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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 4th, 2023

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  • As much as I like my Steam Deck, replacing the battery is not as easy or clean as it should be because of the glue.

    Yes I know there’s a reason they glued it, and yes its good that it is “user replaceable” to some extent, but I hope this pushes for easier replacement in the future.

    I would imagine that the battery cell manufacturers also play a role here, although I have absolutely no way to back this up so take it with a grain of salt. Because 99% of consumer mobile devices have glued in batteries, it is likely that Li-ion manufacturers have adjusted their supply chain to accommodate and make it less expensive for device makers to buy batteries that need to be glued. So it would be reasonable to assume if more companies need to switch to easily replaceable (read: not glued), the suppliers would shift to accommodate and stay competitive.


  • Yeah, and rental prices have skyrocketed too.

    During the next federal election this will be my “single issue” that will determine who I vote for.

    At this point I can ignore our insane grocery/telecom prices, even though that is still a huge issue. The housing crises has far worse ripple effects down the chain: potential buyers can’t buy so they rent nicer places, potential renters can’t rent the nice places so they are overpaying for the rentals they can afford, and people who can’t afford any of the rental prices are scraping by with roommates or on the streets.

    And these development companies have the nerve to go to court over government investigations over their shady practices.

    Shameless.


  • Yeah I saw a post about it a long time ago on Reddit for users with lots of devices

    Basically it is just setting up one or two “central devices” that know all the client devices, but not linking the client devices individually.

    IE: One server is connected to your phone, laptop, tablet, desktop, etc. But the phone is not directly connected to your laptop or desktop or tablet.

    To be fair I don’t actually know if this is the best approach anymore or if just connecting all of them in a mesh is better 🤷

    Here is a forum post describing it.







  • I daily drive Fedora Silverblue on my laptop and distrobox has been great.

    I have layered only two packages: USB Guard and Distrobox. I run syncthing in a rootless podman container, and the rest goes through Distrobox.

    I was even able to setup ProtonVPN in distrobox and it functions as if it was directly installed on the host (just need to map your home folder and some permissions).

    I hope that immutable becomes either the standard or at least all major distros start offering it as an alternative. Makes everything foolproof and makes me much more willing to try new packages and tools because I can always just roll back.

    The only thing that would really make it perfect is if files in /etc/ where also handled in a similar manner. IE: Can make changes to configuration files, and easily roll back to defaults at any time.


  • I run everything in rootless containers using systemd service files generated with podman generate systemd.

    Podman Compose is a “community effort”, and Red Hat seems to be less focused on its development (here is their post about it).

    There are ways to get it working but I find it easier to go with podman containers and pods through systemd because the majority of documentation (both official and unofficial) leans in that direction.

    I don’t know how much you already know, so here is just a summary of things that worked for me for anyone reading.

    Podman uses the concept of “Pods” to link together associated containers and manage name spaces, networking, etc. The high level summary for running podman pods through systemd:

    • Create an empty pod podman pod create --name=<mypod>.
    • Start containers using podman run --pod=<mypod> ... and reconfigure until containers are working within the same pod as desired.
    • Use podman generate systemd to create a set of systemd unit files. Be sure to read through the options in that man page. – this is more reliable than creating systemd unit files by hand because it creates unit files optimized for the podman workflow.
    • place the generated systemd unit files in the right place (user vs. system) and then it can be started, enabled, and disabled as with other systemd unit files.

    Note: for standalone containers that are not linked or reliant on other containers, you can should skip creating the empty pod and can skip the --pod=<mypod> when starting containers. This should result in a single service file generated and that container will operate independently.

    This post goes over pods as systemd services.

    This doc goes over containers as systemd services.

    The Red Hat Enterprise Linux docs have a good amount of info, as well as their “sysadmin” series of posts.

    Here are some harder to find things I’ve had to hunt down that might help with troubleshooting:

    • Important: be sure to enable loginctl enable-linger <username> or else rootless pods/containers will stop when you log out of that session.
    • If you want it to run a container or pod at system startup you will need to specify the right parameters in the [Install] section of the systemd file, see this doc page. Podman generate systemd should take care of this.
    • If you are using SELinux there is a package called container-selinux that has some useful booleans that can help with specific policies (container-use-devices is a good one if your container needs access to a GPU or similar). Link to repo