Buy a plot of land with a nice view and construct one of those nifty passive houses. Also get my teeth and knees fixed, put together a nice home lab, and go travelling. Split the surplus between retirement savings and donating to causes I find worthy.

Groceries, gaming, looking at various niche hobby sites that I only check on a weekly basis

Tempered glass and thick case. Specifically one of those cases with interlocking front and back pieces. Makes it look and feel like it was always an integral part of the phone. In fact it is now, after I took out the glue to replace the battery and couldn’t be bothered to put glue back.

Tore out the plastic sheet included with it and stuck a glass protector in its place. Glass doesn’t have to be expensive, I got mine in a 2-pack for just $6. Maybe the more expensive ones have some oleophobic, anti-glare, or anti-scratch, but mine’s held up nicely for over 3 years.

I don’t mind the extra heft at all and would probably have perpetual anxiety if I had to use a phone without a case.

Just curious, what kind of batteries are powering the remote and if rechargeable, how often does it need charging? Not saying they wouldn’t do such things, still a good preventative measure, but I’d be surprised if it could sustain telemetry with only the power of AAA batteries in a typical remote.

Can confirm it happens even with residential IPs recently, good thing I don’t have static or ‘sticky’ IP so I’m not blocked too long.

You could make it about equivalent to the protections afforded by the typical BIOS password, i.e. the attacker must first disassemble your laptop to reflash the spi chip or pull the hard drive. A grub.cfg like so would do, assuming everything in encrypted partitions:

set prefix=(memdisk)/boot/grub
set superusers="myuser"
password_pbkdf2 myuser grub.pbkdf2.sha512.10000.<your hashed password>
cryptomount -u <UUID of LUKS container>
search.fs_uuid <UUID of the root filesystem under LUKS container> root cryptouuid/<UUID of LUKS container>
configfile ($root)/@rootfs/boot/grub/grub.cfg

Assuming you boot directly to GRUB or locked out the SeaBIOS boot device selector, then GRUB will only ever look for a boot device matching your disk’s UUID; attempting to do anything else aside from entering the LUKS passphrase will prompt for the GRUB password. You’d still have your own recovery path by pressing Esc, entering your GRUB password, and dropping to the GRUB shell. Bonus points for patching the GRUB code so it doesn’t echo the UUID of your disk.

No, it isn’t bulletproof against physical access. But yes, I had the same question you did when starting out with coreboot and this was the solution I came up with.

What I like to call temporal horror vacui. Some things are easy to start, they do require some periodic checking, but are otherwise passive. So I’ll start a 3d print, get water boiling on the stove, or start running an offline backup. Then my mind is bothered that those are such “empty”, “unproductive” tasks, and so reactively fills in the gaps with things I’ve been procrastinating like dishes, meal prep, planning, etc.

Also body doubling. For emails, I have a good friend at work who also massively struggles with them, so every now and then, we make a commitment to each other and for an hour or two, both sweep through our inboxes, with a bit of commiseration along the way.

Anyway, it’s still a struggle that makes me wonder about seeking an ADHD evaluation … next month maybe.

On that note, I still laugh when I recall this story of some college student blackout drunk at a party, friends came up to her to ask if she needed help, while trying to emphatically shake her head ‘no’, projectile vomited and the violent motion of her head made the vomit cover everything in the room.

I use it to generate little bash and python scripts for mundane tasks, random ideas I don’t have a good starting point for, or boilerplate code I don’t have the energy to write manually. Or also to decipher cryptic error messages and logs. Nothing that I publish though, just all testing and personal scripts.

I do this with models running locally on my gpu. 14B parameters is surprisingly decent and fast enough for a 16 GB slot-powered workstation model.

For fun, since the model is local, I also toss in some excerpts of my writing, see what it can glean from my style and vocabulary, something I’d never do with an LLM hosted by someone else for obvious reasons.

Put on a good podcast and enjoy my comfort foods

Focus follows mouse and unchecking the option to auto raise the active window. Couldn’t live without it and being used to it has made me extremely clumsy when I do pick up my Windows work laptop.

I change the taskbar clock to be a one-line MM/DD HH:MM:SS format, drop in my customized locale (based on en-US for maximum compatibility, but without having to deal with US formats and units that I’m not fond of), and point the taskbar shortcut for my text editor to a script that creates a pre-named file and launches the editor with autosave enabled. Because having to manually save and come up with a name for your spur-of-the-moment notes sucks, automatically generating 20260831_text_1 is so much better than a, b, a2, etc.

XFCE specific, I get rid of the second panel full of launchers. Acquired taste, but also Chicago95 theme and icon pack.

Habit. And I’ve become good at finding outfits that look nice and are just as comfortable as ones that look more casual.

Have you thought about writing and publishing your experiences from life and hobbies that other people could learn from?

Many moons ago I’d struggle to fall asleep quickly, but now I can whenever I want. Even more effective if I think about a task on my todo list I’m dreading.

I don’t want to say that it’s due to the pandemic, but it definitely became a thing for me during the pandemic.

Side-effects: does not imply that I use this ability to establish a good sleep schedule. Zero productivity on trains and planes; first-class service is wasted due to being conked out.

For anonymity alone, no. You ought to at least aspire to live the nomad lifestyle first and put up with its challenges, then enjoy whatever anonymity comes from it as a bonus.

If you don’t mind apartment living, you could consider the arrangement I had at one point. Private landlord who didn’t run background checks, accepted payment in any reasonable form, many tenants, communal mailbox without apartment numbers or names required. Internet, utilities, etc. all rolled into rent and not individually metered. Might be harder to find but they exist.

The US response to Microsoft’s monopoly was meager, this time, they will cheer Google on.

Trying to get coreboot to run on the nvidia variant of the ThinkPad T510. I guess it boots now, but I’m probably going to shelve it if I can’t get rid of the random freezes this weekend.

Eating one of those mini pecan pies

Anything that requires PII in a separate browser that doesn’t clear on exit. General browsing on my main browser, which clears data on exit, except for a small list of exceptions. It doesn’t defeat non-cookie fingerprinting, but I at least get rid of all the cookies that I don’t want.

I’m happy that you are at a point where you find life to be stable and well-paced. For a lot of people, whatever comforts they might be enjoying are riding on a razor-thin margin. Holding together well at first glance, but only one financial, health, or other incident away from a world of hurt.

Also, whoever downvoted me right out of the gate could you please take a moment to explain yourself. The thought I had of someone in an ivory tower dismissing my comment first thing as I’m commuting to work wasn’t sitting right with me. Yeah, I’m stressed.