite the root partition within with my old root partition.
5. Update fstab, crypttab, initramfs, and grub
6. Cross my fingers and reboot

The text editor shortcut on my taskbar runs a sort of autosave script in ~/.drafts. I wanted my text editor to function more like the one on my phone so I can just jot down random thoughts without going through the whole ritual of naming and saving. It creates YYYYMMDD_text in ~/.drafts (or YYYYMMDD_text_1 etc. if it already exists) and launches Pluma, which I also have configured to autosave every 10 minutes.

The other thing extends beyond Linux itself a bit. I like to joke that I have the most secure NT 4 / Windows 95 lookalike ever put together. Aside from the encrypted and hardened Debian base (/boot is also encrypted), I was in part inspired by Apple’s parts pairing (yikes!). So my coreboot is configured to only accept my boot disk. If it’s swapped out or missing, or if I want to boot something else, it will ask for a password. In the unlikely event my machine gets stolen, the thief must at a minimum reflash the BIOS or replace the motherboard to make it useful again. Idk, it amuses me every time I think about it.

Reminds me of a time in biology class

Q: What’s a resource everyone has access to?

A: Water

Skin.

Perhaps several years due to socks and shoes wearing out. The rest should last several decades, assuming I quit using the dryer.

It’s nice getting a glimpse as to what fraction of Linux users are using disk encryption. Full disk encryption is becoming the default on mainstream OSes, but not in most of the Linux installers I’ve encountered. Always made me curious just how many people went out of their way to encrypt their Linux install.

I personally encrypt everything except for VMs already in an encrypted device or USB drives that need to work with non-Linux machines. It’d be interesting to hear what other people’s reasons to encrypt their disks or not are.

Biolinum O for desktop

Liberation Mono for terminal