For my Asus laptop the setting is maintained at the hardware level. I didn’t bother trying to find Linux software that could control it (I think there is one) but instead just booted into Windows and set it there and it will persist after that in Linux.

I use an Asus laptop I bought during COVID as my server. I dropped in 64GB of RAM, a pair of NVM drives and an old 2.5” SATA SSD. More than enough for my use cases. The only real software tweak I made was limiting battery charging to 60%.

I’m so used to using powershell to handle collections and pipelines that I find I want it for small scripts on Mac. For instance, I was using ffmpeg to alter a collection of files on my Mac recently. I found it super simple to use Powershell to handle the logic. I could have used other tools, but I didn’t find anything about it terrible.

I even use powershell as my main scripting language on my Mac now. I’ve come around.

You might consider what you would do if your source has an issue that syncs the to your off-site copy. If it isn’t a lot of data, you might want to keep another copy or two in either location that is created at a less frequent schedule but would give you a fall back.

As an example, if your files got ransomware encrypted and then sync’d to the off-site location, how would you recover your data?

I get not wanting to use a google, microsoft or crypto laden browser, but I would be willing to use a well supported browser that used chromium as the page rendering engine. It seems to be extremely difficult to get another engine to be competitive in the marketplace. Maybe the resources would be better spent putting the chromium engine inside a different container. I’m sure there would be drawbacks, but I think there would be compatibility benefits too.

Article says you cannot side load books on Apple Books. That is incorrect. You just send an epub to books via the share menu on Mac or iOS and it loads it. Also syncs it via iCloud if you want it to.

Perhaps the author meant you cannot download purchased books off of Apple Books.

I didn’t love them forever ago, but I rather like their new single “The Emptiness Machine”. I don’t follow music so I didn’t know they had lost their lead singer until yesterday. I heard the song and thought, “Linkin Park doesn’t have a woman for a lead singer….”

I would feel that it would be a reasonable if it was my local paper running the story. Arstechnica IS a primarily technical news site—I believe they should have a higher bar—otherwise they are just parroting a report and not providing useful (to me) news.

I generally think arstechnica.com does a decent job of being a non-garbage news site. I pay a couple bucks a month for the ad-free RSS feed. This story feels terrible to me. I don’t doubt a law suit has been filed, but I would expect some investigation by the reporter of the extra-ordinary claims of privilege escape the application is claimed to be capable of.

https://www.canada.ca/en/immigration-refugees-citizenship/news/notices/changes-medical-inadmissibility-policy-irpa-take-effect.html

I think there is some thought going on about what it means as a society to discriminate against people with disabilities during immigration.

It seems like the US would have a similar problem with people moving between states that had medicaid expansion and ones that do not. I don’t know if there are any studies on the issue.

Discriminating during immigration based on a congenital disability feels like discriminating based on race to me.

I’ve moved to WinPE for its immutability.

Surprisingly, I thought the article was a reasonable summary of the actual paper. I think some people might think this was a poke at privacy on Apple, but it really focused on how hard it is to create accessible settings despite the enormous number of options.

I have found that navigating the menus in Apple iOS is quite a bit easier than on my Android devices. Mac seems more difficult as the settings tend to be inside the individual apps and don’t surface as well through the search.

The paper hammered home the point that Siri configurations were particularly hard, but they also mention that Siri data is end-to-end encrypted. I thought all those points were fair.

I do believe settings need to be improved, but I have little faith they will ever be useful for 99% of users who will simply never change anything from the default. At this point I believe any meaningful improvements for the majority of users will come from useful defaults that include E2E encryption on basically all user data. I feel Apple is coming close with iCloud Advanced Data Protection that was introduced last year, but that needs to become a default. Maybe it cannot though—too many users will lose all their data and then the trade off of security to convenience will not be worthwhile.