Bitlocker.

I’ll decrypt it one day…

The answer has got to be helix ;)

Piggybacking onto this, MenuLibre also works and the “hide from menus” setting does exactly that if a GUI is preferable. I used it to hide a bunch of VSTs a while back.

Forking is indeed the way forward when Mozilla loses its way a little more. For myself, I switched to Librewolf about 6 months ago, along with replacing Thunderbird with Betterbird after using it since the Phoenix days.

I cannot remember what prompted the move to Librewolf, it may have been the AI stuff they were pushing at the time, or possibly the update that forced the tabs into my titlebar without having to go into about:config to fix it. Or the fact that Firefox was constantly pushing me to sign up for an account. There were quite a few gripes that added up over time lol

Betterbird restored some removed things I liked pre-supernova as well as a native systray icon under Linux and that was enough motivation to make the switch.

It is time for a new browser to enter the market. Either Ladybird or something built with Servo seems likely.

I’ve got some bad news for you. Mozilla bought an ad company.

Have you looked at Duplicati? I use it and find it dead simple and reliable (I did a full recovery from a total data loss last year).

In the meantime, its possible to use qjackctl to create a connection from input to the VST before it goes to the easyeffects sink. Its a bit kludgy but it should work well enough.

Ooh damn. Mandrake was my first distro, I remember being sooo excited when the CDs came in the mail. It was I think 4 discs?

The experience was absolutely not good lol. At the time I only had one computer (some eMachines something or other) and a 56k line that only went to 14400 or 2600 baud depending on the weather. My NIC wasn’t supported and after some banging my head on the desk I ended up going back to windows 98se after a few days because it was the family computer I messed up and caught sooo much flak for wiping.

Returned some years later when it was called Mandriva and had a better experience with a custom built AMD machine. The eMachines machine by then was still around as a network file server running a flavour of BSD that served media to my OG xbox played through XBMC (now Kodi).

Great post OP and thanks for the trip down memory lane!

I’m one of those creatures that flattens out fizzy drinks before drinking xD

Air-up water bottles. When I bought mine it claimed to be a better water bottle all-around.

Its primary gimmick of tricking the brain into tasting the scent works well, I did drink a lot more water without needing actual flavouring. The fact that I could (unofficially) 3D print my own reusable flavouring pods to be a little more eco-friendly was a nice surprise and the reason I decided to try it.

The “better bottle” part is utter horse crap. It leaks when tipped over, even when tightly closed. Their marketing team went as far as adding “sip, don’t tip” to the instructions instead of making the cap properly seal.

Drinking from it was a chore as there was no water pressure and the constant bubbling (lets be real, its more like wet fart) noises made it impossible to use in silent settings.

I ended up going back to reusing a disposable bottle until it leaks even though the thought and feeling of something flavourless being in my mouth is revolting (its a sensory thing).

I think about a feature or bugfix that I want to work on, then shoehorn it in by any means necessary. Once my code is confirmed working, the planning phase begins and I go through the module(s) I’m working with line-by-line and match the original author’s coding style and usually by that point I pick up a trail or discover a bunch of helper functions/libraries that I can use to replace parts of my code, and continue from there.

As others have said, configuration files is a great way to learn that. Pick a config option you want to learn about, jump to the config loader, find where the variable gets set, then do a global search for that function. From there it starts to fall into place.

Sidenote: I also learned rust this way. It took me around 6 months to learn the rgit codebase solely from adding features that I wanted from cgit. Now I’m at the point where rebasing from upstream to my soft-fork doesn’t mess up any of my changes, and am able add or fix things with relative ease. If memory serves, a proper debugger (firedbg is excellent!) was used on several occasions to track down an extremely annoying and ambiguous error message that was due to rust’s trait system being a pain in my ass.

Broken in iOs 16.7.2 using whatever built in viewer comes with Safari.

Bitlocker.

I admit that I am a bit biased. During the 8-10 years I tanked my startup by going all-in on Microsoft Store apps because I absolutely loved my Windows Phones and was convinced that they were the future, especially when Continuum was announced (and it actually worked!).

The disenchantment started when Microsoft forced developers to rewrite their apps for Windows 10 after already having forced the mobile devs to do it from 7 to 8. The hatred ramped up when they killed support for the Lumia 950XL 6 months after launch. I freaking loved that phone.

It pissed me off so much that I went to Apple lmao talk about cutting off my nose to spite my face.

You forgot Vista before 7. The list didn’t “break down” because Vista was the steaming pile of shit in between.

8 sucked, 8.1 was good at least in my opinion. 10 was when I fucked off to Linux land permanently after using it on and off for 15 years and have never been happier.

I’m a fan of hellpotting them.

Over-explaining is my biggest issue. I’m entirely self taught and the trash quality of certain softwares with non-descriptive variable and function names sort of steered me towards clearly naming things (sometimes verbosely). That has the unfortunate side effect of repetition when documenting and it comes across as sarcastic or condescending when proofreading.

Its far easier to have a machine do it than to second-guess every sentence.

You mentioned a llamafile, is that offline? I’m using GPT-4 at the moment because my partner has a subscription. If so, I maaaay have to check it out ^^

I use it to generate code documentation because I’m incapable of documenting things without sounding like a condescending ass. Paste in a function, tell it to produce docstrings and doctests, then edit the hell out of it to sound more human and use actual data in the tests.

Its also great for readmes. I have a template that I follow for that and only work on one section at a time.

Betterbird is the solution. It just works and the system tray icon is a welcome addition. No more needing to use Birdtray for that.

I use Proton, business tier. My only gripe is that addresses can’t be deleted without contacting support, or so I’ve read. I can’t find a delete button on any of my addresses, but can find the button to buy more address slots.

Using custom domains and a catch-all pointing to certain labels is my workaround.