For me, Trebuchet goes straight to my brain. There are plenty of fonts that look nicer to me, but that’s the one that I settled on after trying out dozens. I read it faster, I don’t lose my place, it works equally well for me at several font sizes and on both traditional ebook readers and tablet screens.
Bob Smith
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- 99 Comments
Bob Smith@sopuli.xyzto
Lord of the memes@midwest.social•Me after I've been around too many peopleEnglish
21·2 months agoTeleporno and a quiet room?
Bob Smith@sopuli.xyzto
Technology@lemmy.world•The Economist on using phrenology for hiring and lending decisions: "Some might argue that face-based analysis is more meritocratic" […] "For people without access to credit, that could be a blessing"English
23·3 months agoGotcha. This is replacing one nonsense black box with a different one, then. That makes a depressing kind of sense. No evidence needed, either!
Bob Smith@sopuli.xyzto
Technology@lemmy.world•The Economist on using phrenology for hiring and lending decisions: "Some might argue that face-based analysis is more meritocratic" […] "For people without access to credit, that could be a blessing"English
32·3 months agoAll of that being typed, I’m aware that the ‘If’ in my initial response is doing the same amount of heavy lifting as the ‘Some might argue’ in the article. Barring the revelation of some truly extraordinary evidence, I don’t accept the premise.
Bob Smith@sopuli.xyzto
Technology@lemmy.world•The Economist on using phrenology for hiring and lending decisions: "Some might argue that face-based analysis is more meritocratic" […] "For people without access to credit, that could be a blessing"English
191·3 months agoWow. If a black box analysis of arbitrary facial characteristics is more meritocratic than the status quo, that speaks volumes about the nightmare hellscape shitshow of policy, procedure and discretion that resides behind the current set of ‘metrics’ being used.
Bob Smith@sopuli.xyzto
Open Source@lemmy.ml•Libreboot – Free and Open Source BIOS/UEFI boot firmware
5·3 months agoI tell a lie: the specific computer that I mention in the above post has a cleaned-up version of coreboot on it, not libreboot.
I had a much smaller chromebook with libreboot on in a few years ago. Booting was fine, the rest of the hardware was too weak for my daily use. It was an Asus C201. I vaguely remember having to disconnect the battery and bridge some board contacts to get it switched over.
Bob Smith@sopuli.xyzto
Open Source@lemmy.ml•Libreboot – Free and Open Source BIOS/UEFI boot firmware
11·3 months agoI have libreboot on an old chromebook that I converted a year or two ago. I followed a guide. Minor disassembly but nothing weird.
The computer boots just fine with one issue that is hardly worth mentioning. I accidentally left some cruft around when I switched from one distro to another, so it fails to boot to the old system before successfully booting the current one. That’s a ‘me being lazy’ problem, not a ‘libreboot’ problem.
Bob Smith@sopuli.xyzto
Technology@lemmy.world•Your Kindle Can Finally Be Jailbroken Again. [22:00]English
18·3 months agoOne thing to note about the Kobo store is that it (unlike Amazon) lists the DRM status of a given book towards the bottom of the store page below the reviews. If you see something like “Epub 2 (DRM Free)” then that’s the format that the book will be in if you download it.
You can download a book that you’ve purchased directly from the website on the My Account/My Books subpage. I’ve tested this out and it can be a good way to get paid DRM free ebooks, if that’s what the publisher wants to sell.
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Bob Smith@sopuli.xyzto
memes@lemmy.world•How to Succeed in Grifting Without Really Trying
3·4 months agoBahhahhah!
Bob Smith@sopuli.xyzto
Linux@lemmy.ml•What's a good Google Drive replacement for syncing my Keepass database?
1·4 months agoSyncthing is an option on the desktop side and it works with Syncthing-Fork on Android. It takes a bit of setting up, but I’ve been using a setup like this for years now.
Make friends with some PC repair people. Depending on where you live, a LOT of Win10 stuff is getting thrown out right now. If you present yourself as an alternative to recycling/scrapping, you might get a good deal.
I used one of these (might even be the exact same model) as a little music player attached to an old soundbar. I could connect via ssh and play music through the speakers. The main challenge was finding a distribution that worked well with the internal sound card, since I wanted to use the aux output for sound. I don’t think that I ever tried connecting a monitor to it, but it worked well for what I used it for, right up until I needed the sound bar for something else.
Bob Smith@sopuli.xyzto
Linux@lemmy.ml•psa: snapd leads to massive slowdowns in boot time
26·4 months agoSnap turned several of my oldest Ubuntu boxes into unuseable e-waste before I jumped to a different distribution. This is the sole reason that I left Ubuntu behind back in the day and switched to something else on ALL of my computers. I’m not going through that again.
I’ve been running various unofficial versions of LineageOS on a Pixel C for years because the screen is beautiful and the battery remained good until this year.
Official Google support ended with 8.1 Oreo in 2017, but it is currently running 13. I don’t think that it’ll get any more updates, but I squeezed an extra 7 or 8 years out of it. Plus, I can probably keep using it as a stationary screen on my treadmill for a few more years. Potentially, It’ll be useful for a full decade past that final release date.
That’s why I use custom roms.
To be fair, power loss is a concern for any setup. More recent copy-on-write filesystems are supposed to be a bit more resilient…but I also worry about the lack of a long-term reliability track record for newer filesystems like BTRFS. The long term solution, like more than one other poster has indicated, is having multiple backups.
The biggest issue that I ran into when I was using NTFS drives with Linux was caused by unclean drive dismounts. After power outages, forced shutdowns, or manually pulled drives (I am the problem sometimes), the NTFS drive would sometimes fail to mount properly unless I connected it to a Windows computer and scanned the drive for errors first. Not the end of the world if you have backups and a Windows computer handy, but pretty terrible if you don’t have both.
Bob Smith@sopuli.xyzto
Open Source@lemmy.ml•What are your favourite ebook reading apps?
2·5 months agoAnd my experience is limited. I opened up an especially large book earlier today to test things out and it took the better part of ten seconds to load. That seems to be the case every time I switch from a different book to that one, so there’s still a bit of an issue. Not as bad as I remember it being.






I’m not sure that there is a consensus at this time. After reading some conflicting information, I opted to install syncthing via the F-Droid version of Termux until things settle down. When I run it in a terminal the default browser opens the web interface and I’m good to go from there. Power management is not great, but it works and runs the current version of syncthing.