I don’t know how firefighters even hope to put something like that out. You can’t reach the higher floors with water from the ground, it doesn’t seem like there was any sort of sprinkler system in the building. Would they go in from the ground floor and just work their way up one level at a time?

I bought a Fairphone 4 off Clove.co.uk and I live in Canada. After a year and a bit of enjoying that my wife agreed to replace her Pixel 4a with a Fairphone 5.

Has anyone used this program? Did your dentist treat it like any other insurance?

I used to pick based on the package manager, leading me to apt-based distros. With flatpak now, I don’t feel as bothered by non-apt distros.

(And here’s my shoutout to openSUSE tumbleweed!)

We’re in Alberta and used this site: https://www.homeradontest.ca/

It was cheap and easy. Unfortunately our results were right at the warning level, so now we’re trying to figure out what to do.

What is happening in that picture?!

I’m sad to see how many mentions of “proprietary” there are in there. I didn’t think that was DeepSeek’s way of doing things.

I guess my notes are unstructured, as in they’re what I type as I’m in the meeting. I’m a “more is better” sort of note taker, so it’s definitely faster to let AI pull things out.

Infosec … I guess people will have to evaluate that for themselves. Certainly, for my use case there’s no concern.

I use it to review my meeting notes.

• “Based on the following daily notes, what should I follow-up on in my next meeting with #SomeTeamTag?”
• “Based on the following daily notes, what has the #SomeTeamTag accomplished the past month?”
• etc.

I’m not counting on it to not miss anything, but it jogs my memory, it does often pull out things I completely forgot about, and it lets me get away with being super lazy. Whoops, 5 minutes before a meeting I forgot about? Suddenly I can follow up on things that were talked about last meeting. Or, for sprint retrospectives, give feedback that is accurate.

To add: I’ve also started using AI to “talk to podcast guests.” You can use Whisper to transcribe a podcast, then give the transcript to AI to ask questions. I find the Modern Wisdom Podcast is great for this.

(I say this naive of all sorts of things, but…) I wish Canada would do something bold and actively court all these high-skill people who are probably interested in jumping ship. Make it easier for whole companies to move and bring their employees, make it easy for entrepreneurs to start a business serving this new migration, relax some tax rules for those in the process of moving, make it easy for extended family to tag along, make it clear it’ll be easy for them to go back… ehh, and do something about housing.

Then, take out billboards in big cities. Put on events in the US. Partner with Canadian companies to handle logistics for potential employees, etc., etc.

Don’t just go “Hey smart people, come to Canada” and afterwards say “I bet they’ll do smart-people things!” Go for an unprecedented scale migration and actually shape the process for long-term benefit and payoff.

In the past I figured we didn’t do this because we didn’t want to piss off people in the US, but, I feel like who gives a shit now.

Their brand-new car, their charger, and (evidently) on the spot Tesla says “yeah, this isn’t our problem.” I can’t imagine they expect the person is going to go “Oh, dear.” hang up, then pay thousands of dollars to fix whatever broke.

How long have you been using Kmail?

I tried maybe 3 years ago and I found it incredibly buggy. I’ve been using Thunderbird, but definitely wish there was a KDE or Qt-native mail app that did what I wanted.

One is a Pinebook Pro, which is an RK3399 processor. Another is a Surface Go 2 with an Intel Pentium Gold Processor 4425Y.

The actual issue is that the video conferencing works, but trying to do anything else is just suuuper slow. Well, the Surface Go 2 is actually fairly good as long as I’m not touching the ZRAM. But, trying to share a window in Google Meet will always involve a lot of waiting. Firefox and Chromium seem equivalent on the Surface, but the Pinebook seems better in Chromium lately.

I can bare-bones most apps I use on these laptops, but for video conferencing it seems like I have to drag along a whole browser.

My dog was getting dental work done and my vet was worried about her leg. She said while my dog was sedated she’d throw her up under the x-ray to take a look at the joint. “Well that’s super nice!” I thought.

I leave my dog at the vet and get a call an hour or so later. It’s the vet, she says she’s really sorry but not only can she not do that x-ray for free, but I’ll have to pay a consult fee too if they’re going to look at anything not related to the teeth. She was very apologetic.

When I go to get my dog we’re going over discharge notes and at the end this poor vet says “I now need to recommend this particular water supplement. I don’t use it with my dogs. Some people think it’s expensive and ineffective. If you think you might be interested I can also tell you about other options that may be more effective.”

This poor woman who was all happy and concerned about my dog turned into someone who seemed supremely uncomfortable. I can only imagine it was VCA that was forcing this vet to go contrary to what she felt was best.

I’m surprised how many people turn their computers off. My desktop uptime is 4 day, but, I do put it to sleep at night (which I think counts towards its uptime).

I will look into hibernating. The reason I don’t shut down is because I usually end up with carefully placed windows and lots of ongoing projects all over. Restarting would mean I’d have to start all that up again - assuming I remember what I was doing.

For whatever it’s worth - I have a laptop with 4GB of RAM and a 4GB ZRAM device, and it can’t use all the ZRAM before everything grinds to a halt. I think the way ZRAM works best is if it can “swap out” (compress) anonymous pages that aren’t actually needed again right away, freeing up the fast memory for disk caching and other memory needs.

In my case, I think I can reach a point where the amount of memory Linux needs simultaneously active goes beyond the 4GB of RAM, so it’s just compressing/uncompressing forever and getting nowhere.

So, I think I’d argue that maybe you can’t go too big? I think only anonymous pages can get compressed, and there’s probably only so many gigabytes of those in memory at any given time.

I was watching CBC coverage of some press conference Poilievre was doing, going on and on about the need for an “axe the tax election” (??). Someone asked Poilievre what he was doing to fight against Trump’s proposed tariffs and Poilievre says he’s not the prime minister, but if Canadians give him a mandate, he’ll fight for their interests, etc.

Then the CBC commentator cuts in and says “It should be noted that there are many people who aren’t the prime minister who have decided to adopt a “team Canada” attitude and are doing what they can to make the case against tariffs.”

The bluntness and absurdity I just found hilarious.

I don’t think the government should have done this but, being as they did, I think they punish both sides somehow in order to discourage future foot dragging by other unions/companies.

Maybe force Canada Post to accept the last offer made, only give half of that to the postal workers, then give the other half to Uber eats drivers.

I switched to Tumbleweed from Ubuntu but was wary of the rolling release idea. I went in thinking “Well yeah, they need a file system like BTRFS to back out of bad updates.” And this was the case for me when Zoom stopped working after an update during a month when I really needed Zoom to be working. But, somehow, BTRFS has turned into a personal requirement for me everywhere. Things went wrong on Ubuntu too, wouldn’t it have been nice to be able to easily roll back the change that did it?

So, I still find it irritating how often little things change with Tumbleweed, but I love having BTRFS in the background making sure I can back out of any major issues.

I don’t see what would be wrong with a world where businesses just satisfied themselves with providing employees with a reasonable living, contributed to the communities they were in, and provided a good or service that was needed. Sitting under a tree and reading a book sounds better than watching the world burn in your name-brand clothes and 5 bedroom 2.5 bath house.