It's worth noting that you can opt out of that too. You should have received a privacy disclosure with every credit card you've opened containing instructions on how to opt out. Usually you have to make a phone call - you won't find the option in your online banking portal.

GrapheneOS has a feature called contact scopes[1] that lets you pick which contacts apps have access to. It's great!

[1]: https://grapheneos.org/usage#contact-scopes

GrapheneOS only supports phones for as long as Google does, though.

So, 7 years!

I was thinking of getting a 7a for graphene, but I think I'll wait for the 8 to get graphene support and spring for that.

From what I can tell graphene really is a much more secure OS from an encryption and tracking perspective. Its multi-profile configuration and Google play sandboxing alone would be worth it.

Yeah, it is definitely really nice if you care about privacy/security and can live with some minor limitations. I just switched back to stock Android from GrapheneOS though, to get Android Auto working. My car's built-in navigation just isn't good enough any more.

Yeah, that is annoying that Android Auto requires such permissions.

OTOH, I have used it twice in two models of car, and in both instances it would stop working until I unplugged and replugged the phone. I just keep the phone visible in the cup holder now.

Personally, my NixOS system is wiped every time it boots up [1]. So no, I have no need for a tool like sysclean.

[1]: https://grahamc.com/blog/erase-your-darlings/

Nix works by putting its packages into some installed folder, and then building a system by symlinking to those packages.

You'd retain the nix package storage between boots (so as to avoid having to redownload/rebuild), and setting the system up just involves setting up some symlinks. - GrahamC's blogpost discusses this in a bit more detail.

"Fresh system each run" isn't too exotic compared to image-based approaches like launching a VM on AWS, or running a Docker image.

Thanks for clarifying!

No, since all your system is declarative all the software and related configuration is redone at each reboot. Just the state is removed.

To avoid losing data you want to keep you can also mark directories or files to be stored in the permanent storage.

Take a look at the nixos-impermanence that automates this task to you.

I just did the same, and I think those Rolands are basically the cheapest options that will actually serve you well over the medium to long term.

If SyncThing works for your use case, I agree that you should choose it over git-annex. However, git-annex is also much more flexible than SyncThing.

For example, if you want to protect your music collection from accidental changes and are willing to use it manually from the command line, git-annex will work better. Or when I used it for my music, I had a branch for all my lossless files, and then a separate branch for curated and transcoded files that I used for syncing to devices with less disc space. (Perhaps not the most useful example, but the point is that there are a bunch of git-annex workflows that have no parallel in SyncThing or similar tools.)

>if you want to protect your music collection from accidental changes and are willing to use it manually from the command line, git-annex will work better.

that's what plain old backups are for, surely? if I screw something up I can just restore from backup.

and anyway this is just not something that has ever caused me a problem in the first place. how often do you even do something that has a chance of fucking up your music collection in particular?

It's not always obvious when music players are changing the metadata of your files vs storing stuff in some other database.

Why is Canaria better than other alt layouts for Spanish? As a Spanish learner, Colemak-DH seems to be pretty good for both languages (although my usage is still overwhelmingly dominated by English).

the inner columns are not great and you do need to get Z out of the same column as A to free up that SFB.

Interestingly, Spanish might be easier to optimize as a solitary language if the punctuation keys are moved away from the vowel cluster. You can get insanely-low SFB scores. Spanish is a higher-syllable density language with better spelling conventions than English.

What some of the alt-Spanish layouts have done is just take an EN-optimized layout and add diacritics (and Canaria is not an exception here either, it just restored some ergo sanity to Spanish vs. pushing Q and J to bad spots like most EN ergo layouts do). For those who work entirely in Spanish most of the time, EN-ergo layouts are not ideal.

I'm using xmonad inside of KDE Plasma.

It's not flawless. I had to patch plasma-desktop to get it to work at all, and there are still some bugs around widgets and toolbars I haven't found a solution for. But I'm still pretty happy with it. I have window animations with picom, and even window decorations that blend in pretty well, such that a casual observer probably wouldn't even notice that I replaced the window manager.

I'm pretty pumped that both Plasma and GNOME are now working on better tiling support by default. Maybe in a year I'll be back to using kwin or GNOME Shell.

I haven't used Zim, but from a cursory look it doesn't seem like it has any way to query its daily journal entries. In Logseq your daily journal might contain a dozen todos, bulleted project notes, and random thoughts all mixed together, but you don't need to look at the day's entry to find them again. Instead you run a query against all your notes to collect stuff where it's relevant.

> I hadn't looked at Thunderbird since about that time. I trashed it back then because there was no way to export your filters, in order to copy them to other computers... an absurd deal-breaker. Has that been resolved, by the way?

I don't think it has been, but I'm hopeful that the upcoming Thunderbird Sync feature will support syncing filters. I know they are only focused on syncing email account credentials right now, but that's honestly the last thing I care about syncing. More important are all the other little settings, such as filters, that are a huge pain to remember to manually change on all my computers.

And the apologist brigade downvotes uncomfortable facts yet again.

Your lack of desire for syncing is neither uncomfortable nor a fact.