Yeah all you have to do is circumvent the security settings in your browser and suppress warning messages to enable Manifest 2, all in 8 easy steps (written as if it’s 6 steps to make it seem less onerous). For now. Until Google switches it off completely.
Or, drop Chrome and Chromium based browsers (such as Edge, Vivaldi, Brave etc) in one easy step. Install a privacy respecting Firefox based browser like Firefox itself or Librewolf.
Listen: the world is not as bad as news media and social media make out. People love wallowing in misery - don’t let them bring you down.
In many ways we are living in a golden age - technology has never been so advanced, you have at your fingers more power, knowledge and freedom than any generation before has ever had. And despite all the gloom and doom, renewable energy is exploding electric cars are everywhere, people are living longer and healthier, poverty is down across the world and falling. Good news doesn’t cut through on social media or news. Seek it out - it’s all around you.
The world is far from perfect but it’s also no where near as bad as it sometimes seems. The world has always been in a state of flux and changing. We lived through a brief period of stability after the fall of the Berlin wall but normal service has resumed. Somethings will get better, some things will get worse. Sometimes good politicians will be in power sometimes bad.
Trust me as someone now in their 40s, you will look back and wonder why you wasted time worrying about things that ended up not smattering. When I was 20 it was all about George W Bush dooming the world and America. It wasn’t about the positive things that actually happened - like the mobile phone, the internet, falling poverty, rising living standards around the world, the solar panels, and wind turbines and electric cars, and so much more. I work.on Healthcare - diseases I learned were death sentences like cancer or even diabetes and HIV are now treatable and some even curable. Others realistically look they will be cured in my lifetime. When I was 20 those possibilities were all dismissed as wishful thinking, and the main worry was narrow stuff about a politician you probably barely know about and a war people don’t care about anymore.
And now - the world has moved on and now everyone is agnosing over Donald Trump. We’re still worrying about climate change but we’re still not talking about the global renewable energy revolution.
The last 20 years have been nothing short of miraculous in many ways, yet you’d think from social media and mainstream news that the Human race is already extinct and we’re just waiting for the lights to go out. Fuck that. Ignore the shit, get out and live your life. The world is amazing. Go out and see it.
Mate, you need to switch off from it.
Take it from someone older - the news is always bad, the world is always in trouble, whatever is happening today is supposedly always terrible and it can seemingly only get worse. A lot of it is actually total rubbish and nonsense and you need to tune it out. News and social media grab your attention by trying to be shocking and proactive - and they do it largely for money.
Put things in perspective a bit. We are living in the most technologically advanced time in human history. People are living longer and healthier. Cutting edge medicine is allowing more and more people to survive from cancer. Renewable energy is growing at record rates, and electric cars are booming - things we were told only 10 years ago wasn’t going to happen and we’d all be doomed.
And when it comes to Trump - remember he has been president before. The world didn’t end and it won’t this time. Politicians are being politicians and there is fuck all you can do about it so tune it out.
When I was in my 20s it was all about how evil George W Bush was and how he was destroying America and so on. Trumps a shit but the older you get the more you’ll realise how much a lot of the talk is hyperbole and exaggeration. After Bush came Obama. After Trump someone else will come and you can have your say in the mid term elections in a year and presidential elections in 3 years. In the meantime, forget about it and live you life.
Get away from social media, get away from political news and websites. It’s just going to make you feel anxious about things you have no control over and a relentless negative message. The most you need do is vote when the next election comes around, and maybe donate to causes you believe in when you can afford it. Anything else has to come from within and if it’s not there then is not worth wasting your time on it. Live your life and ignore the shitshow. Be a decent person and treat people with kindness and fairness. That is all we can expect of anyone.
The world is not as bad as social media and the news makes it out to be. You’re in part experiencing catastrophe fatigue - the constant negative bombardment of news and opinion that tries to grab your attention by being dramatic and negative. So cut it out.
As for your girlfriend be honest with her and how what she is sharing is impacting you both negatively. If she can’t stop then maybe it’s time to move on.
There is so much more to life than worrying about an 80 year old fat orange man.
I went down the route of a Raspberry Pi 5 and Installing Dietpi as the OS. Dietpi has loads of recipes in its main app that makes it easy to get going, plus if you install docker you have a huge range of stuff to try.
There is a learning curve but it’s not too steep and I’ve enjoyed it.
I’ve been going down the slef hosting rabbit hole recently.
First, Home Assistant is worth doing - you’ve not got a smart home yet but this is the easy way to get one going. So worth it. You can buy a few cheap WiFi plugs, and plug in devices like lights or stuff you don’t want on stand by and you have the start of a smart home. A smart thermostat and smart radiator valves are surprisingly easy to set up if you want to save some money and keep your home efficient - a bit more of an investment but worth it if you find you like the ease and power of WiFi plugs.
I also recommend Pihole - it’s an ad blocker for your entire network. You can run it on Docker on x86 machines - you just point your router to use it as the DNS and it then filters all requests for you. It’s really improved my experience on all my devices.
Next, Paperless NGX - scan your documents and paperless NGX will OCR read them to make them searchable and keep them in a database for you. You can use it to go paperless. Just make sure to sort our a backup.
Joplin is quite a good note taking app which you can self host to sync your devices and keep your data secure.
Syncthing is fantastic for syncing files between devices. I sync my main PC and living room theatre PC, plus in my case my Raspberry Pi as an always on broker and local backup.
Some good advice already in this thread.
Also worth considering QEMU as an alternative to VirtualBox. The Virt-manager tool is decent way of managing machines, and it’s relatively straight forward to create a base machine if you’re duplicating it. Virtualbox is perhaps initially more user friendly for absolute beginners, but once you have any familiarity with virtualization I’d suggest QEMU offers much more.
Also I find integration between the guest and the host linux system is generally more straight forward. Most linux systems already ship with samba and other relevant tools QEMU uses to interact between host and guest. There isn’t a need to faff around with the guest-additions stuff. Plus KVM virtual machines can run with near native performance.
I have one of these, it’s a decent mini PC. It’s decently powerful - I used to play some steam games on it; a bit equivalent to steam deck or a bit more powerful. I used it for streaming on my home TV. I upgraded to a even better one as I liked it so much - and wanted to do more gaming.
It’s a full PC basically. Whether it suits your purposes really depends on what you want to host? It could be overpowered and a bit redundant for a lot of self hosting uses.
I have a Raspberry Pi 5 which is cheaper than this, and am hosting docker with Home Assistant, Sync thing, and fresh RSS running on it at the moment with plenty of spare memory and cpu resource.
This mini PC is considerably more powerful and will have a higher power use at idle. You may struggle to use it at capacity so may be a bit wasteful?
And even the rasp pi 5 is over powered and expensive for a lit of common home server users.
So whether this PC is a good price and choice really depends on what you want to do with it. It’s at the end of the spectrum of being able to comfortably play 4k video. So it’d likely be a decent Jellyfin streaming host if that’s what you want?
PCs are generally based around the X86 chip architecture which is an open standard. PCs are basically modular and lots of manufacturers make components that are interchangeable, creating a huge variety of possible hardware. Hardware suppliers also sell to both big manufacturing companies and individuals. It’s therefore in their interest to distribute their drivers freely even if closed source. If hardware breaks it can be replaced and the PC keeps going, and some components can be kept going for years as a result as people dot have to throw the whole machine out everything something breaks or becomes obsolete.
Mobile devices are closed standards. They use a more limited range of off the shelf components which are deeply integrated into a device, and the hardware suppliers provide their drivers to the device manufacturer or the device manufacturer builds their own drivers and custom version of the os. Hardware can have very long retail lives selling for years and still being functional, so the manufacturers have an incentive to keep drivers available and even update them.
It means mobile devices are more locked down, and the hardware drivers harder to come by. This makes it hard to build custom OS for them and therefore when the device comes to the end of its support from the maker there is limited options to keep it running securely.
It’s effectively a type of planned obscelence that keeps the mobile industry going. Manufacturers stop supporting old devices (because it provides no income) and then consumers have to buy new ones as no one can provide the security patches to keep them secure.
So for mobile there is nothing to force Android or IOS to be kept up to date for old devices. The money is in new devices, and for Android manufacturers are responsible for the mobile device anyway. While for PC it’s in Microsofts interests to keep updating and keeping devices secure via Windows becuase devices have long lifespans and old components can be in the PC ecosystem for decades. Similarly Linux is able to support hardware for a long time because drivers are more freely available and long lifespans to hardware incentivise people to put the effort in to write open drivers when they’re not there.
Microsoft is trying to force an upgrade cycle at the moment with Win 11 though. And the laptop industry ia more like the mobile industry than the desktop pc industry with more propriety devices and locked down hardware.
So the bit of the article quoted doesnt cover the salient points its making. It reads as if its saying “spending more on the homeless is bad” when actually its saying “bad policy can cost more and make things worse”.
The death rate went up because Portland started aggressive anti-honeless techniques of sweeps to clear homeless encampments and a reduction of longer term stable housing in favour of short term shelters.
What the article is saying is Portland enacted bad and expensive policies that have made the situation worse not better.
I’m not hyped by the Switch 2: its expensive, its games are expensive and the launch titles are paltry. It also has competition in the form of the Steam Deck and a range of SteamOS and Windows handheld devices with a huge volume of games available including many at significantly lower prices.
Switch 2 needs exclusives to justify its price and its existence. Switch 1 games with slightly improved graphics (which you have to pay for) and a small handful of launch titles make the Switch 2 a bad proposition for anyone except diehard fans at this point.
At the moment there are no compelling 1st party games in the pipeline. 3D Mariocart and Donkey Kong Bananza seems to be it for now. No new Mario platformer, no Zelda, no pokemon at launch. Everything is old games with better graphics, and much of it available on other platforms like PC with better graphics already anyway (e.g. Cyberpunk 2077 - a 5 year old game which most people have played and is still better on PC or PS5/Xbox; why is that a compelling launch title?).
Nintendo has a lot of work to do - I think there is a real risk the Switch 2 will be a flop if they dont get 1st party exclusives out before the holiday season.
As someone else has said; important to check the model number for the offical guide but if its a LAPQC71 (A, B, C or D) then this covers it: https://manualmachine.com/intel/bqc71abbu6000/8104213-user-manual/
The slots look to be hidden behind your hand in your photo.
The guide says its made for an 80 mm NVME (i.e. 2280). You look to be holding a 42mm (2242) or 60mm (2260) which is too short. There could be screw holes there that aren’t documented but if not you’d have to get an adaptor to extend the length of the NVME to fit. Far better would be to get a drive the right length.
NVME 2242, 2260 and 2280 are all the same in terms of the connection, the only difference is the board length. The longer ones can potentially fit more memory on them so are “better” (good in full desktops for example where there is plenty of space) while the 2242 are designed to fit into smaller spaces like laptops or miniPCs. This laptop seems to be supporting the longer slots which is actually good but unfortunately it may mean your card is not going to be big enough.
It’s always worth reading the manual before upgrade components as it will tell you exactly what slots are available and what standards are supported. There are 2 NVME slots - 1 is NVME only, the other can support NVME and SATA.
Yeah that looks right assuming its the right model; compared to the diagram in the quick start guide, in the picture he’s covering the area where the slots are with his hand and the drive hes holding. This quide for the same model numbers is the same: https://manualmachine.com/intel/bqc71abbu6000/8104213-user-manual/
OP needs to check his model number.
Unfortunately the guide suggests it only supports 80mm length (2280) NVME drives. There could be a screw hole for the 42mm or 60mm sizes but they’re not mentioned. It may be the NVME he has is too small for the design of the laptop. OP is holding what looks like a 2242?
There are adaptors (e.g. on ebay) to add length to a shorter drive to fit into the slot, but the ideal is to buy the right size of the slot.
Not sure that is true? On a quick search, in the UK 3 in 10 had used it for point of sale purchases and 8 in 10 had used it online in 2023-2024. Of course that is used it at least once and does not reflect its actual market share.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1389396/paypal-adoption-in-uk/
Maybe remind him of that when he’s rude like this. He’s bitching at you for not doing him a favour - taking it for granted. And then insulting you for your choice in shower gel.
He cones across as a bit of an asshat.
Its a glitch.
Its important to understand that evolution does not “design” anything with intent or purpose. Its all chance and survival of the fittest does select for traits that confer greater survival.
But plenty of traits are neutral or minimally negative in their survival benefits so also suriviveor develop. And it only affects traits that impact reproducing and passing on traits to the next generation. So many traits may be totally unaffected by evolutionary pressures as they have no relevance to survival of the fittest.
Plus the other species being competed woth over time and the environment generally shape what traits are desirable versus detrimental.
Basically not everything has an evolutionary purpose or function.
So no this is not safe. Once ypu have a system it is easier to crack because if someone has 2 or more of your passwords they can work out there is a system and it’d make it much easier to crack others if they’re determined.
It is unlikely that someone random would specifically target a person and systematically try and crack their passwords. If that were to happen it’d most likely he someone they know - and this does happen sometimes. So while the passwords are definitely flawed it may not be something that anyone takes the time to exploit. But you can never say never.
The best way to manage passwords probably remains a secure password manager and randomly generated series of characters for each site. If its truly random then there are no shortcuts and every single password stands independently. The password manager gets round the issue of memorising them.
I use Firefox and Librewolf.
I’ve used Firefox for a long tine, and I strongly favour it as the only true independent browser engine left. Everything else is under Google or Apples control, and many of the various chrome forks are commercial and compromised. I dont trust Brave or Vivaldi in terms of privacy. And google has severely limited privacy options in chromium based browsers with its recent changes.
Mozilla is far from perfect and I’m disturbed by some of its actions but it remains the least bad option. Librewolf adds a layer of privacy and separation that I like although its not my main browser. I main Firefox with lots of privacy extensions.
I do have chromiun and chromium ungoogled installed and exclusively for streaming video. Not because Firefox isn’t capable but because I have loads of extensions in Firefox so its easier just to contain all my subscribed streaming services in its own browser and not have to faff with DRM or ad block issues. I watch YouTube in Firefox, but use Chromium to watch BBC, Channel 4, and Netflix (when I had it). I use Jellyfin media player to stream my own content.
Except the big danger with fully self driving cars is that drivers are not paying attention at all as they have nothing to do most of the time. They’ll be on their phones regardless of what theyre supposed to do and that will cause deaths. So such a glaring safety flaw will have numerous opportunities to happen in real life - humans do not make good safety features in cars; thats what the self drive stuff was for.
Teslas self drive technology is not fit for the roads regardless of this. Musk had sensors stripped out pf the cars design to save money because apparently he knows better than all the worlds self drive engineers. The guy is a just an investment bro woth a huge ego - he can’t let the people hes investing in get onwith it, because he sees himself as a “genius”. The guys a moron.
Stack Overflow, like Reddit, derives its value entirely from its users—it’s just a host. Now that users (and their knowledge) are moving elsewhere, the platform’s importance is fading.
It’s odd when people worry about Stack Overflow’s decline. Online communities have always shifted: from BBSs and newsgroups to forums, chat, Yahoo Groups, Reddit, and Stack Overflow. Each had its time.
The next gathering spot for tech-savvy users might be the fediverse, but who knows at this point. AI isn’t solely to blame for the shift—people moved to Stack Overflow because it was better than what came before. Now, as it declines in quality thanks to general enshittification of services as companies try to monetise uaers, they’re moving on again.
Maybe I’m misunderstanding but wouldn’t diffuse light be what it’s going to be best at? While it’d be worse on a sunny day when there is an optimal single direction for the light to come in?
It’s the opposite of a light house fresnel lens - instead of scattering the light source evenly out, it’ll capture diffuse incoming rays from random directions better and concentrate it on the photovoltaic cell? However it would be at the cost of being able to capture direct sunlight efficiently as only some of the lens would ever be in the best position to capture the direct rays?