That’s very different than every grocery store, though. Might also be different in Canada.

I’ve got bad news for you…

Sometimes your place of work might have electronics recycling bins or something, but for the most part you’re expected to go to a special eco centre to recycle large electronics and batteries and stuff like this. Often you even have to pay a fee for them to take these items, which seems incredibly stupid to me because it just encourages everybody to throw them out with the normal trash.

You may find some stores in some places that will take this stuff, but as far as I know this is not commonplace in much of North America. There are also some services where you can pay a fee for somebody to collect an item. We did that for a swollen lithium cell recently.

Why do you say a TPM prevents users from running malicious software? As far as I know that’s not really what they’re used for.

I’m pretty sure this is on a public mailing list.

Post quantum cryptography is under development and is slowly being introduced in order to evaluate it / prevent store-and-decrypt-later attacks… But this is generally in more niche applications. SSH recently adopted post-quantum cryptography for key exchange, but it uses a hybrid approach with traditional cryptography in case the post-quantum stuff proves to be not as strong as we think… Signal is experimenting with post-quantum stuff as well. As far as I know, though, post-quantum cryptograhy hasn’t seen wide deployment, and I don’t think any of it is used with HTTPS yet (certainly not commonly, anyway). Depending on what you care about this could be a problem. If you just care that nobody else can authenticate as you, then yeah, once everything is moved over to post-quantum stuff you can just change all your passwords and hopefully you’ll be good… If you care that the data is private then this is a big problem, and in theory somebody could scrape all of the messages you’ve sent and the contents of everything that you’ve done on the web (probably government agencies and not normal people, but maybe this information later gets leaked to the public too). This could also be a problem for authentication, for instance if you’ve ever logged into your bank account you’ve probably seen your routing numbers which somebody could take and use to transfer money, in theory.

It’s also worth noting that, as far as I know, we don’t actually know for certain that the post-quantum cryptography we’ve developed is secure. I think all we know is that it isn’t vulnerable to Shor’s algorithm, but there could be other exploits we don’t know about. This is of course also true for all of the cryptography we use today too. We don’t actually know how hard factoring into prime numbers is, for instance, but these algorithms have been in use for a long time and have been under a lot of scrutiny so we have more confidence in them.

How else are you going to browse the web on your fridge?

God this reminds me that it took Firefox forever to support security keys natively. I hope PassKeys are implemented quickly in Firefox if they take off.

Firefox usage has plummeted. To be fair, 2% isn’t a huge slice of the pie, but it’s still a pretty large number of users in absolute terms.

Audio drivers have never really been a problem in my experience, but maybe you’re referring to pulseaudio? In which case, pipewire has been great!

You know, I always used to think praying was incredibly stupid, and I’m sure plenty of people treat it in a way that’s… not really in the right spirit / ineffective? But recently it’s started to make a lot more sense to me. If you’re praying to god in an effort to directly influence the real world I think you’re misguided… If you think of prayer as a time to consider what you’re grateful for and what you want for the future, it actually seems like a really sensible mental health practice. To be clear, I am and always have been an atheist, and I don’t particularly like religions as a whole, but it seems like some of these things I’ve always found odd (like prayer) stem from something that could actually be reasonable and helpful but got corrupted by some game of telephone and people not understanding metaphors lol.

Does it mean there are fewer ads, or just less variety?

It’s also just a way to ping you and see if you’re there and ready to continue a conversation politely / small talk and a way to start talking again.

Isn’t there VR Google Earth? It’s probably the thing I’m most tempted to buy a headset for.

Backblaze B2 is S3 compatible but not built on S3. B2 is also considerably cheaper than S3, so it probably wouldn’t make sense if it was built on S3.

I’ve lived where it regularly gets near -40C. Often feel chillier laying down in a “cold” house than even just walking outside for a bit. If you have a thick coat and you’re moving it’s not unusual to get too warm, which can be a bit of a problem if you start sweating. I would bike in the winter and I basically just needed a wind breaker and a light jacket (and good gloves, obviously!). One thing that kind of sucks is taking the bus in the winter because you walk to the bus stop, but then sit there in the cold, and then when you finally get on the bus it’s disgustingly warm.

I’m from Canada, so… I have?

If you’re active outside it’s surprisingly hard to be cold to be honest. Beyond that the most important thing is having a wind proof layer on the outside, and probably some decent gloves.

It’s been great for getting to games I’m not sure I would have otherwise. Ori and the Blind Forest was the perfect game to play through on it!

I hope you have a better rest of the year and beyond. This year stank a bit for me too, but there’s been some good things as well.

I got one recently too, and it’s already helping me with this. I hope you find joy in it :). I never buy myself anything so I was worried I’d regret it… but I really like it so far.

The mail app does not support push notifications for gmail and also does not support IMAP IDLE (my naive understanding is that IDLE keeps a socket open and potentially the radio as a result which would impact battery life), so it fetches emails on a timer. AFAIK the only ways to get push notifications is with iCloud email and with an exchange server. I know you used to be able to set gmail up as an exchange server account on iOS, but I’m not certain if gmail will still pretend to be an exchange server these days. This is probably my biggest complaint with the mail app — like I said, it’s not great :), but it’s good enough for my purposes right now.