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Cake day: September 27th, 2023

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  • I’m not sure what the exact model is, but it’s probably from the Performa or Power Mac 5000 or 6000 series. It’s low-res so it’s hard to read, but the text next to the floppy drive says “PowerPC”, referring to the CPU family used in Macs in that era.

    The screen looks like Mac OS 8. It’s so low-rest that it’s kind of hard to tell, but the menu bar at the top of the screen is clearly from Mac OS. Could be 7.5, but I’m guessing 8 since that’s what’s shown in the web browser.

    I think the left screen is showing Windows. Again, super low-res, but those look like Windows 95/98’s blue window title bars and gray task bar at the bottom.



  • It used to say “container-native”. They recently changed the wording, but there was no technical change.

    It’s a Linux distro that runs locally, like any other. It has no particular tie-in with any cloud services. If Flatpak, Docker/Podman, Distrobox, Homebrew, etc. are “cloud” just because they involve downloading packages hosted on the internet, then I don’t know why you wouldn’t call “traditional” package managers like apt, dnf, zypper, etc. “cloud” as well. 🤷 So yeah, I feel your confusion.

    The big difference compared to something like Debian or vanilla Fedora is that Bazzite is an “immutable” distro. What this means is that the OS image is monolithic and you don’t make changes directly to the system. Instead, you install apps and utilities via containers, or as a last resort you can apply a layer on top of the OS using rpm-ostree.

    The only thing cloud-related about any of this is that atomic OS images and containers are more common in the server space than the desktop space.





  • There are a handful on non-default apps I’ve used across my last 3-4 distros at least:

    • mpv - the best video player, period. Minimalist UI, maximalist configuration options. I’ve been using it for many years across many OSes and at this point everything else feels wrong.

    • Geany - My favorite GUI text editor on Linux.

    • Foliate - the simplest eBook reader I’ve found.

    • Strawberry - It’s “fine”. Honestly, I’ve never found a music player on Linux that I really liked. I keep falling back to Strawberry because it’s familiar and generally works as expected.


  • That’s pretty much what I do, yeah. On my computer or phone, I split an epub into individual text files for each chapter using pandoc (or similar tools). Then after I read each chapter, I upload it into my summarizer, and perhaps ask some pointed questions.

    It’s important to use a tool that stays confined to the context of the provided file. My first test when trying such a tool is to ask it a general-knowledge question that’s not related to the file. The correct answer is something along the lines of “the text does not provide that information”, not an answer that it pulled out of thin air (whether it’s correct or not).




  • I’ve done this to give myself something akin to Cliff’s Notes, to review each chapter after I read it. I find it extremely useful, particularly for more difficult reads. Reading philosophy texts that were written a hundred years ago and haphazardly translated 75 years ago can be a challenge.

    That said, I have not tried to build this directly into my ereader and I haven’t used Boox’s specific service. But the concept has clear and tested value.

    I would be interested to see how it summarizes historical texts about these topics. I don’t need facts (much less opinions) baked into the LLM. Facts should come from the user-provided source material alone. Anything else would severely hamper its usefulness.


  • Related feature on my wish list: I’d love a way to basically fork a feed based on regex pattern matching. This would be useful for some premium feeds that lump multiple podcasts together. For example, one of my Patreon feeds includes three shows: the ad-free main feed, the first-tier weekly premium feed, and the second-tier monthly premium feed.

    I don’t want to filter them out because I DO want to listen to all of them, but for organizational purposes I don’t want them lumped together. I’d prefer to display these as two or three separate podcasts in my display.

    Another example is the Maximum Fun premium BoCo feed. They include the bonus content for ALL their shows (which is…a lot) in a single feed. I only listen to about half a dozen, and even that is a bit of a mess in one feed!



  • Good advice!

    This is also available with BTRFS. Personally I am leveraging this feature via Snapper, simply because it was the default on OpenSuse and was good enough that I never bothered looking into alternatives. I’ve heard good things about Timeshift, too.

    This has saved my butt a couple times. I’ll never go back to a filesystem that doesn’t support snapshots.

    I really liked ZFS when I used it many years ago, but eventually I decided to move to BTRFS since it has built-in kernel support. I miss RAIDZ, though. :(