I’ve never been into tablets, are Surfaces as easy to install Linux on as a PC? Is there any bootloader unlocking or anything like on a phone, or is it more like secure boot on a PC?

I had installed Linux on an old Chromebook and it would always offer to wipe the hard drive on every boot, so now I’ve assumed that some hardware isn’t as Linux friendly as others. I think a lot has changed since I got my desktop and the last laptop that I installed Linux on.

And are the Linux touch screen interfaces any good? I tried a Fairphone that was running something Linux and the touch interface was lacking. (It was a great tiny laptop for using a terminal though).

And last random thought… I loved the 10” netbook form factor back in 2009 or so. I think tablets are a similar size, but the weight is in the “monitor” part, I preferred the bottom heavy laptop form factor. Are the Surfaces okay for that, or top heavy enough that they can fall over and can’t have the angle adjusted finely like a laptop?

I bought a 512 GB SanDisk one for $65 USD a few years ago. I don’t like Samsung software bloatware on their phones, but having 512 GB of storage for $65 feels pretty futuristic to me. I can’t believe more phone manufacturers don’t offer external SD card support… you’d think more consumers would demand it, given that the alternative is to pay a lot more, every time you get a new phone.

I’m basically able to keep like every photo I’ve taken for the last 10 years or so (though not at original resolution).

I was thinking this too, but consider some improvements:

• wireless printing seems to “just work” now. Besides having to painfully enter my wifi password with up and down arrows on my printer, it seems like my windows and Mac laptops are able to print to it wirelessly without any initial setup. (I use Linux on my desktop but haven’t tried printing from it yet). I think it even works from phones.
• cables: I don’t remember what type of cable printers used, but I remember the big keyboard cable, then the smaller purple and green PS/2 ones (I think keyboard and mouse were different?)… I vaguely remember multiple different peripheral cables, like FireWire? Giant parallel ports for things like scanners?

I hate that most printers don’t come with the USB (B?) cable that seemingly only printers need now, but I’m glad that it’s standard and that everything supports <strikethrough>USB-A</strikethrough> I mean USB-C (except my PC) now. Such a utopia.

I find that stove top popcorn is even less convenient (so less tempting to eat all the time), but much cheaper, and maybe tastier in some ways.

Get a ~500 g (1 lb or so?) bag of whole kernels for $3-ish, some oil that you use for cooking other stuff anyway, and salt. Heat the oil on the stove with a few kernels, then when those pop, briefly remove from heat and add more. Make sure the pot has a lid. Keep shaking it side to side to keep the popcorn from burning.

I find it adds just enough oil to taste good, but not so much that I’m eating something super awful for me. (And it’s much tastier than air popped). And I assume you could still add melted butter if you want an extra treat.

I want to get one of those movie theatre style things where the popcorn can fly out of the pot.

My problem may be related: how do you find people to follow? I wish I could just follow communities like on Lemmy. I’ve tried following hastags I’m interested in, but it seems like they aren’t always used.

I’ve instead searched for topics that I’m interested in, followed a bunch of people, then unfollowed the ones that post too much stuff I’m not interested in. But this seems like a pain.

I also don’t necessarily want to see everything that a single person posts.

Cool, thanks! This is what I was looking for. I’ve briefly tried playing with Nextcloud before, but this seems like another good option.

This is what I do for my own notes now, but could it work for students writing essays and that sort of thing? I suppose there must be some markdown to HTML/PDF/etc converters (also probably ODT or DOCX or whatever).

This is actually what I did when I was in school, and overall it was quite pleasant. There was some WYSIWYG LaTeX program too that I shared with some colleagues when we were working on a document together, I remember it working okay.

But I don’t see the average student, especially studying non technical stuff, to pick up LaTeX just for normal sort of essays. Even I am fairly rusty now. And honestly I don’t even know if I could have managed it during high school, where I had to write English essays and stuff with specific formatting for references. (I am grateful that my engineering education was less strict about that sort of thing).

I was hoping that someone would suggest a self hosted web document suite, I think “Nextcloud” is a popular one. Then it should work on any OS, and you don’t have to worry about syncing files. Even if you can pay to have someone else host an instance (not sure if this exists), and ideally a program that can keep a local backup synced to your PCs would be a big step in the right direction. Syncthing seems pretty great, though I haven’t used it much, and on iOS it doesn’t seem to be able to run in the background.

edit: I just read another comment that recommended OnlyOffice, this seems like another good option (source: this reply: https://lemmy.ca/comment/9415293). Aside: is there a proper way to link to a comment on lemmy that will go through your own homeserver?

What do you recommend? I love LibreOffice on Windows and Linux, and it still works well on macOS but the GUI seems weird on it, the buttons are really large. I still use it but my partner is put off by it.

I already basically get that half the time I boot into windows after an update. They say “let’s finish setting up your PC” and try to get you to pay for one drive, office, even game pass.

I’m so glad gaming on Linux has gotten to such a good state. I barely ever boot into windows now. (The “ad” on boot up is probably only once every few months, but that’s about as often as I boot into windows).

I don’t think it’s only you. I remember him saying (and even tweeting) that 2015 will be the last FPTP election if the liberals were elected. I was younger at the time but I remember a lot of people reluctantly voted for him instead of the NDP just to finally end FPTP and be able to choose the NDP as their first choice in the next election (but still choose the liberals as their second choice, to keep the conservatives out). Further reading for anyone interested: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vote_splitting

Then they won, claimed that they couldn’t find an alternative that everyone liked, and apparently that was it.

My understanding is that many people would have been happy with “anything” besides FPTP, but weren’t able to agree on their first choice? …surely it’s not that ironic? Or maybe there’s more to it than that?

Anyway overall the liberals may have still been the best choice… but this wasn’t some minor promise that he made. I think this is what was most important to a lot of people. Err… I think? No one seems to talk about it now.

edit1: added link to tweet

edit2: This article seems to summarize the timeline: https://globalnews.ca/news/3102270/justin-trudeau-liberals-electoral-reform-changing-promises/

edit3: this seems more helpful: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elections_in_Canada#2015_federal_election

Message me on matrix in #alexgames:matrix.org if anyone wants to try playing a multiplayer game together :)

(I’m not actually very good at chess or go)

You may know this, but my understanding is that they randomly stop either to do another delivery on a different app, or to get gas/etc. (edit: I don’t think this justifies it to the customer, hence why I’ve stopped using these apps. I do have some sympathy for the driver, I have heard that the companies incentivize them to maintain a streak and take fewer breaks between drives, and somehow it seems like long unnecessary pauses aren’t penalized (perhaps because they’re hard to distinguish from traffic))

I haven’t used delivery apps in a while due to cold food and outrageous prices.

To clarify on this: even the people who use gibberish as their password and don’t store it and rely on password resets via email are actually somewhat safe if their email is also highly safe. Maybe their password strategy for CRA implies they don’t take their email password security seriously either… but still, my point is just that “at least as secure as your email” can be an incredibly high bar if you do it right

Yes but you’re free to use an email provider which also supports security keys, which gmail and proton mail* do. I understand that the CRA needs to accommodate the average person who doesn’t care about security, but I think everyone in this thread appreciates when they also cater to people who care deeply about security and are willing to use strong unique passwords in a password manager and security keys or at least TOTP.

* it seems like they require keeping TOTP enabled because their mobile apps don’t support security keys. Meh.

This may sound like a wild fantasy to some, but the US IRS seems to have some partnership with ID.me which supports security keys. But I’m impressed that the CRA supports TOTP before major banks so maybe this could happen.

Granted they also have separate logins for state income tax and California is… well let me just say that I’m grateful that the CRA doesn’t force you to reset your password every 4ish months. (California state income tax (FTB?) does).

Ah, I hadn’t heard of the SSL issue, thanks for sharing!

I’ve noticed that Tangerine only allows for a 6 digit pin, but I think they might also allow for a security question and SMS 2FA? I started signing up with them and gave up when they required a Canadian cell number (I hadn’t yet switched due to high costs, but recently they’ve become surprisingly reasonable—ignoring roaming) and I saw the 6 digit pin password requirement.

I think it was also BMO that a friend told me required a maximum 8 character password until very recently?

Anyway overall, thanks for reassuring my suspicion: I should just pick one of the banks and not let “perfect” (or even “decent”) be the enemy of “almost adequate but not great”.

Thanks, I suspected this (I only see “authenticator app” when I log in on a new device or periodically, but I wasn’t sure.

Related: for finance related services like Questrade, I’ve stored my TOTP keys on a U2F key, Yubico in my case. Besides the hassle of managing physical keys, is there any drawback to this approach? I’m slightly worried I’ll lose all my keys in a house fire or something, but I assume there’s a recovery option.

Unfortunately I think this is the norm with big banks in Canada, and it is similar to a credit union in the US from when I briefly lived there. Security seems to be a second priority to people losing access (presumably only briefly, since they have brick and mortar locations everywhere).

Wealthsimple and Questrade seem to support TOTP but I’m not sure if you can still bypass it with SMS. I don’t think so but I haven’t dug into it.

I’ve used CIBC before and they also seem to require keeping SMS 2FA enabled. Also they send me fraud alerts over SMS, “respond Y to authorize this suspicious transaction”, and I’m dreading the day where I have to enable roaming while travelling just to send a text. They send push notifications through the app to login on a new device though, so maybe in 10 years they’ll do it for transaction approval too.

Also aside about TD: is there really no way to download a CSV file of all your transactions? My partner uses them and I think we were limited to 18 months, and may have even had to download each much separately (luckily I can use use a program like cat to workaround this, but that seems like a pain for most people). CIBC has irritated me in a lot of ways but I think I can download transactions from back to 2012 when I first opened my credit card, maybe earlier.

Do you or anyone know about other big banks? My partner and I are looking into a joint account and I want to be able to download all transactions to CSV. Ideally we could get TOTP only (no SMS 2FA) but I’m not counting on it.

Thanks, I edited my comment. No idea how I missed that it was 30 seconds for all this time. It looks like my own TOTP codes are even 30 seconds so I don’t know what I was thinking.