I had a phone that did that! The feature was called ‘IR Blaster’ IIRC, and there was an app that had all the frequencies for different brands of TV on it. I don’t think they put those in smart phones anymore lol

Here in Canada, the general sentiment among people I’ve talked to is definitely that the US has fucked up it’s relationship with us in a very long-term way, if not permanently. Even if the tariffs went away tomorrow, there’s still the issue that Trump threatened Canada’s sovereignty, which people here are not taking lightly at all.

I’ve heard people say that even if Trump went away, there’s no guarantee some other dickhead won’t take over and start the same nonsense, or we’ll just be back here again in 4 years. Even the new Prime Minister said that the relationship we used to have with the US is over now.

Not the above poster, but for me: it’s a slight concern but AFAIK the profiles are interchangeable so it’s pretty trivial to just switch back to Thunderbird if anything does happen.

For me it’s handy because I have multiple email accounts so I can just open Betterbird and check them all at once without having to log into several different pages.

I use Betterbird as my main email client so I tried out the attachment searching. Searching by attachment name seemed to work well, but it doesn’t look like it searches for the text within the documents, at least not for PDFs. Not sure if there’s like an OCR extension or anything that would do it, but yeah just the base Betterbird install doesn’t do it as far as I can see.

I’ve been thinking about doing this too! I have a RPi 4 that’s not doing anything, and I don’t really have a great offsite solution for backups and I have family in another country. Maybe next time I go over there I’ll see if they’ll let me set one up lol.

There are also charities that take donations of old laptops and use them for things like education in places that don’t have access to a lot of technology, so I guess you could recycle them in that sense.

I mean realistically what are you gonna do, appeal to their better nature? We’ve been trying to do that since when… Reagan? Nixon? The right has only dug in deeper and deeper, and now the Nazis are back.

We’re long overdue for some fuck about and find out time IMO.

Art jobs are like this! Especially if management are also art people, then every day is utter chaos lol.

Two things an art job is great for:

• Developing a thick skin. Make art every day, send it off, receive a detailed list of everything that sucks about it, re-do it, repeat this about 30 times until it finally goes out, then receive death threats from the audience.

• Learning to function under chaos. A regular Tuesday at Art Job is roughly equivalent to the worst day in company history and a normal office job.

Two things an art job is not good for:

• Keeping the desire to make art for fun in your spare time.

• Being a regular functioning human.

I did poke around a bit more and found that I didn’t have the direct mode on, so it was hopping around. Switching that on and doing a direct connection made it much better, like 50Mbps. But that’s still only 25%-ish of the regular speed, whereas I thought it’d be about 50%. But way better than like 2% of the original speed which is what I had before lol.

As a side note, I don’t know if I maybe have something configured wrong but is DAITA supposed to absolutely massacre your connection speed? I assumed it would be slower but my connection goes from ~190Mpbs to 3Mbps when I enable it.

English, where the word ‘jam’ can mean traffic, a stuck door, to play music, to cram things into a tight space or a fruity preserve lol

Yeah I like my Kobo too. It’s never done anything sketchy as far as I can tell, plus you can sideload things, and if you plug it in via USB it just shows up like regular drive so you can do what you want with it. And also Libby is awesome lol.

I think sort of, although it won’t be as cut-and-dry and the first two. I think it’ll be somewhere between a traditional ‘hot’ war and a cold war, where the larger players (ie: China, the US, Russia, the EU) will engage in propaganda wars, attempts to destabilize each other, cyber attacks, trade wars etc. while in areas outside of those groups (eg: Ukraine currently) there will be physical wars fought by proxy between the bigger groups.

I think we’re seeing the start of it now, and IMO the US is probably doing the least well so far of the major groups. Russia is doing the destabilization thing, which is working quite well in Europe and spectacularly well in the US, China seems to be leading in trade and tech (both cyber attacking and just undermining the US tech sector with things like DeepSeek) and I think Europe’s strategy seems to be to just bunker down and see what happens.

I think the main advantage the US traditionally has always had is its military - it’s geared up very well for a big physical war, but I don’t think this is that kind of conflict. And with the Trump administration’s obsession with tariffs and the general disregard for education and soft power, I think the country is really heading in the wrong direction for what may be coming.

I have a Plaisir Platinum fountain pen that’s awesome. It was pretty cheap as far as fountain pens go but it writes really nicely and has a good solid feel to it.

For day-to-day disposable pens I like the Zebra Sarasa ones, or the Pilot P500 for drawing. I bought a big box of the P500s to keep in reserve in case they ever stop making them lol.

I’ve been kind of liking Brave Search lately, even though I’m not really a fan of the browser.

I use Quickemu for mine, makes it really quick and easy to get a new system up and running.

My theory: since all the big tech companies seem to be making “donations” and bending over backwards to do favours for Trump before he’s even in power, I suspect it’s going to eventually come out that he’s been selling exemptions to tariffs for companies who bend the knee.

Those companies will then only raise their prices by 50% instead of the 65% their competitors will have to do, and they’ll try to play it off as altruism.

Oncolytic Virotherapy!

There was a news story recently about a virologist who possibly cured her own stage 3 cancer using this technique. Obviously more study is needed but it looks promising!

My setup is:

• Arch (BTW) & KDE on my laptop, that’s the tinkering machine that only I use.
• Dual boot Pop!_OS & Windows on the desktop, that’s the one that other people use too so I’m not allowed to break it.
• I also have a bunch of other OS’s in VMs that I mess around with like little specimen jars lol