Thomas

Germany’s government is a three-party coalition where all three parties have lost in recent regional elections, so they try to show their profile ahead of the national election next year. Especially the party which now causes the most trouble (by appeasing an opposition party in a bid for a future coalition) got close to 0% of the vote in those regional elections. The chancellor himself has an unresolved history of being involved in a large tax evasion scheme (“cum-ex”) back when he was head of a regional government. Otherwise, he tries to do nothing wrong by not doing anything at all (ok, he does the day-to-day business, but no inspiring long-term goals or other leadership things). In contrast, the vice chancellor (from the Green party) does a noticeable better job at explaining and motivating the government’s decisions. Unfortunately, even this party has people in leading positions where they should not be …

Why would you study anything with literature if you had never read a book before? This sound like a colossal waste of time and money. My theory is that if you were good at anything or had an interest in a particular topic, you would study something else like engineering, medicine, or law (I exclude the case that you may be genuinely interested in literature). Thus, many of those who study literature have no idea what they should study else and probably think that they can always get through a course which is about book. Why? Probably rich family pressured them into studying instead of posting stuff on Instagram or TikTok.

If you do not trust Tailscale as a company, here is an open source re-implementation of the server called headscale. Some/all clients are open source as well. So, you can review all components yourself or pay for a professional third-party review. Otherwise, if you take a binary blob from any origin, including Tailscale, and have it run with privileges on your server, there are few limits on what this blob can do. Yes, backdoors are technically possible, but probably bad for Tailscale’s business if that ever came to light.

Please submit a second copy of that letter, but replace Windows with Android, PC with Mobile, Microsoft with Google, and Edge with Chrome.

My setup is smaller, but when my venerable old router died about a year ago, I acquired an Asus TUF-AX3000_V2 where I installed FreshTomato. One can login via SSH and dump all settings for backup. Likewise, individual or all settings can be done on the command line instead of the GUI. I have a script on my computer that reads CSV files with MAC addresses and more to apply changes in an automated way.

Google is outsourcing their job to you, because you doing it for free is even cheaper than paying some poor fellow in India a dollar a day.

Did you just summarized the first episode of Gilmore Girl? 😉

KDE Connect has been mentioned before. You can supplement this and other tools by using a VPN so that both endpoints can see each other even if the underlying network does not allow this. My preferred solutions are Tailscale (managed, cloud-based) or Headscale (for self-hosting).

Yes, XMPP with proper TLS on the server side and Conversations or one of its forks (preferably fetched from F-Droid) using OMEMO encryption should be good enough. If you are brave or paranoid, give Tox a try: https://tox.chat/

Well, you have Finland in the north-east, Ireland in the north-west, and every land border faces a Euro-zone country. Few other countries can claim the latter.

If at all, you want to use Gentoo’s ebuild system, which can be seen as some kind of superset of PKGBUILDs. I guess one could write a Python script that “dumbs down” ebuild scripts to PKGBUILDs for simple packages (excluding complex stuff like kernel, KDE, …). The main challenge, as pointed to before, would be maintaining a table mapping package names between distributions in order to get the dependencies right.

Mal als Beispiel wie das in anderen Ländern (Schweden) gemacht wird:

Das da ein freundlich-lächelnder Mann in rot steht, ist nur fürs Pressefoto. Normalerweise Selbstbedienung. Der ganze Apparat kan in der Höhe eingestellt werden. Vorne die Fläche ist für eine digitale Unterschrift, die auf die Karte gedruckt wird. Bezahlt wird dann per Bank/Kreditkarte. Alles papierlos.

I recall hearing that already during the classical antiquity the Greeks and later the Roman could have invented steam engines (for reference of their technical skills see the Antikythera mechanism), but the abundance of cheaper slave workers made this economically infeasible.

https://archive.is/1rgR8

To fuck with computers that don’t know how to do UTF8, add a few emoji.

Even better, add some byte sequences that are invalid UTF-8.

Gibt es da nicht da nicht die ganzen Rankings von Zeitschriften (Focus, …)? Was Schulen angeht, Bayern vermeiden. Da habe ich schlimmes gehört. Da herrscht (pedagogisch) teilweise der Muff der 1950er Jahre. Gebiete, die von Klimakatastrophe (Dürren, Überschwemmungen, Küste) betroffen sind, meiden. Fahrradfreundlich (flaches Land, Fahrradwege) und/oder guter ÖPNV ist ein Plus.

I guess this refers to MiG-24 vs. F-15. Wikipedia writes:

The appearance of the MiG-25 sparked serious concern in the West and prompted dramatic increases in performance requirements for the McDonnell Douglas F-15 Eagle, then under development in the late 1960s. The capabilities of the MiG-25 were better understood by the West in 1976 when Soviet pilot Viktor Belenko defected in a MiG-25 to the United States via Japan. It turned out that the aircraft’s weight necessitated its large wings.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikoyan-Gurevich_MiG-25

Many projects accept donations, for example for server costs or travel expenses (conferences, meetings). You can setup recurring monthly transfers to projects whose software you use most often. Examples are the Free Software Foundation for various GNU tools or the KDE project.

Do not put people who strive for power into power, and vice versa.

Did someone say ‘Wing Commander’?