I work a rather demanding job and I've constantly been feeling tired and underperformant compared to my colleagues for the past few months. I keep evading responsibilities or putting them off until the last minute.

Many people would kill to be where I am. Yet, I show up every day unmotivated.

There were several stressful years leading up to my current job and I'm wondering if I'm burnt out at this point or if I'm just not pulling my weight.

Edit: Thank you all for your support and guidance. I haven't given too many details here, but personal life has been moving along smoothly, chores get done, etc. But I definitely need to reconsider where I'm going with my job.

The frowning face that pops up when the internet connection drops out or Youtube breaks something. I don't know if it's how suddenly it pops up, my horror and true crime habit, or its lifeless eyes, but I have a jarring and visceral reaction when it shows up.

It's all subjective I suppose, and I could make personal builds to patch it out, so I don't know if it merits me making a Github account and raising an issue. I'm curious if anyone else feels the same way about the frowning face error.

Work uses Slack, which is quite entrenched in the organization, so trying to move all of my contacts over to something else would be nontrivial. Colleagues use it to send moderately urgent messages every now and then, so notifications on my phone would be a nice-to-have.

I haven't had much luck finding well-maintained open-source clients for Slack. I could sandbox Play Services alongside the official app or a browser, but I'd rather not make my phone run the whole Google Play stack just for those notifications. Did I miss any low-hanging fruit or is hosting a Matrix bridge the only alternative?

It's not worth shipping and handling, it's beaten up, and I don't know anybody who wants it. Nothing is upgradeable, unless you count inserting a microSD card.

Of course I could use it as a janky media server or a dumb SSH terminal, but I've already got other machines for those jobs. Or I could recycle it, but what's the fun in that? Suggest me your wackiest programs to try, dangerous distros, or most unorthodox setups to make use of it.

Got Ollama set up with an 8GB AMD graphics card at my disposal. Any recommendations for the most unhinged model I can run on this? i.e. I can ask it how to annoy my neighbors and it won't go on a rant about morals or its supposed purpose as an LLM?

Summary: nothing seems to have changed on my phone except for an initial notification that my device is no longer supported.

The Pixel 4a with GrapheneOS is my secondary phone where I test out apps before committing to them on my main phone and sequester less desirable apps like Whatsapp. GrapheneOS support for it ended over a year ago, so the update notification today was quite the surprise.

With Google recently rolling out an update to the 4a that cripples its battery and charging, I was very wary, knowing that at least one of the GrapheneOS maintainers intends to discourage use of older, unsupported models.

My Pixel had been on the 2024092100 release of GOS, which oddly enough is not tagged in the repo. Comparing the closest release, 2024080800, with 2025012100 yielded no differences in the code (https://github.com/GrapheneOS-Archive/device_google_sunfish/compare/2024080800-sunfish...2025012100-sunfish). So I went ahead with it.

Upon booting, I found a notification saying that m

I was recently intrigued to learn that only half of the respondents to a survey said that they used disk encryption. Android, iOS, macOS, and Windows have been increasingly using encryption by default. On the other hand, while most Linux installers I've encountered include the option to encrypt, it is not selected by default.

Whether it's a test bench, beater laptop, NAS, or daily driver, I encrypt for peace of mind. Whatever I end up doing on my machines, I can be pretty confident my data won't end up in the wrong hands if the drive is stolen or lost and can be erased by simply overwriting the LUKS header. Recovering from an unbootable state or copying files out from an encrypted boot drive only takes a couple more commands compared to an unencrypted setup.

But that's just me and I'm curious to hear what other reasons to encrypt or not to encrypt are out there.

This is an aggressive method for when isopropyl alcohol on a towel is too slow or requires too much elbow grease. See the caveats section!

Materials

• Isopropyl alcohol, 100 mL or more
• Copper or copper-coated scourer
• Heavy-duty scrubbing pad (like the green piece on top of dish sponges)
• Magic eraser (replace with non-scratch scrubbing pad if not available)
• Paper towels
• A couple of hours

PPE

• Adequate ventilation
• Dust mask (microplastics)
• Sturdy, waterproof gloves, or in my case, non-waterproof fiberglass gloves over thin foodservice gloves
• Old clothes (stains)

Method

Remove power, batteries, and any electronic components you can.

This is an iterative process, so not every step has to be done perfectly in one pass.

Magnesium parts (usually the lower chassis and lid)

• The rubber coating is bound more strongly here than on plastic parts.
• Wet an area about 5 cm in diameter with isopropyl alcohol. There should be a shallow puddle of it where you will

Building Coreboot

• Significantly easier and lower risk than I expected. A lot is already taken care of once the mainboard is selected. There are many safety and sanity checks in the build process.
• Make sure to select "General Setup">"Option backend to use">"Use CMOS for configuration values" so that nvramcui and nvramtool works.
• Even if flashing only the top chip, build for the entire 12 MB ROM. Otherwise, the machine won't have the correct offset for the MRC cache and will cold boot when it should be resuming from suspend.

Installing Coreboot

• I am not yet confident enough to use an external programmer with my 3612QE board, so I opted for the 1vyrain route.
• Extracted the top 4MB of coreboot.rom using dd and once booted in the 1vyrain installer, overwrote /root/bios/X230.rom (double-check this for yourself, just going off my memory here) and let it flash the chip. This workaround to avoid having to upload my bios somewhere and connect 1vyrain to the internet.
• Aft

My laptop has a display resolution of 1366x768. Every now and then, I'll encounter a window whose default height is over 768 and thus won't fit entirely within my screen. The GTK file picker comes to mind, though it is resizable without much fuss. But then there are those that cannot be resized and being unable to move the titlebar further up, I am forced to use Alt+F7 to see what's at the bottom.

I suspect that many programs today are designed to work comfortably on higher resolution displays, but not really tested on smaller ones. Understandably, developers only have so much time and 1366x768 is getting long in the tooth. Just wanted to put this out there since nobody seems to be talking about it.

Decided to uninstall my display manager and use startx instead. But now when I resume from suspend, the brightness keys cease to work until I log out and back in. Backlight does still respond when echoing into /sys/class/backlight/intel_backlight/brightness. But what kind of magic does a display manager do to keep brightness controls working after suspend and resume?

Using xfce on tty1 on an X230 if it matters.

UPDATE: After flashing coreboot with the option to "Enable ECC if supported", ECC RAM still does not work. The screen and lights come on and the speakers emit a continuous high tone. The memory tested was an 8GB stick of 2Rx8 EP3L-12800E from SK Hynix. It is unbuffered ECC to the best of my knowledge. I'll write up my thoughts on corebooting this particular board when I have used it for some more time.

After learning that the 3612QE itself supports ECC RAM in contrast to the stock CPU options and that the QM77 chipset also does, I purchased a DDR3 SODIMM with unbuffered ECC. I have not been aware of any other attempts to test this combination.

The machine did not POST and did not produce any beep codes. Absolutely no response to any input aside from shutting down when briefly holding the power button. Everything returned to normal upon putting the original RAM back.

I suspect the BIOS lacks support, but whether this changes with coreboot remains unknown to me, at least until I learn

In an effort to keep my X230 snappy for a few more years until I find/make a newer laptop to my liking, I finally caved in and bought an i7-3612QE board. Posting some observations and thoughts based on the questions I had prior to buying. Previous CPU was the i5-3320M.

Setup

• Debian 12
• XFCE
• 16GB DDR3L
• Two SSDs
• Hyper-threading disabled
• 1vyrain BIOS with classic keyboard EC patch

Performance

• Not literally twice as fast, but the improvement is quite noticeable
• CPU no longer seems to struggle while loading Javascript-laden websites
• Rarely hits 100% CPU usage, even on Youtube (sadly bloated enough to be a sort of benchmark)
• Single-core tasks are only slightly better than before

Thermals

• High 40s at idle to mid 60s when busy
• Feels cooler compared to previous CPU, which I assume is due to the CPU usage being lower across all tasks.
• Did not upgrade to the AVC cooler. Toshiba cooler works well and is quiet as ever.

Battery

• About 4.5 hours of office tasks and light

I like my Linux installs heavily customized and security hardened, to the extent that copying over /home won't cut it, but not so much that it breaks when updating Debian. Whenever someone mentions reinstalling Linux, I am instinctively nervous thinking about the work it would take for me to get from a vanilla install to my current configuration.

It started a couple of years ago, when dreading the work of configuring Debian to my taste on a new laptop, I decided to instead just shrink my existing install to match the new laptop's drive and dd it over. I later made a VM from my install, stripped out personal files and obvious junk, and condensed it to a 30 GB raw disk image, which I then deployed on the rest of my machines.

That was still a bit too janky, so once my configuration and installed packages stabilized, I bit the bullet, spun up a new VM, and painstakingly replicated my configuration from a fresh copy of Debian. I finished with a 24 GB raw disk image, which I can now depl

Anyone here use an X230 with the quad-core mod? I'm looking into it and was wondering about the reliability and battery life compared to the stock i5-3320M.

Been using searx.be for a bit now and they had many results in Dutch and German, which can be expected for a site based in Belgium. But does anyone notice an influx of results in Russian? Did they change the server location or are users in Russia catching on to it? Yandex isn't toggled on in the settings either.

Not trying to judge security by language. I just kinda liked having results in a mix of languages I could read.

Banking apps seem to be a motif among things that don't play well with privacy ROMs. My bank's website does everything I could want out of it. I think I might be ignorant to something.

• What about banking apps is especially compelling?
• How often do banks put must-have features behind an app?
• And should I be concerned that banks might move away from offering services through browsers?

I'm about to degoogle my stock Android phone. For the past few years, I've used it to handle the non-open source apps that I don't want running on my main phone. As I've finally weaned off GApps, I realize that I might as well go degoogle the rom as well.

edit: to be clear, I'll be using sandboxed Play services on GOS

But since that phone is my compatibility guinea pig, is it likely I'll still run into an app that demands unmodded Android with no alternatives? In your experience, has any bank or other service required the app on regular Android, with no alternative for the desktop, browser, etc?

As I understand it, X11 has many inherent security concerns, including programs being able to read the contents of other windows and intercept keystrokes. Wayland addresses these concerns but at the moment breaks certain functions like screen readers, cursor warping, and the ability of a program to resize its own window.

I am curious as to how the display protocols of MacOS and Windows handle these situations differently. How does a program in those operating systems gain permission to read the contents of other windows, if at all? What is to be done in Wayland for these functions to be more seamless or are there inherent obstacles?

Bought a Pixel 4a second hand since it's the last Pixel with a headphone jack that isn't too big for me, and I'm hoping to keep it as long as I can.

Unfortunately, it's about time for me to replace the battery. I tend not to treat my battery too well (can't be bothered to keep it between 20% and 80%, but it's supposed to be consumable, right?) and I'm not sure if replacement batteries will hold up as well over the years. So I'm wondering if it's fine to just replace the battery and pop the whole thing back into my case without gluing the screen, so future repairs are a bit easier and won't involve the risk of breaking the screen while prying it off.

For reference, I'm using one of those cases with an interlocking front and back, so it ought to hold itself together and not fly apart if I drop it. (edit) I guess what I'm looking for is experience as to whether the newly introduced slack between the glass and body tends to make make the screen more fragile or put undue strain on flex c