Thunderbird since forever. Before that, Seamonkey and the Mozilla suite.

There are some changes I didn’t like over the years like the tabbed interface for everything, but nothing else ever came along that worked as well and was multi-platform.

. I personally think that a lot of this could be resolved by turning display brightness levels down, but people like what they like.

It’s the opposite: turn the brighness on an OLED display to 100% and the eyestrain ends because the flickering goes away. Pulse width modulation is used for dimming OLED displays – that means turning the screen off and on again in a very quick manner – to simulate a darker screen. It’s fast enough for your brain to think it’s a dimmer screen, but slow enough that the muscles in your eyes still react to the sudden on/off again flashing, which results in eyestrain and headaches. A lot of cheap OLED panels flicker at only 240Hz at anything below 100% brightness, resulting in eyestrain. Chinese phones have gotten around this by using things like DC dimming (lowering the voltage to the diodes) or increasing the rate of the flicker to greater than 1KHz (called high frequency pwm dimming), which is fast enough that your eye muscles don’t notice the flicker.

It’s enough of an issue that Apple followed suit, having just moved to high frequency pwm dimming as a “new” feature on the iPhone 17 last month. They call the feature “Display Pulse Smoothing” and describe it as:

“Disables pulse width modulation to provide a different way to dim the OLED display, which can create a smoother display output at low brightness levels. Disabling PWM may affect low brightness display performance under certain conditions.”

Note that the pwm flicker rate is different than the refresh rate, which has to do with how quickly things are drawn on the screen.

How it relates to e-ink, I do not know. About a decade ago, most e-ink e-readers got backlights and I remember buying the then newest Nook that had a backlight. I would read before going to bed, and as I closed my eyes, I would see flashing light in the outline of the Nook, like a residual effect of screen flicker. I am on a Kobo Libra 2 now and no longer have this flickering issue.

Regarding the Boox, this is a form factor that I’ve always wanted for an e-reader, to use on public transit. I think it’s a fine size for my kids as well. But I’ll wait and see after launch if the current version is discounted and get it from Taobao.

Install the apparmor profiles and extra profiles packages from the apt repository. They are sensible restrictions on common apps (web browsers) to prevent anything malicious from happening if they are ever hijacked. Make sure apparmor is enabled. This will do more to keep you secure than an antivirus.

If you insist on an AV, install ClamAV and have it scan weekly. It’s libre software and works well with Linux.

No, but it is in the 2024 iPad Pro.

Fairphone 4 with PostmarketOS?

I deleted TikTok a few days ago and I had lots of videos there. Lots of fond memories and even met some people on the platform and found my barber on that app. But it’s going to be another Instagram because the content curators all think the same and promote the same ideology and try to incite people over the same false narratives.

This is going to be like when Fox bought MySpace.

Those are great laptops and were well built. I think the 2011 might have the Radeon GPU issue though but if it’s lasted this long, you are probably safe.

My grail was a 17" MacBook Pro from that era. I saw one the other day at a tech market but the vendor wasn’t at the booth for me to make an offer =/. I’ll swing by again an see if I can get it for around $50. They really do live a second life as Linux machines and OWC keeps me supplied on replacement parts.

It wasn’t doing anything that Facebook wasn’t already doing, but it got banned. The CEO was brought in front of Congress and racially profiled, gave strong answers, and then got banned anyway.

Wonder why?

TikTok hate was a bot farm. The algorithm was always a reflection of the user.

Pretty sure the Punkt is my next phone and a Raspberry Pi 500+ is my next desktop.

Take me back to the start of the millennium. I’m tired of this shit.

Because they are controlled opposition.

The only time something not controlled got popular was TikTok and you saw how quickly both parties went to ban it in 2024 after normal people started talking about Gaza genocide in every day conversation. The American Congress worked together to ban it even though they couldn’t agree on anything else.

It went from an Asian platform where Asian people in the West connected with each other outside the mainstream blue pill/red pill false choice and shared culture as well as history that isn’t taught, to “here’s the truth about Jesus” and “the world is flat debate me” after that vote. Now it’s full on MAGA.

Mastodon is harder to control because servers can pop up organically, but I guess Threads was a hedge against that threat.