• 2 Posts
  • 28 Comments
Joined 4 months ago
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Cake day: April 27th, 2026

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  • I’ve downgraded my server from 1st gen i7 10 GB RAM (don’t ask) to Core 2 Duo 4 GB with the same load and barely felt it. my entire infra including desktop, laptopS, tablet, phoneS, etc costs like a third of this “missed value”.

    not shitting on your choices, but positing that the price-gouging retail market is all there is, kinda disingenuous; there’s sooo much stuff being discarded although perfectly usable.

    like, I couldn’t bear the super-expensive raspberries while they were in the $50 range, let alone now. marketplaces are awash in busted laptops, with way better value and performance. discarded corpo desktops can house cheap HDD and run 24/7 for eons. etc.


  • way more modern CPU and chipset resulting in better power management; also faster and better graphics, but that’s not important for the use case. an undervolted i5 5250u can run with wifi and lit screen in the sub-5W range, netting you 10ish hours of continuous light use out of a decent battery and days of standby (that you can turn into weeks if you implement suspend-then-hibernate). you could make an earilier model work but the price difference should be in the $20 range, so why bother?

    edit: microSD, yeah, I guess you can boot off them but why would you want the flaky and slow mess when you got a perfectly fine PCI-E SSD?


  • macbook air 11 2015 8gb version. just this one and no other, no 13, no 2013, no 4 gb versions, etc.

    very linux friendly (once you sort out broadcom wifi drivers), sips power, tolerates undervolt. it’s useless to the apple crowd as it don’t got support for latest OS so it can be had for cheap, even more so if you wanna buy busted units and frankenstein together a new one. also, wide cross-gen parts compatibility. aliexpress got $5 USB-C to Magsafe2 adapter so you don’t gotta haul the charger around.

    don’t get the 12" ones, unless they’re close to free. spectacular screen, but the keyboard is atrocious and prone to die, with no option of replacing it, SSD is integrated so can’t get the data off it if something dies, fragile display connection, it’s a shit-show.









  • I’m gonna piggyback off of this to remind everyone to install OpenSnitch and go through the iinitial and super-tedious approve/deny outgoing connections.

    there’s stuff on linux that, despite being perfectly offline capable and having turned off everything related to clown sync and remote check this and that, still phones home.


  • ixnay on anything but the vanillaest of the vanillas and that goes triple for bazzite and friends. you don’t want “intriguing” shit left behind to take care of pops, that’s a thing for you to play and experiment with.

    your solution is already staring you in the face: the ubuntu you left behind persevered even under those circumstances. either fix it and update it or install a fresh one, with a tweak here and there. and don’t touch nothing else…


  • get a local instance of dovecot running with the barest functions, like IMAP ony. it’s docker-friendly, so you can run it thus and you can have your local repository of all your emails.

    you connect to it from thunderbird as another account, in addition to your gmail account. what you do is just select all the gmail emails (in the folder All emails) and copy or move them to the new folder on your server.

    then, you can shut down the container and spin it up only when you need stuff off it.


  • you can rest assured I know the difference; it was completely useless, I didn’t go “problem solved, let’s nuke the fucker”. I had posts that received a barrage of downvotes and I let 'em be. had posts where the conclusion differed from what was originally intended and I’d let them be as there was value in the resolution. this was none of them things, no chance anyone would find this useful.




  • I deleted my post here specifically. it was completely useless to anyone else and 0 chance anyone could find any part of it useful.

    I’ve done that a coupla times when I determine that the post itself and the replies provide no value to anyone whatsoever.

    I wouldn’t think of removing a post otherwise, if I made an error in OP or came off stupid or sumsuch, I’d edit it for posterity; even when it’s a pile-on downvote bonanza, I wouldn’t think of touching it.



  • I don’t think that’s correct as I’ve registered a fresh account as described, during the setup phase of a phone, within the last month and no phone number was needed. I’ll give you the benefit of doubt as I don’t want to do that again just to disprove a stranger on the internet, but if anything changed it had to change in this very, very recent period.

    edit: the posit of OP was to open an account in order to be able to register to other accounts, not go jasonbourne on 5eyes and friends.