Amazon is on my shit list and will not buy any products from them ever again. They are one of the worst monopolist mega corporations. They treat their employees like slaves, are anti-repair, anti-consumer.

I gifted an older Kindle to my sister, and the screen broke (out of warranty). I contacted Amazon about it, and they basically said they don’t make replacement parts and don’t service the kindles, they can only give me a small discount for buying a new one.

I looked up a guide on doing it myself, and even if I find a replacement screen, it’s really difficult. The screen is glued with a strong adhesive. The entire device looks very cheaply built and deliberately made really difficult to repair.

You can use an USB cable to upload files to the Kindle, the @kindle email address is just a convenience thing. Calibre is great for converting to a compatible format.

Ah, the aspiring musician’s keyboard who can’t afford a real one

Keyboard players: everything is keys

You can still yank the power chord out.

Women are not good for the network connectivity

I actually tried it before for my TV PC that I wanted to also use as a miniserver, with gpu pass through and everything. It was painful to get it working properly, was like 30-40% slower. I also had constant problems with USB peripherals not connecting properly, or going in a sleep state and not waking. Many games didn’t work properly.

Then I decided to just buy a cheap second second hand PC and never looked back.

Did it work? There’s a huge chance of data corruption if you are copying the disk of a running system.

Companies left and right will start creating EULAs with forced arbitration clauses for all kinds of crazy things… Shit like “Being in the general vicinity of one of our buildings, you agree with our license terms”. Or “saying the name of our company, you agree with our EULA”. Or “By being alive, you agree to our EULA”.

Or maybe an automated system flagged it and an underpaid and overworked employee in a third world country reviewed it.

I don’t think this was malicious, these app reviews are being done by an overworked and underpaid employee in some third world country. Mistakes are made all the time.

Lights. 15 years ago, everyone was using incandescent bulbs which were terribly inefficient and neon lights which had their own inconveniences. Today, LEDs have mostly replaced them, can produce better quality light, and use a fraction of the power.

Displays. Even the cheap TVs and monitors look incredibly good.

Consumer protections are a joke

It could have been worse. The romans had the day divided into 24 hours, like we do, but the hours varied in length so that from sunrise to sunset, you would always have 12 hours.

Imagine if that was the agreed upon time system, and we had to program that into computers.

I’ve read a lot of reviews before buying, and that was my expectation as well. I had a Nexus 5 before and it was a great phone.

Maybe I got a lemon that had some hardware fault, I don’t know. I’ve been wanting to get a newer Pixel just for GrapheneOS, but that experience was so bad, I’m having a lot of doubts

Pixel 3A. Constant bugs, camera would stop working or had a long delay starting up, system would randomly stop responding, constant crashes, lock screen would bug out preventing you from unlocking the phone. Dialer would bug out preventing you from answering the phone. Random reboots. Screen scratched really easily.

Phone crapped out about a month before warranty expired, wouldn’t boot any more. Luckily, it was still in warranty and they returned the full price.

The worst most unreliable phone I ever owned.

Make a plan. Think about how much storage you need, whether you need redundancy and backups, and what server applications you need to run.

Here you also need to consider how much time you want to spend on maintenance. Premade solutions like Synology are set and forget. Using NAS operating systems mean having to do regular updates. Using just Linux is also an option if you want full control and are confortabile with the command line, but it’s more work.

Then step 2 is getting the hardware.

My recommended route, if you want to spend the least amount of money, is to get a 2nd hand PC, preferably not pre-built (dells and hps have proprietary parts like power supplies). A 4 core cpu from the last 10 years should be fine, and 16gb of RAM is more than enough for most applications. SFFs or MiniPCs might be ok for nvme SSDs only, but if you want hard drives, get one that has enough HDD bays. Depending on what you find, you might need to replace a few things, like the power supply or case.

Servers are good and reliable and have nice features, like network management, redundant NICs, redundant power supplies, but are usually pretty noisy.

I have mixed feelings about Mir and Unity. Having competition is a good thing. If we only had gnome, Linux would be far less interesting. But at the same time, they could have spent the effort trying to improve Wayland and Gnome, and they would have made a significant difference.

But snaps being forced upon me, they can fuck right off. I don’t need my browser in a semifunctional container, when it worked perfectly before. And i hate that they made mount barely unusable.

And also, I have work to do… I don’t like wasting my time tinkering with config files trying to get the optimum settings. I just want an OS that helps me do my work and gets out of the way.

All the edgelord kids boasting about using Arch are also a big turn off.