Posts

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I’m walkin’, yes indeed…

It’s now a bit over 2 years since I’ve treated myself with some of these “fitness trackers”, and while first checking about and against this “tracking” part, I’m using Gadgetbridge on my phone to keep all of the data locally (versus in some “cloud”, which means someone else’s computers). Means that on January 9th, 2024 I’ve bought that Xiaomi Mi Band 8, and since January 29th, 2024 I am doing 10.000+ steps a day. Each day. Didn’t miss a single one since then. And so, here’s today’s summary on Gadgetbridge:

8.85 million steps including those few first days with mostly only playing around with the device and software, and 8.72 million if you start counting 713 days ago, counting only those where I reached my self-set goal.

That device can be really recommended btw, and if like me you use it as a step-counter only, it still keeps the battery for about two weeks until it reaches 30% charge. So I charge it each and every 2nd Sunday only, which is perfect for me.

Not interested in sleep, pulse, or any other tracking, but that’s just me…

And like always, thanks for reading.

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Heise about TV sets

Someone at heise seems to need a new TV set – they’re examining those since a while, for instance here or here (both links are behind paywalls; sorry).

To sum it up: in the first of these articles, they compared lower-cost OLED against LCD TVs, and the most positive remarks were made about LG’s cost-effective “B5” series.

The latter article seemed to favour Japanese makers like Panasonic and Sony, as most other media both in Germany and in the UK say as well. Panasonic uses LG panels, while Sony has Samsung, and the first comes with Amazon’s “Fire”, and the latter with Google’s software. LG and Samsung have their own software, and for/against all of these “smart” TVs, you’ll need a filter list in your Pi-Hole (or not connect them to the internet at all if you want to avoid being spied upon).

Luckily, our own Panasonic LCD from about 2013 is still a good one – while the on-device “apps” more or less stopped working (due to not enough CPU power and/or memory I guess), its picture is still really good – better than a low-cost LG LCD TV we bought for our dad in my opinion. And even if the original remote control has long given up most of its keys, and the TV sometimes reboots without any apparent reason, we’re still happy with it. A newer one wouldn’t improve the programs, and ours is still too good to use it as a bigger monitor in the kid’s dorm or so (athough it would be awesome together with some kind of home trainer or so) 😉

My sister lately bought LG’s mid-tier “C5” series, which is probably what most people would be really happy with. Haven’t asked her tho what was wrong with her older one (also LG), which looked nice to me on our last visit to hers.

Anyway, and as always – thanks for reading.

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First bigger upgrades of 2026

Hey and good morning, dear friends and readers of this blog.

This morning after the usual

yay -Syu

line in Arch, I got lots of updates, some 200+ packages IIRC, including a new kernel as shown in my conky as well:

Later, I found this post from Marcus Nestor in 9to5 Linux about Debian – so I went and updated that as well, which also got me a new kernel amongst lots of other things:

What most people who aren’t that much into Linux probably don’t know is that it’s nowadays more and less automatic, like in Windows from versions 10 and upwards – you are notified about new updates, and often they come without much fuss, just by themselves. Lately I also read the old question again of when to reboot after such upgrades, and for me the answer is simple: whenever you get a new kernel or some other really low-level stuff like systemd or GRUB. Some distributions like Debian now automate updates via Gnome, which is a bit too much in my opinion – contrary to the later Windows versioning, this reboots pretty much each time instead of when really necessary. But I digress.

Marius’ article also mentions why and when you should probably download such upgrades – when making new boot images on your USB sticks or elsewhere. So while pretty much all modern distributions update themselves, and you don’t really need such downloads, if – like me – you’re carrying around a bootable stick with some of these images with you in case you’d need to help some friends with these, go for it and download those “point” distributions of monthly images (in Arch), and put them onto your boot media.

Oh, and in case you dual- or even triple-boot like me (yes, I still keep Windows 11 around as well), you’ll have to update your bootloader of choice of course – in my case, that is GRUB on Arch, like this:

sudo grub-install –target=x86_64-efi –efi-directory=/boot/ –bootloader-id=Arch

followed by

sudo grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg

as documented in the very nice Arch Wiki about GRUB. If you don’t do that, then you won’t see your new kernel in Debian 😉

Like always, thanks for reading, and have a nice day 🙂

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Tried secureblue

Last week I had a brief look at secureblue, a hardened Linux distribution based on a so-called “atomic” Fedora distribution (called “silverblue” in case you’re interested). I was interested because I’ve read about it on several security-related websites like for instance here or here.

And I liked it a lot, becauise it takes many very good ideas from GrapheneOS, like their hardened Chromium-based browser Vanadium which here is called Trivalent. Even their webpages kind of look alike.

And since I haven’t had a look at a tiling window manager yet, I first tried the “Sway” version. With the <super> and <Enter> keys, you open a terminal window, here called “foot”. Looks like this:

You’ll notice the “us” keyboard, which I couldn’t switch to a German one, except in the login manager which looks like this:

This isn’t a problem of Sway; I later tried that with another distribution where it worked. Maybe some overlay “header” on Fedora’s version was responsible for this, I didn’t find out during my test.

I stopped testing it because neither this Sway nor the KDE Plasma or Gnome based versions of secureblue ran on Mitchie’s old Lenovo laptop which still has a Celeron-class dual core CPU, and only 2GB of RAM. Too heavy for old metal like that. I also can’t do all of my stuff (like music making which requires real time) on such an atomic version of Linux, and with flatpaks.

But in case you want a nice and reasonable secure machine, and have the hardware for it – I recommend a quad core with at least 4GB of RAM – then go for it, and have a look. Could be well worth trying it.

And like always, thanks for reading.

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Bravo, Jan!

This. No other comment needed, except that you need to understand German, or that you’ll have to use your favourite translation engine for it.

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Memory loss, indeed

Oh wow – this means the end of an era, at least for me. We have Crucial memory in all of our desktop computers, and in each one I’ve built over the years. And now it will be gone, at least for us “consumers”. Why? The AI craze. And look at this:

A photo of the “Stargate I” site in Abilene, Texas. AI data center sites like this are eating up the RAM supply. Credit: OpenAI (taken from ARS Technica’s website)

That’s what AI – and as such, all of us – are doing to our planet. A lot less trees, a lot more datacenters. This has to stop if we really want to save the planet…

Like always, thanks for reading.