Hello, my friend recently lost their laptop (long story) and has kindly asked me to help them out to find a replacement.

I've had success asking here before, so I would be very grateful for any help or direction.

Here are the main criteria, based on what we've discussed.

• Can compile LaTeX.
• Can run Jupyter notebooks, Python, and the like.
• Can play non-AAA games like Binding of Isaac, Balatro, Dofus.
• Can play YouTube videos, and Twitch streams. (Not picky about screen quality.)
• Maximum 13" screen, can be smaller I think?
• As light as possible (a tablet + keyboard combo might be worth it).
• USB port for transferring files (to their institution's ancient printers)
• Ports to connect a mouse, gamepad, etc.
• Bluetooth, wifi, webcam
• Lasts at least four hours on battery (if not gaming)
• Under 1000 euros preferably (willing to make exceptions if you think it is worth it)

Here are the nice-to-haves:

• HDMI slot
• Long-lasting battery
• Nice mic and webcam
• Nice screen quality
• Repairable

Don't care about:

• Stylus
• SD card reader

My friend is mostly used to Windows but I think if I could make a strong case for Ubuntu then they might be open to it if that's relevant.

Thanks for reading!

Posting for ideas/advice, if anyone has any, as I'm unsure of where else to turn.

I have a VPS (Named "Bucket") I rent and self host a few services on, along with a home server (Named "Vergil") that lives under my basement stairs and I host many more services on. At 2:01 AM today I got a notification from Bucket that my Plex (hosted on Vergil) was down/unreachable. I'm assuming that's when this issue started.

When investigating I found that Plex wasn't down, but Bucket couldn't reach/talk to Vergil. Further investigation showed that it wasn't just Bucket, but nothing can reach/talk to Vergil. At first I thought it was an issue with my router, as I have my gateway set up in IP bypass mode and manage my network via my third party router (UDM-Pro). But after digging through logs looking for any automated blocks from any misclassified intrusion attempts, I realized that none of my attempts were even reaching the router. So I checked the route, and that's where I found what I think is the problem.

Running mtr to route from Vergil to Bucket gives full resolution of the route:

    mtr -rwzbc 10 45.79.209.169
    Start: 2024-12-19T16:49:53-0500
    HOST: Vergil.goose.ws                                                    Loss%   Snt   Last   Avg  Best  Wrst StDev
      1. AS???    192.168.2.1                                                 0.0%    10    0.1   0.1   0.1   0.2   0.0
      2. AS???    192.168.99.254                                             10.0%    10    0.5   0.6   0.4   0.8   0.1
      3. AS7018   45-26-156-1.lightspeed.tukrga.sbcglobal.net (45.26.156.1)   0.0%    10    4.4   3.6   2.0   5.9   1.2
      4. AS7018   107.212.169.24                                              0.0%    10    5.2   3.7   1.6   6.1   1.5
      5. AS7018   12.242.113.31                                               0.0%    10    2.2   3.7   2.2   5.3   1.0
      6. AS7018   12.247.68.178                                               0.0%    10    2.8   3.8   2.2   5.8   1.2
      7. AS20940  ae6.r21.atl01.mag.netarch.akamai.com (23.192.0.94)          0.0%    10    3.2   4.3   2.3   5.7   1.1
      8. AS20940  ae0.r21.atl01.icn.netarch.akamai.com (23.192.0.65)          0.0%    10    3.7   4.1   1.9   6.5   1.5
      9. AS20940  ae1.r21.atl01.ien.netarch.akamai.com (23.207.235.35)        0.0%    10    4.2   3.5   1.9   5.6   1.1
     10. AS20940  ae22.gw3.atl1.netarch.akamai.com (23.203.144.39)            0.0%    10    5.2   5.0   2.4   8.8   2.0
     11. AS???    ???                                                        100.0    10    0.0   0.0   0.0   0.0   0.0
     12. AS???    ???                                                        100.0    10    0.0   0.0   0.0   0.0   0.0
     13. AS???    ???                                                        100.0    10    0.0   0.0   0.0   0.0   0.0
     14. AS63949  bucket.goose.ws (45.79.209.169)

However, routing from Bucket to Vergil does not:

    mtr -rwzbc 10 99.42.115.109
    Start: 2024-12-19T16:49:13-0500
    HOST: Bucket.goose.ws                                                Loss%   Snt   Last   Avg  Best  Wrst StDev
      1. AS???    10.204.3.155                                            0.0%    10    0.2   0.3   0.1   0.8   0.2
      2. AS???    10.204.35.16                                            0.0%    10    0.4   0.4   0.3   0.5   0.1
      3. AS???    10.204.32.2                                             0.0%    10    0.7   9.4   0.4  74.3  23.2
      4. AS63949  lo0-0.gw4.atl1.us.linode.com (74.207.239.106)           0.0%    10    0.7   0.5   0.4   0.7   0.1
      5. AS20940  ae45.r22.atl01.ien.netarch.akamai.com (23.203.144.36)   0.0%    10    0.4   0.4   0.4   0.6   0.1
      6. AS20940  ae4.r22.atl01.mag.netarch.akamai.com (23.192.0.98)      0.0%    10    0.6   0.7   0.6   0.8   0.1
      7. AS20940  ae1.r24.atl01.ien.netarch.akamai.com (23.192.0.103)     0.0%    10    0.5   0.4   0.4   0.6   0.0
      8. AS7018   12.247.68.177                                           0.0%    10    1.0   1.0   0.8   1.2   0.1
      9. AS???    ???                                                    100.0    10    0.0   0.0   0.0   0.0   0.0
     10. AS7018   107.212.169.25                                          0.0%    10    1.4   1.4   1.4   1.5   0.0
     11. AS???    ???

Calling the tier 1 support number for AT&T residential support was very less-than-helpful. They kept on wanting to send a tech out to the house claiming there's an issue with the line. I kindly thanked them for their efforts but gave up, and tried emailing the contact email address for the AT&T datacenter/core router from the WHOIS in that last successful hop of the trace from Bucket to Vergil. I doubt I'll hear anything back, but I'm unsure of who else to turn to/what else to try. I've never seen/experienced a route broken in one direction like this. But I'm unable to access any of my devices/services from outside my house, due to it. Hoping someone has an idea or suggestion?

Edit:

Well, after about 38 hours of this issue, the power went out at my house. My networking equipment is on a UPS, so it did not go down. But when the power returned, the route began resolving again, and I am connectable again. Don't know if an area power outage rebooted some AT&T equipment nearby, I would imagine their stuff is also on UPS. But who knows?

For the non-believer about my route previously being complete:

[goose@Bucket: ~ ] $ mtr -rwzbc 10 99.42.115.109
Start: 2024-12-20T15:20:23-0500                                                        HOST: Bucket.goose.ws                                                        Loss%   Snt   Last   Avg  Best  Wrst StDev
  1. AS???    10.204.3.155                                                    0.0%    10    0.1   0.2   0.1   0.2   0.0
  2. AS???    10.204.35.16                                                    0.0%    10    0.2   0.3   0.2   0.4   0.1
  3. AS???    10.204.32.2                                                     0.0%    10    0.6   1.8   0.4   9.9   2.9
  4. AS63949  lo0-0.gw4.atl1.us.linode.com (74.207.239.106)                   0.0%    10    0.4   2.0   0.3  15.6   4.8
  5. AS20940  ae45.r22.atl01.ien.netarch.akamai.com (23.203.144.36)           0.0%    10    0.4   0.4   0.3   0.5   0.1
  6. AS20940  ae4.r21.atl01.mag.netarch.akamai.com (23.192.0.90)              0.0%    10    0.8   0.7   0.6   0.9   0.1
  7. AS20940  ae0.r24.atl01.ien.netarch.akamai.com (23.192.0.95)              0.0%    10    0.4   0.5   0.4   0.5   0.0
  8. AS7018   12.247.68.177                                                   0.0%    10    0.8   0.9   0.8   1.2   0.1
  9. AS???    ???                                                            100.0    10    0.0   0.0   0.0   0.0   0.0
 10. AS7018   107.212.169.25                                                  0.0%    10    1.4   1.5   1.4   1.6   0.1
 11. AS???    ???                                                            100.0    10    0.0   0.0   0.0   0.0   0.0
 12. AS7018   99-42-115-109.lightspeed.tukrga.sbcglobal.net (99.42.115.109)   0.0%    10    3.6   3.2   2.1   4.9   0.9
[goose@Bucket: ~ ] $

Since Musk took over Twitter and made it a "free speech" platform, something that has interested me is has that basically render TruthSocial obsolete or is there some niche that Trump is targeting with TruthSocial that Elon is not with Twitter?

The biggest obv difference is just the reach with Twitter having more people than TruthSocial but with all the headlines I see about how people are leaving Twitter en-masse, I figure it's just a matter of time before it loses mainstream attention?

But beyond the number of users, it is basically the same environment, albeit with different tech stacks?

Edit: I have sent my link to three different people and I am out. Assuming they sign up. However, a lot of people also have invite links that commented. I guess a system would be for the invite-giver to reply to the comment of the invite-receiver to keep track?

—-

I received a link during Thanksgiving that lets me invite several people to a free trial of Kagi.

I tried convincing friends to try it out but most of them were not even interested in a free trial to a paid search engine.

If any of you are interested, please let me know.

I'll give you my link in private and you can register yourself to the free trial.

Posting just in case people are on the same boat as me.

--

Also, I hope it's appropriate to start a topic on this?
Let me know if this is frowned upon.

Title is pretty straightforward I think.

Trying to get my Podcast listening off of Spotify because I just hate their player and UX lately. Also, no ability to add feeds by RSS link.

My daily drivers I spend most of my time on are my iPhone and Macbook Pro. After that, maybe I would listen on my iPad, or my PC that is running both Linux and Windows.

This Lifehacker article recommending Ente Auth reminded me that I am looking to migrate off Authy to something else.

I thought I would see what Tilderinos are using:

• What do you use, and do you like it?
• How do you deal with syncing?
• Do you only generate codes on your phone, or do you use a desktop app too?
• What questions should I be asking that I didn't ask?

I’m about to take a road trip and I want to be able to easily play my music and it would be a huge pain to do this with iTunes. I’ve got VLC but the UI leaves much to be desired. I can’t even view my music by album in CarPlay, which is how I’m going to be accessing my music. There are tons of music playing apps out there but they are all varying degrees of sketchy. Does anyone have any recommendations?

I've been researching internet privacy and fell down the rabbit hole of...well, internet privacy. I started with deleting Facebook/Instagram and switching to fire fox + plugins. I would like to make more improvements but I really have no idea how, it started with deleting socials and next thing you know I'm looking at LineageOS and de-googling.

If anyone has any suggestions on where to go next while staying realistic/not going crazy, i would love to hear them. I am not really sure where to set my expectations, basically I would like to have more control of my data. The other day Google photos gave me a memory recap which kind of creeped me out! I am suddenly not fond of whatever is going on under the surface of Google photos that's making collages and trying to sell my photo books. Also g-board giving me a pop up in the text prediction row asking me to rate the app??? Ew.

I am a fan of self hosting and run a small NAS (open media vault) but this too quickly turns into the privacy spiral and leaves me thinking I should throw my phone into a river and live in the forest. Would love to hear your thoughts/advice/opinions!

Could someone please recommend a text messaging app for Android that is reasonably secure?

Verizon is discontinuing their native texting (SMS) app. They recommend switching to Google Messages, but I would not like Google to have access to my entire text messaging history. I tried Signal, but my old messages don't transfer over (minor problem), and almost none of my family are willing to switch to Signal (big problem). When I search for advice, I get a bunch of AI slop articles and advertisements. So I figured I might have better luck asking here: Is there any text messaging app for Android that works well and isn't going to hoover up all my data?

Australia’s proposed social media ban is deeply concerning and authoritarian. It's disturbing to see how much of the general public supports this measure.

Prominent organizations, including Amnesty International, the Australian Human Rights Commission, and Electronic Frontiers Australia, have voiced significant concerns about this legislation:

Amnesty International's Explanation of the Social Media Ban
Australian Human Rights Commission on the Proposed Social Media Ban for Under-16s
EFA's Critique of the Social Media Age Ban

Australia has a troubling history with internet legislation. Noteworthy examples include the Australian Internet Firewall under Stephen Conroy and Malcolm Turnbull's infamous statement, "The laws of mathematics are very commendable, but the only law that applies in Australia is the law of Australia," regarding encryption backdoors.

While I recognize the issues with social media, "don't feed the trolls," along with maintaining online anonymity and implementing parental controls ( no phones with unfettered internet access ), should work. This law indiscriminately punishes all Australians for the missteps of a few, potentially leading to increased identity theft through phone and email scams and causing older family who are not tech literate to lose connections with their families due to the complexities of government-issued tokens.

Adults will be the ones who are going to be most impacted by this legislation.

The scope of this law is extensive. The Online Safety website suggests that this is merely the beginning, with plans to cover the entire web, including games, adult content, and more. The consequences are profound: the erosion of true anonymity and increased risk to government whistle-blowers and journalistic sources.

Requiring individuals to provide their identity to a third party to access the internet, which many have used freely for decades, is alarming. It threatens to sanitize search results and revoke access to purchased games if users refuse additional identity verification measures. There are no grandfathered exceptions, highlighting the law's intent to de-anonymize the internet.

Although Australia lacks a constitutionally protected right to free speech, this law poses significant risks to whistleblowers and marginalized youth in remote communities. Instead of banning access and creating allure through prohibition, we should address the root causes of why younger people are drawn to such content.

Once entrenched in law, any opposition will be met with accusations of perversion or indifference to child safety, compounded by the spread of misinformation. We must critically assess and address these laws to protect our freedoms and privacy.

There wouldn't be speculation if they defined how they intend the law to work. Instead of a "don't worry about it we will work it out", give people something to say that's not so bad and I can live with it