Especially because it sends money to the party you vote for, which the OPC has upheld: https://news.ontario.ca/en/release/1005286/all-parties-in-ontario-legislature-support-extending-per-vote-subsidy

All the more impactful because we have limits on campaign finance so rich people have to try a teensy bit harder to influence the process.

https://results.elections.on.ca/en/graphics-charts has a chart at the bottom for “Historical Voter Turnout”. It goes back to 1866. What I see in this is that giving up so hard on our democracy that you don’t engage with it in the simplest way is a pretty recent thing:

1929 set a new all-time low of 57% that didn’t get beat until we hit 52% in 2007. And we’ve been lowering the bar since then:

2011, the next election hit a new low of 48%.

2014 at 51% wasn’t much better, in 2018 we at least got 57% to tie the record low that held since 1929.

And last time in 2022 it was 44% and we talked about it a lot. Because that was depressing af. I really hope enough of them heard so we never lower the bar beyond that. And hopefully we can start getting it above 57% on the regular like we managed to do for 78 years.

neutrality/cooperation with China and Russia,

the reality of Russia’s claims of self defense

…WTF? There are way too many Canadians with ties to Ukraine, myself included, that would be offended at the very idea of anything but utter condemnation of Russia’s inhumanly brutal invasion. How can an invasion ever be “self defense”, that’s absurd.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_crimes_in_the_Russian_invasion_of_Ukraine

How can abducting children, laying siege to residential areas, rape, torture, etc. be self defense? It’s not. It’s abhorrent. Russia is worse than Trump.

Cory Doctorow thought that through: https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/15/beauty-eh/#its-the-only-war-the-yankees-lost-except-for-vietnam-and-also-the-alamo-and-the-bay-of-ham

Heh, seems like Mark Leyner would fit right in https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/131525.My_Cousin_My_Gastroenterologist

The new version of Recall is now opt-in rather than opt-out – I got prompted to enable Recall immediately after installing the Insider Build.

This seems to be the important bit, hopefully it stays opt in.

And not just any Americans. They’re owned by Chatham Asset Management, a hedge fund associated with the Republican party that also owns a notably Postmedia-like publication: The National Enquirer (via a360) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chatham_Asset_Management

Oh man, that inflation will get ya, back in the day it was only $20: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iH6kUCqIfD4

Aha, thanks for posting this, was a bit dismayed that I didn’t see that in the release. Now I see it was a misunderstanding so will wait until December to be disappointed. Well, no, I’m disappointed that I’ve been able to do this on my thinkpad for years and have had to fiddle with awkward compromises like accubattery if I want to reduce wear on my phone battery.

Anyone happen to know which release the audio sharing feature is scheduled for? Missed that one too.

Ha unfortunately browsers kind of decide that, I like JXL too 😢

My understanding of debbootstrap is that it’s for installing a minimal system, which is very much not what I want to do when rescuing an existing system as it’d probably overwrite things I’d like to keep. And the mount commands in the docs there to bind virtual filesystems before a chroot are similar to the sorts of things I’m hoping to find a memorable shortcut for yes. However, I already know what I want to bind mount, just looking for a more convenient way to go about it in a panic. Thanks for the suggestion.

Yes I recognise this post was more typing than a few decades of system rescuing but it’s also more relaxing because my laptop already works and a one character typo won’t be as much of a hassle here. It’d make an unpleasant chore more pleasant if there were a simple alias for this, which I occasionally speculate on proposing but ehhh I don’t need it so often.

So it appears this time I’m motivated enough to make a post here. But not quite motivated enough to:

• figure out how to wedge something to do this into the filesystem on my rescue ISO (because I’ll either lose that USB or need to remember to repeat it for the next Debian stable release which might come out before I need this again — I’m thinking on a longer time scale)

• learn how to formally engage with the Debian community (which seems lovely and welcoming but also extremely bureaucratic for sensible reasons and like I’ll have a pretty long road ahead of me to get a patch together and properly formatted and somehow applicable to all architectures and documented/internationalised and a lot of other steps I’m insufficiently motivated to undertake but perhaps eventually once I have a critical mass of contributions in mind that it feels worthwhile to dive in).

Thanks, that’s a significant detail. It also seems like Bluetooth 5.4 adds nothing relevant to my expected use cases: https://devzone.nordicsemi.com/nordic/nordic-blog/b/blog/posts/whats-new-in-bluetooth-v5-4-an-overview

Is there such a thing as a particularly good PCIE -> m.2 E key adapter or are they all pretty much equivalent? Specifically, are some antennae better than others or they’re pretty much simple enough devices that they’re going to be equivalent if they’re remotely aiming at the same spec?

Unfortunately, it seems like Intel may be a bad bet in terms of use as an AP:

Intel cards are only usable as access points either in the 2.4 GHz band or (very rarely) on channel 36. This hardware restriction is stemming from the fact that they don’t have the circuitry required for reacting to radar pulses, and therefore rely on the “proper” access point to tell them about radars.

Also it needs a USB header on my motherboard as apparently the BT aspect is based on that bus. So perhaps I’d be better off with a fully USB adapter, I wonder if there is a downside to that approach… Edit: PCIE is the way to go

One thing that would be useful to understand is the distinction between CMR and SMR

I got a nice deal on the x280 and am happy with it, was also looking at the various X1 carbon. Two criteria I had were I wanted USB-C charging (since I have those chargers around and they can handle these laptops) and a single battery (eg. the T470s I have from work is nice but it has two small capacity batteries that each cost the same to replace as the full size single ones in the carbon and x280). One thing to keep in mind is some of the earlier X1 carbon don’t support NVME SSD (I think it started with 5th gen?)

Edit: another thing to consider is soldered RAM. Part of why my x280 was cheap was it’s only 8gb and can’t be upgraded. Since you’re looking at lighter weight things and using FOSS (and perhaps open to tinkering with things like ZRAM) that might be a useful aspect to focus on because there is probably a glut of such machines given how memory inefficient things are lately with every trivial app running a whole browser engine. OTOH, depending how many tabs you tend to have open and how many electron apps you tend to keep floating around, 8gb might start to feel cramped. Especially if you think you might want some VMs around.

More detail / similar concepts if you’re not a video person: https://www.centerforbuilding.org/blog/we-we-cant-build-family-sized-apartments-in-north-america

Next time I look for a small laptop to have handy one thing I’m going to be sure to prioritise is: how much battery does it use while suspended? I’d really like to not need to have it switch to hibernate after 30m of sleep or w/e and ideally just plug it in overnight like a phone.

Thanks, cancelled for now. I’ll keep an eye out for ways to contribute as we get more organised.

Big fan of that one, been using it for years.

Do you know about the one for healthcare on the 25th?