cntct.: 4ggr0[ät]protonmail[dot][kom]
- 4ggr0 parenti had diamond and cobalt in mind, i'm sure that this doesn't apply to every type of mine. but you can't deny that this isn't a current, imperialist strategy. soft colonialism.
- my younger brother called me once, which was unusual, so i immediately answered. he was crying, which was new to me as well, and told me that our mom's laptop he had been using to game on was hacked, and that he was now being extorted live in a discord call.
asked him to shutdown the laptop immediately and add me to the call, to which he replied, "they sent me our postal code and told me if i told anyone or turned the laptop off, they're going to send someone to hurt me."
that's when i realized why he was panicking so much, to me who was 10 years older that was an obvious scare-tactic, he was a young, naive teenager so he was legitimately scared for his life.
was able to calm him down, he added me to the call, and turned the laptop off. i was surprised that the hackers in question were 3-4 french teenagers, incredibly rude and aggressive. they didn't care that they weren't able to ruffle my feathers, they just constantly asked for bitcoins, said they'd hurt our mom etc.
when i refused and just didn't engage they started posting our mom's tax returns and other files from her laptop, that's when i realized that they did indeed exfiltrate data.
immediately packed my bags and took the next train to meet mom and brother. we spent the afternoon rotating e-banking passwords etc.
while doing this, the hackers did try to login to her paypal and they actually got into my netflix account.
turned the wifi off at home to boot the laptop back up, wanted to try to retrace their steps. i did find out what kind of stealer they used and was able to sleaze my way into a secret discord server they used to organize, but it was temporary and they had already left. so i just wiped the laptop and reinstalled windows.
apparently these guys had promised my brother to optimize his PC so that Fortnite would run better, he let them connect via AnyConnect or TeamViewer, don't exactly remember. they did some legit debloating stuff etc., but also let a stealer run in the background. apparently these guys had spent some weeks in the discord server my brother was in to establish trust.
to this day i haven't felt as much rage again. seeing my young brother in such a distressed state, realizing that all of my mom's data, childhood pictures etc. were stolen made me angry to a point i've never felt, i legitimately wanted to find out who these guys were and hurt them as much as i could. of course we all calmed down again and realized there's nothing we could do other than rotate PWs and observe logins.
police said there's nothing they could do (didn't expect it anyways, but worth a try), discord ignored me when i reported the hacker's accounts. typing this out again makes me angry again, interestingly enough. it's been two years, almost forgot that this ever happened.
- Fedora Atomic and RHEL used to ship with rpm-ostree, new versions are now using bootc. the base philosophy is still to ship the OS as an image, but bootc goes more into layering like docker-images, so that you can deploy changes a bit more easily/dynamically.
they're different technologies with bootc being the new kid. bootc means "bootable containers". rpm-ostree has not much to do with containers and is more like managing your OS with git-logic.
forget about "imagemode", that's the marketing-term RedHat uses for bootc.
i imagine bazzite will migrate to bootc sooner or later, but of course that requires a new way to build and ship it.
- > rpm-ostree is a PITA
yup...at first i thought, "at work i have to manage rpm-ostree servers, so why not use the same tech at home?", well, because the tech is freaking buggy, annoying and deprecated already (imagemode/bootc).
Bazzite also had strange issues with the XBOX controllers i use, those issues went away with CachyOS. in the end it doesn't matter that much, on both i use(d) KDE Plasma. GF also uses the PC with her own useraccount to play her games. overall very satisfied, can't complain.
don't lynch me, decided to go for the pretty standard instead of Sway or Hyprland, as i feared that this would bring more issues with gaming. maybe that's an irrational fear, who knows.
- > the only remaining use case for me is a gaming PC
even this has gone away for me, exited first with Bazzite and am now on CachyOS. Still got a debloated Windows11 on a different SSD for when friends want to play games with kernel-level anticheat or other bs.
feels good to be free of Microsoft. work on a Mac, game on Linux, phones run Android.
- i think it's the by now internet-meme worthy difference between walls in the US compared to most of Europe. i've never lived somewhere which didn't have thick brick or concrete walls. 30cm was a bit high, more like 20cm.
i've seen tons of americans making holes in their walls by punching or falling into them. could never relate myself, i'd have a broken hand or concussion :D
my phone is not very powerful, maybe that's a factor.
- Ah I see, your model gives more details in a simple way. The one I bought is veeery barebones[0], I basically have to stop what I'm doing and look at the watch for a couple of seconds to figure out approximately what time it is...
> I just can't justify "yet another watch"
Same, there's a watch I find absolutely beautiful[1] since years, but it costs around 3.5k, could never justify spending that much for a watch.
The other two watches you posted are interesting, fun to meet another person who likes cheap and/but quirky watches. Took longer than I'd like to admit to understand how the SHENGKE works :D
Since getting my RePebble a couple weeks ago I haven't worn another watch.
[0]https://svalbard.watch/pages/Svalbard_Singly_AA29.html
[1]https://www.longines.com/de-ch/p/watch-longines-master-colle...
- > a "Svalbard" single hand automatic
nice, so i'm not the only one with a single hand Svalbard watch :D one day i thought "i wonder if there's a watch with one hand and 24h", pretty soon landed on the Svalbard website and ordered one. i must say that i rarely wear it as it's pretty hard to get an accurate time reading from it, which kind of defeats the whole purpose of a watch.
but i did get lots of comments when wearing it...
- even a small country like Switzerland uses its highways to land fighterjets[0], wouldn't be weird to me if the US with their humongous highways uses them for the same reason. difference is that the swiss have to remove the middle crash barriers before landing, so less spontaneous.
[0]https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/swiss-air-force-lands-fighter-p...
- also probably depends on the building you live in.
not trying to start a flame-war, but i can imagine that you get quite some range in the US, if you live in one of those cardboard-inner-walls houses.
in the 30cm thick solid wall apartment i live in my pebble looses connection the next room over, i almost need line-of-sight for it to work. working at my desk, get up, walk 5 meters to the bathroom, watch looses connection.
maybe my smartphone has a weak bluetooth receiver, compared to other models, who knows...
- i mentioned 5 books in a comment[0], only 3 where registered by this tool. Wonder why :D
- already exists, here's one example: https://apps.repebble.com/en_US/application/56205296ece6340e...
or a search for 'voice': https://apps.repebble.com/en_US/search/watchapps/1?query=Voi...
- wow, it is actually the one me and my SO stayed at! specifically this[0] kind of room. when reading your description i immediately thought about this one. we did have a gentleman's agreement, "can you please put on your noise cancelling headphones and don't look back, i gotta..."
only stayed there for one or two nights, it says a lot when a campervan gives more comfort than a hotel room :)
[0]https://www.premierinn.com/content/dam/pi/websites/desktop/n...
- quite shameful to me that SBB uses so much AWS stuff, considering the amount of IT workers it has. but what are you gonna do, MGMT hears about cloud being cheaper and better and proceeds to change the whole strategy. hope they'll seriously invest into own DCs again or at least use local providers.
considering how relevant SBB is to a functioning Switzerland it really feels like they should be in control of their own Infra.
- huh, good point! never saw it that way. never bought a pre-built myself, but the first PC i got when i was a kid was a pre-built with Windows on it.
the argument i always used is that Windows feels like spyware, and slowly seems to turn into it. showing me ads, selling my data. don't see why i should pay for this.
- > I could understand if it was free, but it's not.
never in my life have i paid for a windows license.
