• 20 Posts
  • 146 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • It lags for me whenever I access some filesystem that takes a while to respond. That could be a faulty or old device, or it could be an NFS share with multiple large file transfers going on in the background.

    And when I say it lags, I don’t mean it just takes a while to show me a directory’s content, I mean the entire UI freezes and kwin will grey out the window because tha application isn’t responding any more.

    This does not happen a lot, and if your file browsing is largely limited to a fast local storage, like a SATA SSD or even an NVMe, you may well never see this problem at all. But it does happen.



  • Okay, I’m generally on the side if dolphin UI-wise, but when it comes to the topic of lagginess, it has to be said that dolphin, and in fact, almost everything using the kio infrastructure, is the one shitting the bed here. You’d think a bit of multithreading will keep the UI from freezing up whenever the underlying I/O has some minor hiccup (which can absolutely happen in practice with network filesystems or USB sticks in combination with large file transfers), but apparently dolphin can’t do that.






  • The reason I gave up self hosting email was because all my emails kept going to spam for everyone I emailed.

    You need to set up DKIM, SPF and DANE, then most big email providers will accept your mail. Worst case, you may need to contact them to unblock your mail server’s IP if that has been used by a spammer prior to you.

    Plus incoming email needs spam protection.

    Both SpamAssassin and Rspamd do a decent job of that.

    Note: I’m using rspamd, and for some time at the beginning, it looked like it wasn’t really doing anything. Turns out it needs a couple hundred training emails before it will start using the Bayes function. Just feed your Spam folder into the learn_spam command and any of your normal, not-spam folders into the learn_ham command.


  • Domain registration information can usually be found out somehow, although these days you have to jump through some additional hoops to get it, and those hoops are designed to discourage automated lookups. The privacy gains you get from hosting your own email server, though, are massive and IMHO more than worth it. If you are not hosting your own mail server, then the most you can expect from having your own domain is nicer looking email addresses. Depending on what your hosting provider supports you might also get unlimited aliases, maybe even regex aliases, which can be very helpful when handing out mail addresses to various companies and internet services.

    If your main concern is that your email address should not be associated with your real identity, your best bet is to just use a VPN to connect to any large email hoster, like ProtonMail. (Obviously don’t use Proton Mail if Proton is also your VPN.)



  • Older Millenial here. It was definitely GenX that paved the way for the computer world I learned, and it was mostly GenX who wrote the books and taught the lessons (often informal) that brought us what knowledge we have, at least in the beginning. Plus a small selection of exceptional individuals from older generations, including, dare I say it,… the baby boomers.






  • Modern CPUs (from like the last 20 years) will throttle down a lot before they actually shut down. Unless your cooling is completely inadequate or somehow broken, shutdowns because of high load just dont happen. I suspect there is something fundamentally wrong with your hardware.

    A problem with cooling could also go some way to explaining your performance problems – but it could also just be that your system just doesn’t have the computing power to do what you want it to. The computing demands from video decoding go up dramatically when you go beyond 1080p. If I recall correctly, the Intel Core CPUs with the “U” at the end were the low-energy models (for longer battery life); of course that comes with compromises on the performance side.

    The CPU model suggests that this is a laptop, and a fairly old one at that. I would look for things like blocked air ducts or broken fans if I were you. It’s also possible that the thermal compound between your CPU and the CPU cooler has dried out and needs replacing (although laptops of that power class should be using thermal contact solutions that do not dry out), or that contact has lessened for other reasons. Again, if your computer seriously powers down because of load, it’s borderline broken and in need of maintenance.

    As for your other question, no RAM cannot help with that. It can hurt if you have too little of it, but once you have enough, the best it can do is not be a bottleneck.

    * Edit: Also, make sure you are not setting down the laptop on anything soft, like a blanket, when using it. It will sink in and have its air intakes blocked if you do that.