PDF reflow is one of the major reasons I am using Koreader. The whole thing is very clever and works extremely fast given the limited nature of these devices.
IMAP had its day in the sun, but the advent of big webmail providers (especially gmail) has killed off the advancement of email clients. Now all major development is focused on trying to recreate Gmail to varying degrees of success. It all ends up internal to one or another corporation so they are just all endlessly reinventing the wheel with IMAP just being relegated to a afterthought front end to some sort of search-based backend.
Actually having a email client software running on your machine is extremely nitch and is mostly in the realm of self-hosters and legacy holdouts that won't let their clients go.
A most advanced modern approach is to just use POP3 to download your emails to a local Maildir and have them indexed there non-destructively. And then sync between your various machines that you want your email accessible using some sort of file sync or P2P solution.
I use notmuch for this. It automatically indexes and tags emails and thus enables much more advanced email management solutions then what can be offered over something like IMAP.
The main advantage of this is that 'folders' are managed virtually. There is no shuffling or copying or editing of emails done normally. I only have to worry about backing up my emails and notmuch config as all the rest can be regenerated relatively quickly.
This is more or less replicating what Gmail and other webmail providers do server side.
Where as the traditional approach shuffling and moving and deleting of emails on some imap server is fairly dangerous and expensive operation. Mistakes can lead to data loss and are often very difficult to reverse.
This sort of thing is why nobody gives a shit about IBM anymore and they have to keep just buying relevant companies to stay relevant.
Hopefully they do the right thing and hand hashicorp over to Redhat so they can open source the shit out of it. So they can do things like make OpenTofu the proper upstream for it, etc.
I think it may add a bit of security, but containers are better thought of as mechanism to deploy and manage applications/services.
They can be useful as part of a security posture, but you kinda have to wrap everything up in SELinux or as part of some other system. Which is a lot easier to do with containers then it is to do with normal applications.
Also for most purposes:
If you want to integrate container applications into your desktop you'd be better off with something like Flatpak or distrobox/toolbx.
there are lots of things that these applications do to setup the environment and integrate into your home directory that isn't going to be done with simple scripts like this.
That doesn't mean that these scripts are useless, of course. I you want to run a application with more isolation and less integration then it is a lot easier to do it this way then with something like distrobox.
Like if you don't want to give a application access to your home directory. Or want to emulate a container environment for the cloud locally so you can hack on it.
> Is there an equivalent of DDWRT/OpenWRT but for TVs?
Get a used mini-pc, install Linux on it, and don't allow the TV to connect to any networks. This is a 50-75 dollar solution. Good if you are on a budget and are not interested in any wiz-bang features like HDR.
There are a few TV-dedicated Linux systems out there, like libreElEC.
Or get a more powerful system with a AMD GPU and install Bazzite on it. That way you get something like "SteamOS for your TV". Pairs nicely with controllers like 8BitDo.
It would be nice to have TVs as open as PCs, but the manufacturers and media companies are ran by dirtbags and would rather have victims then customers.
As someone who tried that route I'd strongly recommend against it for anyone who isn't core HN audience or just loves tinkering. You're much better off with an Apple TV or an Nvidia Shield unless you really want the "beefy gaming media center".
I walked the mini-PC/RPi road and they came up short every time even for me, let alone the rest of the family. Even when I put in place the perfectly optimized initial setup I was still left with a bad compromise of performance, power consumption, noise, boot time, ergonomics, and the constant trickle of things breaking down or needing tweaking because of some update.
When trying to watch a movie with the family the last thing I want is to troubleshoot random issues.
I just use an old macbook air with a bluetooth keyboard that also has a touchpad. The thing is in sleep mode when not needed, so it wakes up fast and does not need a lot of energy. With that setup I can access whatever media I want, have a solid adblocker and a browser with a real keyboard.
> with a bluetooth keyboard that also has a touchpad
Different strokes for different folks, having to use a keyboard to control my TV is for me one of those usability compromises I preferred to avoid. It's probably related to how I use the TV, things like browsing the web were never on the list of requirements. I'll have a phone, tablet, or laptop at hand for that.
I've had a MSI Trident functioning as a gaming/HTPC computer for years and the family loves it. They know how to browse the various streaming services and use Steam and Kodi.
This is diverging quite a bit from "a smart TV replacement". Especially if Steam is a requirement.
The gaming PC you have there is probably exactly the combination you want. But for most others it's the compromise to avoid I mentioned above. It delivers the console and TV/media center experience but with the full PC power consumption, noise, boot times, maintenance effort, and inconvenient controls.
The cheapest Trident I can find on eBay costs more (by 2-5x) than an Xbox and an Apple TV together. And these 2 deliver their respective experiences with far fewer compromises.
> They know how to browse the various streaming services
Knowing how to use it is just the bare minimum requirement. With an Apple TV for example you can do the same with almost instant startup time, 0 noise, 0 maintenance, ~1-2W streaming, and a small remote control. And probably has less ads than the average Windows computer :). I found the "right tool for the job" more appropriate for my use case but that might not work for everyone or all the time.
Things just happened that lead to that optimised state of using one device for alll (The MSI). Nevertheless the main question was about a nice 4k screen. :)
I have a 'smart tv'. I don't allow it to connect to any network.
The only really annoying thing about it is that noises from tv shows or the house sometimes triggers the voice recognition, which fails, and then you have to click through the error message.
Mirrored raid is good. Other raid levels are of dubious value nowadays.
Ideally you use "software raid" or file system with the capabilities do scrubbing and repair to detect bitrot. Or have some sort of hardware solution that can do the same and notify the OS of the error correction.
And, as always, Raid-type solutions mostly exist to improve availability.
Backups are something else entirely. Nothing beats having lots of copies in different places.
Taking a valid and correct observation and then strawmanning it with a crappy comic strip does not turn it into a invalid and incorrect observation.
The whole article above reminds me of when my brother went through his "I don't know why everybody works. They are so stupid" phase in late teens. Except this guy never grew out of it and he is now 30-something.
Stuff like this:
> Poverty is not an objective condition, but a relationship produced by unequal distribution of resources. There’s no such thing as poverty in societies in which people share everything.
The problem with this line of thinking is the line of thinking of "poverty exists because rich people exist". It treats the economy as a zero sum game were wealth is determined by access to natural resources and capital. That in order to for some people to be rich they need to restrict access to those productive and natural resource, thus condemning others to poverty.
A better way to think of poverty is 'privation'. Humanity has struggled against privation for as long as humanity has existed.
The natural state of humanity isn't being rich. When everybody had equal access to everything and there was no private property... It was true that everybody was equally wealthy, but they were also impoverished. It just meant that they were equally likely to die from what we would consider now a minor injury or inconvenient disease. It meant that you could starve to death if you badly twisted your ankle or broke your arm.
Poverty is the default. Anything else is a improvement.
It took 10s of thousands of years of struggle and fighting and dying to get to the point were large percentages of the population dying from communicable diseases and starvation wasn't considered a normal cyclical thing that was simply part of the natural order.
This wasn't that long ago.
We are still at the tail end of the moral panic of "People are no longer dying off faster then they can reproduce in the cities. How are we going to feed all these people? Are they not just going to descend onto the fields and consume the world like locusts?" (which is ironically reflected in some of the statements in the above article)
Now I am all for a person who doesn't want to exist as a cog in the corporate machine. I am also on the side of the person who is willing to accept a lower income in exchange for pursuing better personal relationships or gaming or art or whatever. Great. Go for it. You have only one life live how you want to. If you don't need to put in the government-imposed standard of a 40 hour work week... then by all means don't.
But if somebody writes a small book with the premise of "everybody in the world is a idiot except me"... then I have a pretty good idea on the odds of that statement being true. (hint: they are not good}
> If you don't like the modern world, stop being a hypocrite make the first move and throw away the computer and go live in the woods.
You, with derision:
> Taking a valid and correct observation and then strawmanning it with a crappy comic strip does not turn it into a invalid and incorrect observation.
> The whole article above reminds me of when my brother went through his "I don't know why everybody works. They are so stupid" phase in late teens. Except this guy never grew out of it and he is now 30-something.
So... Is it okay to decide to change on a personal level to not work or does that make you a dingus like your brother?
The whole point is that we have achieved insane productivity without the commensurate increase in quality of life and leisure due to the idiotic status quo.
> But if somebody writes a small book with the premise of "everybody in the world is a idiot except me"... then I have a pretty good idea on the odds of that statement being true.
What software are you using that has a parent company that pays out damages to you if it fails?
Because that is the purpose of 'bonded and insured'.
I haven't looked at every EULA and license of every piece of software I use, but I bet that "without warranty" clauses are part of every single one of them.
