As always, I got the username wrong…

  • 0 Posts
  • 55 Comments
Joined 3 months ago
cake
Cake day: June 24th, 2025

help-circle





  • It’s old news that you should never use the same camera for two images that need separate identities.

    The same applies to radio transmitters and every analogue medium like probably microphone or preamp or ADC.

    Anything that doesn’t work on purely digital domain is most likely traceable and I wouldn’t be surprised if proprietary software like Adobe started embedding hidden fingerprints into their files to “enforce their copyright” or “better collaborate with law enforcement”

    I tend to complain that ROMs like Graphene OS don’t allow spoofing IMEI which should be basic functionally of every privacy-enabled phone. Yet if you require real privacy the electronic “fingerprint” of the radio itself is probably enough to track someone if they really want to.

    There’s also a thing where they can track someone’s time and location just from listening to oscillations on the utility power’s frequency



  • The fuss is that every time you transcode to a new format you accumulatively lose quality.

    So for example if you have an 320kbps mp3, but then that takes too much space so you transcode it to 192 mp3, but then you discover the opus codec is more efficient so you transcode it again, but then you want to make a fan video of the same song, so your video player transcoded it again into video friendly aac.

    The quality on your final video is going contain the faults of all the files upstream.

    Meanwhile if you edit the video from a lossless source, it will only get encoded once.

    So it doesn’t matter for streaming, but it matters if you want to download and convert to other formats.



  • I used to run my nas from a raspberry pi with an USB to Sata bridge, but I found that USB cables are as always super unreliable and keep disconnecting and eventually I get filesystem errors, had to format and restore from backup.

    I ended up repurposing an old i3 computer as nas. Which worked well for few years until I was scrubbing the harddrives this summer and one of the harddrives died, when I took it off it was super hot. So I learned that having front fans blowing air directly to the hardrives is important so they don’t overheat. I’m not sure if external cases have enough air circulation.

    So maybe you could consider the overall reliability of the system and temperature of the harddrive, electricity can be expensive but an 8TB harddrive surely is more. Also you say you want no fan, so that makes things harder, maybe you can use the raspberry pi just as a client and have a big noisy NAS made from some old computer somewhere else in the house? And maybe have it so it wakes up on LAN when it’s being used and powered down when it’s not to safe power?





  • I like simplex a lot on android, it supports e2ee calls which afaik xmpp doesn’t.

    However simplex is still buggy, and sometimes messages don’t get through until the other party restarts the app. And the desktop app seems to be even buggier and has no native Wayland support.

    I’ve used xmpp + otr for many years, it seems to be the most stable solution if calls aren’t a concern.

    There are many clients to choose from, many of which are modern enough to support Wayland and are written in save languages (in the Whonix wiki there’s a nice xmpp client comparison you may be interested in)

    Nowadays omemo seems to be the replacement for OTR, it’s a shame it doesn’t support Socialist Milionares Protocol like OTR did.


  • IMO locked bootloader isn’t that important as graphene OS devs make it sound, but I would NEVER trust a software “found on telegram”.

    I have used unofficial lineage OS before, but that phone was just an entertainment machine, with no personal information on it.

    Graphene OS however has security features that other ROMs don’t have like improved encryption.

    However Pixels are too expensive, I can’t afford them either. I’m thinking as an alternative getting a Nothing phone cm 1 (or something) which is much cheaper than a pixel and can run official /e/ OS



  • Because not everyone has the skills, the know how and the time to learn a new operating system.

    Most people if they were to try to install Linux would probably endup breaking their systems somehow, most don’t wanna risk it.

    It may seem simple to us, but think of it from the perspective of someone who is afraid to install a program because thinks it’s going to make their computer explode, have no idea what a bootable USB is, and have never used a command line their whole lives.

    With modern computers with UEFI and secure boot installing Linux is even harder, no average user is going to mess with any of that.

    For the average person, the computer is just a very secondary thing in their lives that doesn’t get any attention besides the average “my phone is full, I need to copy my photos to the computer”. Tech companies know this so they exploit the user’s ignorance.