Perfected a recipe using mostly fresh ingredients to replicate my favorite overpriced frozen microwave meal

I’d go see my closest family and open up the vintage wines we’d been saving for later

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.

Desktop: Librewolf, Chromium as a fallback

Mobile: Vanadium on devices with GOS; adblocking via DNS. Cromite for my secondary phone and degoogled but not GOS tablet.

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.

Larger denominations also become much easier to smuggle. Concealing and slipping an envelope vs a whole bag.

Dirty lounge chairs because people sit on one and prop their feet up on the next

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.

As others say, where the use cases are so specific to each machine, it’ll be a headache juggling all of those images if your needs and workflow change down the road.

But I’d be remiss to say I don’t practice a form of what you mention, I would go insane if I actually had to reinstall from distro defaults. I have a single perfected VM image with customizations and software common to all of my machines. And yes, if you were to go this route, there are little quirks to iron out manually each time I image to a new machine, even old and well-supported ones. Some just cosmetic, some preventing graphical output. Although still much less time than setting up from scratch.

It works well enough for me, but it also frankly leads to a poorly-documented system that will accumulate cruft with updates, and can’t propagate changes in the VM to my existing systems easily, so I’m interested too to see what other people here suggest. Particularly for those niche customizations that land outside of /home and /etc (e.g. /usr/fonts, packages not provided by the distro).

Phone: 316

Desktop: 294

Laptop: 79

You could say I’m making use of all the ram I’ve installed

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

The hospital gifted me mine

To quiet a squeaking hinge after misplacing my wd-40

Woah a huge flip phone!

Cool pairing of hardware in all seriousness. I too used to laugh at the inclusion of 3G/4G in select iPad models.

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.