European. Contrarian liberal. Insufferable green. History graduate. I never downvote opinions and I do not engage with people who downvote mine. Low-effort comments with vulgarity or snark will also be (politely) ignored.

  • 7 Posts
  • 49 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • It does seem so, but I’m guessing it’s mostly a tourism venue at this point.

    What I find interesting is how the experiment effectively taught us some humility:

    But the most important lesson from the biospherians’ experience, experts agree, is the realisation of how difficult it would be to live anywhere else than on Earth. Humans can’t exist in isolation; they come in “biospheric packages”, as Nelson puts it, and recreating these complex systems is no easy task. While Tilman reckons that some of the problems may have been solvable, it was clear during his visit to the facility that it was a long way away from being able to sustain human life. “It really impacted me when I saw that, because… my initial guess was that you would probably make it work,” he says. Now, “I firmly believe that this really is our only planet ever”.











  • If you do, then also choose full-disk encryption. It doesn’t make sense to close a small hole only to leave the big one gaping wide open. And yet on Linux FDE is mostly off by default, even in today’s era of encryption, even on laptops. Personally I don’t understand it.

    Once you’re encrypted, then Secure Boot (if you even have the option of it) mitigates against the “evil maid attack”. To get access to your encrypted computer, the attacker will need physical access to it twice: first to swap out the bootloader, then to harvest the password you unsuspectingly passed to their freshly installed malware.

    For most targets (i.e. you, probably), this would all be far too much trouble. But technically it closes a loophole: it means that you can go to Russia as a spy or a journalist and not have to carry your laptop on your person at all times.












  • An almost exact question was asked here about 3 days ago, maybe begin there.

    Almost any Windows machine with an Intel sticker on it will work so it really depends on your priorities:

    • ethics - buy from a Linux specialist like Tuxedo to avoid paying Microsoft
    • safety (no surprises) - buy whatever your big-box retailer is selling at your budget
    • bang for buck - buy a Lenovo ThinkPad second-hand


  • Use dark mode at night and you won’t need Redshift any more. It’s only relevant for white screens.

    PS: This IS in fact the optimal solution - if not for you then for others. I used Redshift for years, suffering its periodic breakages, babysitting the timezone issue, and it was worth it, because a retina-searing reddish-white screen is better than a retina-searing whitish-white screen. But a dark screen is SO much better for my eyes than either of those. I can’t believe I waited so many years to do that and I’m never going back.