I daily drive Debian now, but several years ago when a couple of my computers were still very new, I used Arch since it has bleeding-edge support for new hardware while being still thoroughly documented in the Arch Wiki.

The sheer volume of packages on the official repo and the AUR made it great for discovering which desktop environment I wanted to use and for software-hopping in general too. You can have as much or as little on your system as you want and nothing is forced on you.

I think ROCm is fine with more recent cards, but getting it to work on my RX 480, for which ROCm dropped official support a while ago, was a real pain.

Everything in Owner and a secondary phone for all proprietary work and communication apps. The secondary phone is powered off or at least disconnected once I leave work. Google stuff and banking through a computer browser whenever possible.

If I were forced to use only one phone, the secondary phone’s contents would be on a secondary profile. This used to be my setup but switching between profiles throughout the day wasn’t my thing.

I like knowing what my computer is doing and that was noticeably less and less the case as I went from Windows 98 to 10 and all the major versions in between. Before learning about Linux, simply going through the options in debloat scripts made me realize how invasive Microsoft was behind the scenes.

I know that he’s not necessarily the best resource, but Rob Braxman’s videos were first to bring mobile privacy concerns to my attention. Also, while his promotion of his custom phone didn’t lead to me buying one of them, it did lead to me learning about custom Android ROMs and eventually buying a Pixel for GrapheneOS.

No, they respect my goals and seem to have accepted that I’m sometimes just unreachable. The only thing they might be annoyed about is my GrapheneOS and Signal proselytism. If anything, it’s more apathy than antagonism. They’ll agree with me on privacy issues but rarely ever give up the conveniences of Apple, Microsoft, Google, etc. in practice.

English is my second-ish language, but perhaps I have an unfair advantage for this question since I spent nearly all of my childhood in the US and started learning English at age 5.

It wouldn’t be outwardly noticeable, but the remaining non-native element for me would be the alphabet. I learned the English alphabet well before learning English itself, so the sounds of the individual letters are in my mind still part of my first language. In other words, whenever I recite the alphabet or spell words out loud letter-by-letter, it feels as though I am switching back to my first language.

The sink. It never occurred to me that people regularly brush their teeth in the shower until now.

I used to brush without wetting the toothbrush, but ever since I saw a fruit fly on my toothbrush, I’ve rinsed it off before using.

It’s better than the default, but such firewalls are installed at the user level while Google’s services are installed at the root level and are known to bypass VPNs and VPN-style firewalls, including RethinkDNS, on occasion.

Nice, that’s a better rugged laptop than I imagined. Seems to be a fortified variant of a regular Latitude, so you should have access to interchangeable parts for years to come.

It is on the back of my mind, but there’s only so much I can do as a civilian. And I’ve already got enough personal stuff to keep me busy for a while.

The cheap secondary phone is the approach I have gone with for work apps. Powered up only when needed and doesn’t connect to my main home network.

Great for my tablet which is too weak to run IronFox smoothly. One annoyance is that it’ll insist on a refresh if your internet connection is interrupted or changes in any way. The reason for it is not immediately obvious and neither is the option to turn it off (Settings > Homepage > Ask to restart on connection change)

I won’t pretend that I have self-hosted storage that is reliably accessible from beyond my home, but most people who have set up a self-hosted cloud drive report that it can be done in a matter of hours on cheap second-hand hardware, which would also save you on subscription costs. You’ll also be spending some time migrating files over in either case already.

A fine start, but I think the plan could be made a bit more sustainable.

1. Make a threat model. Hardware that is impenetrable today might not be as secure five years later as new security vulnerabilities are found. Who or what do you want to defend against?

2. If you don’t use an OS that phones home, options without AI-enhanced wiretapping will still be around for years to come. There’s also several existing layers of hardware-related wiretapping to consider: the Intel ME, AMD PSP, BIOS, embedded controller firmware, SSD firmware, input peripherals, etc.

3. I’d be happy to be proven wrong, but what you have sounds like specialty hardware, for which parts will become increasingly rare and expensive over 8 to 9 years. Ironically, common business-class laptops could be more future-proof by this metric, unless perhaps you plan on using one out in the field or in a metal foundry.

4. Laptops are fundamentally like desktop computers, just in a portable form factor. Any security measure on a laptop can be more or less replicated on a desktop computer.

Glove Prints

Problem: Thin gloves like surgical gloves can still leave fingerprints on surfaces.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glove_prints

Mitigation: Wear thick, textured gloves

Finally found an explanation for why my phone’s fingerprint sensor works through thin gloves.

Baidu and Alibaba might have you covered. But Chinese web services tend to require a laundry list of personal details and sometimes government ID to register for an account, if they’re even available to foreigners. Other considerations aside, the “security checks” and other knickknacks on Chinese web services are also just plain annoying. Is there anything that keeps you from self-hosting?

Have a NAS, Jellyfin server, and LLM on my LAN so far. Next step is to make them available outside my home, but I’ve been procrastinating.

6 to 8 hours depending on the day. If it were up to me, I’d have a polyphasic system for a sum of 8 hours: 6 hours at night plus a 2-hour siesta.

Never. Data privacy aside, I can’t be bothered to fill out yet another form or create yet another account just for one item I purchased. I also can’t remember the last time I had something break on me before the warranty expired.

It’s tempting to cut it off like mold on bread, but like mold on bread, it can extend far deeper than whatever mole or irregularity you see. See a doctor. Skin cancer is not something that can be treated with home remedies.