An unknown Red Hatter calls it out for what it is… thanks Liam for writing his opinions down for us.
Two from today
Took two pictures of Bella today – and one included me:
Both taken with Mitchie’s Panasonic Lumix 20mm/1.7 lens on my Olympus OM-D E-M10 Mk2 camera. For the second one, I also used two studio strobes, both gridded, front one in a beauty dish. The cat found that super interesting 😉
Like always, thanks for viewing.
Sick and tired of that so-called “AI”?
So are we. Just get back to your browser as you knew it, with a script called “Just the browser”. Or read more about it from Liam on TheRegister first. You’re welcome.
Selfie mit Katze
Out of camera image, nothing changed. ISO 6400, f/2, 1/13s, 17mm. Thanks for viewing.
The internet is sooo kaput
After a bit of reading, yesterday I decided to have another fresh look at a browser called Brave. And yes, I knew about the controversies regarding its crypto- and “AI”-integration, and also the ones about its owner. But it’s still one of the better browsers around, so I tried it on Arch and Debian Linux, on Windows 11, and even on my phone (which runs GrapheneOS and which does have a pretty secure Chromium-based browser called “Vanadium” already).
I’m not the typical internet user who is using a browser for pretty much everything, and no “doom scrolling” for me, thanks. But what hit me is that after less than 24 hours, Brave’s built-in tracker stats showed me this:
Almost 3,500 trackers in less than 24 hours? Wow – see the headline of this post… time to regulate the internet, and to “take it back”. A website needs just two things from us as end users: the URL you want to see, and the IP address where it should be sent. No scripts, no cookies, and most definitely no ads and trackers.
Anyway, thanks like always for reading. Oh, and the background photo within the Brave browser is by Anna Wangler, on Unsplash.
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.
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.
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 🙂
A nice interview with Andreas Tille, current DPL
This post on Phoronix brought me to the original “Bits from the DPL” message from where I followed Andreas’ link to an interview with him on RadioTux (see more about RadioTux and that interview here). Interesting man, interesting interview, thanks for that, and recommended hearing.
