The transition to contactless (where you tap your card or phone instead of inserting the card) took so long in the USA though. It only really became popular during COVID and with Apple Pay. Home Depot finally enabled contactless payments recently. In Australia, we were using contactless payment 15 years ago!

US banking is behind in a few other ways too. Apps like Venmo and Zelle just don’t exist in some other countries since you can easily do an instant transfer through your bank to anyone else for free. Some US banks still use SMS for two factor auth, which is insecure.

If you can find it :) DDR2 is old enough that a lot of it has been thrown out as e-waste. If you’re lucky, you may be able to find some at a computer/electronics recycler for free.

I have a separate home server, so I don’t have a reason to not shut down my desktop PC. No reason for it to be using electricity while it’s doing nothing.

I shut down my laptop because suspend/sleep support on Linux still isn’t great.

Oh that’s a good point. I totally forgot that Discord has voice features. don’t use Discord often, and when I do, it’s just for text chat. Unfortunately some open source apps I use use Discord for communicating with the developers.

I switched back to Linux on the desktop earlier in the year. I hadn’t used it on a desktop/laptop since 2008 so I was pleasantly surprised how much better things are these days (except suspending a laptop which seems to still be kinda broken). I’m glad we don’t have to deal with AMD proprietary drivers (fglrx) any more.

Something that wasn’t immediately obvious to me, coming from the BIOS era, was that if you want to install multiple Linux distros, you just need a single EFI partition and they can all use it.

I also share my /home partition between Debian testing and Fedora, but that might be risky. I’m planning to remove Debian soon anyways. I love it on servers (and have used it for over 20 years for that purpose) and it’s what I was trying out initially, but on a desktop, Fedora has newer packages and a better out of the box experience. I’m also forced to use Fedora at work (I can choose Windows 11, MacOS, or Fedora) so I may as well use it on my personal computers too.

In theory, compatibility on Fedora-based distros may be slightly better since they have newer Linux kernels, meaning all the drivers are newer and you get bug fixes sooner. On the other hand, you also get all the new bugs sooner :)

Not sure about Ubuntu, but the AMD GPU firmware that ships with Debian can become very outdated, and you need to manually download newer firmware to get the bug fixes. Until July 2024, the version of AMD firmware in Debian (even in testing and unstable) was over a year old, from June 2023.

You absolutely need swap on a low RAM system. It’s the only way the system will actually be usable. You’ll hit OOMs (out of memory errors) that take down the whole GUI if you turn off swap on a system with only 2GB RAM. You can only really turn off swap if you have a very large amount of RAM, and even then, it’s safer to keep it enabled and set swappiness to 0 instead.

you can disable swap.

Be careful with disabling swap if you don’t have a very large amount of RAM, as many apps rely on memory overcommitment and a large virtual address space, which can behave erratically without swap.

You’d be better off keeping swap enabled and instead setting vm.swappiness = 0 in sysctl.conf.

Swappiness is a value between 0 and 100, where 0 means to never swap unless absolutely necessary (only if you completely run out of RAM), and 100 means all programs and data will be swapped nearly instantly. Think of it like a target for the percentage of RAM to keep available. The default is usually 40 which is fine for a low-RAM system, but swaps way too often for a system with more RAM.

I had around 1500 open tabs in Firefox. It was fine. I figured enough was enough and closed them all. Now I close all tabs at the end of the day before shutting down.

What’s the benefit of running Discord’s app instead of just using it as a PWA? A PWA would reuse your existing browser and its session.

For DNS challenges, I personally prefer using acme-dns. It’s a separate DNS server that only serves ACME DNS challenges. I felt a bit uneasy using an access token for my actual DNS host since it grants full read/write access to every record. acme-dns reduces the attack surface.

Let’s Encrypt follows CNAMEs and supports IPv6-only DNS servers, so you could just run acme-dns on a spare IPv6 address (assuming your internet provider has a static IPv6 range, or you have a VPS with IPv6).

I think it’s all read-only access through, so you can only use it to import data not make new transactions.

That’s alright. Even read-only access is useful. I could write a script that pulls my current investments, prompts for the amount I’ll be investing in total, and prints out the buys (eg “buy 10 x VOO, 5 x VXF, 20 x VXUS”) that’ll keep the account balanced based on some percentages.

Does SimpleFIN use OAuth to log into bank accounts, or do you need to enter your bank’s username and password?

Unrelated to this post, but do you know if SimpleFIN supports investment accounts? If it does, it seems like an easy way to let me write a script to help rebalance my investment accounts. I might look into it.

I didn’t see a docker image

https://actualbudget.org/docs/install/docker

https://github.com/actualbudget/actual-server/blob/master/docker-compose.yml

Good idea to send donations to the syncthing-fork devs to keep it alive though.

In that case, could the syncthing-fork app be renamed to syncthing, now that it’ll probably be the main Android app for Syncthing?

mostly a wrapper around their proprietary library

I’m not familiar with exactly what Bitwarden are doing, but Nvidia are doing something similar to what you described with their Linux GPU drivers. They launched new open-source drivers (not nouveau) for Turing (GTX 16 and RTX 20 series) and newer GPUs. What they’re actually doing is moving more and more functionality out of the drivers into the closed-source firmware, reducing the amount of code they need to open source. Maybe that’s okay? I’m not sure how I feel about it.

Open source software doesn’t have a reason to lock you in like proprietary software does :)

More and more proprietary SaaS systems are allowing data exports now, to comply with laws like the GDPR “right to know”. Say what you want about Google and Facebook, but they were the first big companies to start allowing data to be exported before there was any law requiring it - Facebook in 2010 and Google in 2011.

That’s a good point. I didn’t consider the fact that all the encryption is done client-side, so that’s the most important part to audit (which Bitwarden has already done).

I hope it gets security audited one day, like Bitwarden was.