The phone-shop detail is the most alarming part for anyone at risk there: a device compromised before you even switch it on defeats most of the usual advice. For journalists and activists in that position, the practical baseline is buying devices from a large retailer or outside the country rather than a local shop, keeping the OS fully updated, and on iPhone turning on Lockdown Mode, which was built for exactly this kind of targeting.

Amnesty’s Security Lab also maintains the open-source Mobile Verification Toolkit (MVT) for checking phones, and Access Now runs a free digital security helpline for civil society if someone suspects they’ve been targeted.

The comparison table is the useful part, because “optional and replaceable” is something you can actually check. Remote access works without the subscription through your own reverse proxy, a VPN like WireGuard/Tailscale, or a tunnel, and the Alexa/Google voice integrations can be set up manually, just with more steps. So the no-lock-in claim holds for the service itself.

The rename seems mostly aimed at the confusion they mention, where new users thought “Home Assistant Cloud” meant running Home Assistant in the cloud. Fair enough given how many people ask exactly that.

For your points 2 and 3 specifically: if you go the Icecast route (AzuraCast also uses Icecast under the hood), Icecast can require a username and password per mount point, so the stream URL alone is useless to anyone who stumbles on it, and you can give the mount a bland name. Put it behind HTTPS on your reverse proxy so the password isn’t sent in clear text.

For point 4 (genres at certain times), AzuraCast’s playlist scheduling handles that from the web UI. If you build it yourself instead, Liquidsoap can switch playlists by time of day, but it’s a scripting language with a learning curve.

If what you really want is your own library rather than one stream everyone hears at the same time, the Navidrome suggestion is simpler: separate logins and plenty of Subsonic apps on Android.

Adding to why it has to be reachable: when a local user follows someone on another server, that server pushes new posts to your server’s inbox, so the remote side has to be able to resolve your domain and connect over HTTPS. A LAN-only box can’t receive that.

The least painful compromise is a cheap domain (or a subdomain you control) plus a tunnel or a small VPS acting as reverse proxy, so nothing on your home network is exposed directly. Then close signups so only your household can register. If Mastodon feels heavy for a handful of users, GoToSocial is much lighter on RAM for that use case, though you’d use a separate client app with it.

One thing to decide up front: the domain is baked into every account and can’t be changed later without starting over.

The part worth watching is the data side of the dashcam-company partnership: who owns the footage, how long it’s kept, and whether it can be shared with police or sold on. USPS is subject to FOIA, so a records request for the pilot agreement and any retention or data-sharing terms is one of the few concrete things people can do here. If the deal really is only about mapping roads and signs, the contract should say so, and if it doesn’t, that’s the story.

For anyone with an HD 7000 / R9 200-era card or an old GCN APU sitting in a drawer: the move to amdgpu as the default for GCN 1.0/1.1 means you get RADV Vulkan, so DXVK/Proton games that simply wouldn’t start on the old radeon driver now have a chance. If you’re on an older kernel or a distro that still binds radeon, lspci -k shows which kernel driver the card is actually using.

Nice to see the talk also cover how he moved from Mesa into kernel work, that part is useful for anyone thinking about contributing.

A few things that might save the next attempt, whichever distro you land on:

Audio: USB DACs on PipeWire usually work, but sometimes they aren’t picked as the default output or end up on an “Off”/“Pro Audio” profile. wpctl status shows whether the D3 is listed under Sinks, and wpctl set-default <id> makes it the default. If it isn’t listed at all, aplay -l tells you whether the kernel sees it. pavucontrol’s Configuration tab is the easiest place to switch the profile to plain stereo output.

4K120: the 2060 Super only has HDMI 2.0, which is why you need 4:2:0 for 4K120 on the C1 in the first place. A common workaround is an active DisplayPort 1.4 to HDMI 2.1 adapter on the card’s DP port. A good one gets the C1 to 4K120 at full RGB, so the subsampling question goes away on Windows and Linux alike (VRR through those adapters is hit or miss, and cheap ones top out at 60Hz, so check that it specifically lists 4K120).

Installer: writing the ISO to a USB stick is much more reliable than a DVD, and checking the ISO checksum first rules out a bad download.

The userChrome part is at least a one-time job. Set toolkit.legacyUserProfileCustomizations.stylesheets to true in about:config, open about:support and click the button next to “Profile Folder”, create a folder called chrome there and put userChrome.css inside it.

The catch is that Sync doesn’t carry it over, so if you use more than one machine it’s worth keeping the file in a dotfiles repo or a synced folder and copying it in after a fresh install.

If you’d rather keep Vikunja as the backend and web UI, it has a CalDAV endpoint, so you can point DAVx5 at it and use Tasks.org or jtx Board on Android for the reminders themselves. That gets you native Android notifications without email, and you keep the web interface for planning. Vikunja’s CalDAV side is less mature than its web UI, though, so test whether due dates and reminders come across the way you expect before moving everything over.

For notifications that aren’t tied to a task app (say, “remind me when X happens” from a script or Home Assistant), ntfy is the simplest self-hosted push to Android, as mentioned above.

Nice find. One thing to check before buying parts: the README says it works with line-level sources through a USB audio adapter. Most turntables output phono level, so unless yours has a built-in preamp (look for a PHONO/LINE switch on the back), you’ll need a phono preamp between the deck and the USB adapter. Without it the signal is very quiet and has no RIAA equalisation, so it sounds thin.

Also, AirPlay buffers for a couple of seconds, which is fine for listening, but you’ll notice the delay if you’re standing next to the speakers while dropping the needle. The automatic start/stop on signal detection is the clever part for a turntable.

If you want to watch the numbers yourself, FediDB (fedidb.org) and fediverse.observer list each software by number of servers and monthly active users. MAU is a fairer measure than total accounts, since lots of accounts are dead.

Roughly: Mastodon is by far the biggest, for microblogging. On the Reddit-style side you’re on now (people call it the “threadiverse”), Lemmy is the largest, with PieFed and Mbin as the main alternatives, and they all federate with each other, so you can follow the same communities from any of them. Misskey and its forks are also big, especially with Japanese users.

Since you’re learning: make an account on one and follow a person or community that lives on a different software. Seeing a Mastodon post show up here as a thread is the moment federation clicks.

One test I’d apply to any new private-mail provider before moving anything important: how easy is it to leave? Check whether you can export the whole mailbox in a standard format (mbox/EML), whether there’s IMAP/SMTP access or a bridge, and above all use your own domain. With your own domain, if the provider gets bought, enshittifies, or deletes your account for inactivity like someone mentioned here, you change the MX records and you’re gone in an afternoon.

Given how young it is and the security disclosure back-and-forth above, I’d keep it to low-stakes mail until it has a track record and an independent audit.

The difference for me is control. On a phone you get per-app permissions, you can switch location off, and you can leave it at home. The car’s telematics modem is always on, there’s no permission screen for it, and you usually can’t opt out without losing features you paid for.

It’s also not hypothetical: in 2024 GM was reported to have shared drivers’ trip and hard-braking data with data brokers that fed insurers’ risk scores, and the FTC later took action over it. People saw premiums go up without ever knowingly agreeing to it. That’s why folks pull fuses: the phone at least gives you a switch.

Both of those are Apple’s own infrastructure (aaplimg.com is Apple’s CDN/edge domain), so it isn’t a third party phoning home. The “apay-cash” part suggests the Apple Cash / Wallet side doing a periodic device check-in, which can happen as long as Wallet/Apple Pay is set up on the device, even if you don’t actively use Apple Cash.

If you want to know which feature triggers it, NextDNS makes that easy: block just that domain for a day and see what breaks (card refresh in Wallet, Apple Cash balance, transit cards). If nothing you use breaks, you can leave it blocked; if Wallet starts complaining, you know what it was for.

Hope you feel better soon.

Two things specific to the RX 6400 worth knowing:

• It’s a PCIe 4.0 x4 card. On a PCIe 3.0 board the link is half as fast, and that hurts most exactly when a game spills past the 4 GB and starts moving textures over the bus. So on a 3.0 board, keeping texture quality low enough to stay inside VRAM matters even more than usual. MangoHud can show VRAM use live, so you can see when you hit the ceiling.
• For emulation, VRAM mostly goes on internal resolution and texture packs. In Dolphin, PCSX2 and the like, 2x-3x internal res is usually comfortable on 4 GB; 4x+ with high-res texture packs is where you’d start running out.

It also has no hardware video encoder, so don’t count on it for recording or streaming, but for older games and emulation it’s a perfectly decent card.

The most useful number you can get is from your own stack: put your actual app on the box and hit it with k6 or wrk using a realistic mix of pages, and watch memory rather than CPU. On 2 GB the failure mode is almost always RAM: too many PHP-FPM/worker processes plus a database on default buffers, then swap thrashing and the OOM killer, long before the single core is the limit.

What buys the most headroom on boxes this size:

• cap the worker count (pm.max_children or the equivalent) to what actually fits in RAM
• size the DB buffer pool deliberately instead of leaving defaults
• zram for bursts
• serve anything static or cacheable straight from nginx so it never touches the app

And rate-limit or block the obvious scrapers. As someone said above, bot traffic is often the real load.

If you end up running it headless (game streaming host, Jellyfin/Immich worker, whatever), two small things save a lot of hassle:

• Get an HDMI dummy plug (a “display emulator”, a few euros). With no internal panel detected and nothing on HDMI, the GPU often has no proper display to render to, and Sunshine/Steam streaming in particular wants a “real” display to capture at the resolution you pick.
• Check the BIOS for a “power on after AC loss” / “auto power on” option. Plenty of laptops don’t have it, but if yours does, it comes back on its own after an outage like a proper server. Otherwise Wake-on-LAN from one of your mini PCs is the fallback.

And since storage is your bottleneck right now, open it up and see if there’s a second M.2 slot. Some of these chassis have one, and then it could hold some data while also taking the Immich/Paperless ML jobs on the 3050Ti.

For anyone testing the beta, the two lower-level changes are probably the ones most worth poking at before the 15 October release, since they’re the ones most likely to break things silently rather than visibly:

• Rust coreutils is now complete, including cp, mv and rm. If you have backup scripts, deploy scripts or anything that parses the output of these tools or relies on less common GNU flags, run them on the beta now and report differences upstream to uutils. Behaviour differences in edge cases (symlinks, sparse files, odd permissions, error messages) are exactly what a beta is for.
• dbus-broker replacing dbus-daemon: mostly invisible, but if you have custom D-Bus policy files or services that do unusual things on the session bus, it’s worth checking the journal for warnings after login.

The OOM change (core desktop processes getting lower OOM scores) sounds like a genuine quality-of-life fix for anyone who’s had the whole session killed while a browser ate all the RAM.

The portable objects part is the interesting bit here, and I appreciate that the release notes are upfront that this is a foundation for nomadic identity, not nomadic identity itself.

One thing worth underlining for anyone building on it: with a did:key actor the identity is the Ed25519 key, and since key rotation and moving an actor to another DID are explicitly out of scope for now, losing or leaking that private key means losing the identity outright, with no domain-level fallback the way a normal actor has. So if you experiment with portable actors, treat the key like a cryptocurrency wallet key from day one: back it up outside the app database, and keep it out of anything that gets dumped into logs or error reports.

Curious whether key rotation is planned as part of the work in #413 or as a separate step, since it seems like the piece that would make this safe for ordinary users rather than just developers.

Before buying one, a couple of checks that often help more than the pad itself:

1. Find where the air goes in. Flip the laptop over: most draw air through vents on the bottom and blow out the back or side. A pad only does much if its fan sits under the intake grille, so match the fan layout to your vents rather than buying the biggest one. Even just raising the back edge by a couple of centimetres (a pad or a book) improves intake a lot.
2. Clean the vents and fan. Dust on the heatsink fins is the usual cause of a laptop getting louder over time. Compressed air through the vents in short bursts, holding the fan still so it doesn’t over-spin.
3. Check the video player isn’t decoding in software. If the fan only screams on heavier video files, that’s often a codec your GPU can’t decode (e.g. AV1 or HEVC 10-bit on older hardware) or a player with hardware decoding switched off. Watch CPU usage while it plays; if one or more cores are pegged, try enabling hardware decoding (in VLC or mpv it’s a setting) or a different player. That can cut the heat far more than a pad.