On Vivaldi and yeah it was paywalled so I went straight to my collection of workarounds and no built in solutions. Overall faster that way.

I’m in Saskatchewan so yeah. You have to track down who has them and hope that their “In Stock” is up to date. $7/test.

For those who are paywalled https://web.archive.org/web/20240927171841/https://theintercept.com/2024/09/27/google-israel-defense-tech-conference/

I wish they would do this in Canada.

Used to do tech support for Vivaldi on Reddit before I left. It is a highly configurable chromium based browser that does everything it can to secure and take most of Google out of the browser. It has its own profile system and sync servers before it was enforced, blocks Ads and Tracking outside of the Manifest system, and is highly configurable with its own per profile settings, and has a user editable theming system. It’s adblock system isn’t uBlock level yet but it can use many of the same blocklists and blocks ads on the intake so similar to how uBlock does it now. It has a Mail, RSS, Mastodon Client, and Calendar. It has also done a codebase rewrite of the Chromium engine to optimize its performance. They literally also follow their previous commitments they made during the days of Opera where they have patents, but only to protect themselves and not to restrain others from using them. Back when they were making Opera they and the Mozilla Foundation used to send each other cake at major releases because they were both strong web standards organizations and shared patents at no charge.

And the thing is it is an Iterative release. They have about 50 people, and only 30 are devs. They have browsers on Linux, MacOS, iOS, Android, and Windows. They release more basic versions of the product and grow them then building an in depth product.

So why not go Open Source. Their size. Any company could take their large amounts of work, build on it and release it before they have time to react and it would mean an almost instant loss of control. They are pro-federation, anti crypto, E2EE Sync, and despite what the Brave Employee says on PrivacyTests.org, highly (but not purely) privacy focused browser.

Understanding that the browser is based on an Open Source Browser, and uses Web Standards, and you distribute freely, then why not just be Open Source? Many Open Source Advocates have accepted it as Open Source Adjacent and have even become a release on some less strict Open Source people. So why not? Their CEO answered this that it is basically a function of their size and the large amounts of custom code that they have had to make to the browser. If they went Open Source, which they discussed and tried to find a way they could, but any of the MUCH larger teams could just take their product whole cloth, put a minimal amount of work in and have a better browser and they would be shortly out of business.

For those who are all business is bad, remember that here is a group of people who through several companies and one under attack from Microsoft, managed to survive the original browser wars while supporting Open Source Browsers and Projects. The one bad thing you can say is that they originally planned to go up against Google and Chrome’s Manifest v3, but they couldn’t and couldn’t find co-operation from other Chromium Based browsers once they saw the exact form Manifest v3 was going to take. Outside of that they are working to get their ad block tech up to a near uBlock version, but they won’t just do to uBlock what they fear could be done to themselves if they were Open Source.

TL;DR It is a free browser that has a very friendly set up process so if you want to see the features, download it and install it. If you are on Mobile I will warn you they are still having UX/UI design issues there.

Sure… if you ignore the entire rest of the article.

You think that there aren’t people who might need a Smartphone for work or medical emergencies? That is a non-zero number, so no. However should we have everyone’s base needs met before others get past a certain point before luxury goods? Yes. Should we be able to do that now AND have luxury goods? Also Yes. Is it alright for people to have a Billion Dollars before that? Definitely No.

Fake Tattoo and now she wants money to “remove it”. Her Mother’s Saliva and some Elbow Grease should do it, and that is free.

Food is food. Do what you want to do to your food because you are eating it. Other people aren’t eating it so they don’t get a say. If most people saw what the original pizzas were they wouldn’t recognize them and some wouldn’t like them, including modern Italians.

Tabasco, in my opinion, is just like eating a pizza with peppers or a bunch of pepper flakes on it, or as I sometimes do, ground cayenne pepper.

If you don’t want to use Steam you can use the Heroic Launcher that does Epic and other games, especially itch.io games.

I would like one with GIF and Meme support as well. I can live without it though, but it would be nice to have!

FUTO swipe isn’t there yet, but last I looked it was damn near what I was looking for, but the Swipe was useless. I should check it out again. And I don’t like using beta software for something as important as the keyboard. I don’t think I have tried Anysoft Keyboard before… I will have to check that one out.

Update Anysoft Keyboard doesn’t have swipe typing and it obviously wasn’t developed with English in mind. Typing in some of my secure passwords would have had me hopping between multiple screens. Great for some people but not for me.

Nice try and thanks for the suggestions. Futo is is still in Alpha and my old phone is still down so I won’t be testing it either. Thanks for the suggestion.

To quote the Features; “Glide typing (only with closed source library ☹️)”

I find that people who come from the old days of linux will often respond “you have to use terminal”, or “learn the operating system”, or even balk at people saying you can just use the GUI Interface/Desktop Environments. And then when you get help from expirienced users you get allot of terminal commands, which makes people think “I can’t use Linux without learning the terminal first”. In actuality it is just easier to show a person a command and ask for the results than it is to walk a person through getting the same info otherwise.

“OK, which Desktop Environment are you using?”.

“Desktop what?”.

“Which version of OS did you download and install?”.

“Cinnamon.”.

“X or Wayland?”.

“What’s a Wayland?”.

“OK, X. Is your system up to date and which kernel are you running?”.

…and so on. It is faster to just help working in the terminal. The Desktop Environments are fairly far along and most that I have worked with you could get by completely in the Desktop and not touch the terminal.

I would suggest Linux Mint, but for now I would stick to the non latest version of 21.3 as they bit off ALLOT in 22 and while it works for allot of people there are driver bugs they inherited from Ubuntu and have not implemented the fix for yet and allot of other pains in the toukus so if you want a version with the minimum of troubleshooting and stable Desktop Environments I would stick to 21.3 (If I had any sense I would be switching back to it from 22 myself).

If you want another option it would be Ubuntu and its Different Desktop ‘Spins’ to see which you like the most. Some people prefer to start off on Fedora and I am told it has a good DE, or some people recommend PopOS which had its own spin on a DE but they have let development lag on it as they developed their Cosmic Desktop for the Wayland project (the project that is superseding the X.org project for making windows).

Which ever you choose, good luck. I am in the same boat and I am trying to learn what I can before it is too late.

SwiftKey Keyboard. There are OS keyboards and even swipe predictive text keyboards but I wish there was one that had the skinability and functionality that learned from my typing without monitoring my clipboard and reporting it to Microsoft. Yet every other keyboard I have tried has left me disappointed.

Its not much of a vulnerability, like locks, its not if it can be picked, it is how difficult it is to be picked, but the difference here is that the vulnerability is that a nation state actor, or a high capability actor can compromise it, and “it” being the thing that keeps your accounts safe.

So this is like the lock that protects all your accounts can be shimmed if it ever gets out of your control type of an issue, so not to stop using them, but to keep them secured or on your person at all times.

I hope YubiKey offers a fair upgrade program for their next series of keys and maybe a new FIDO Standard.

What? This is a loooooong time code for swingers. Usually it is pictures or pins of a Pineapple, and is most popular on cruises and vacation resorts. The problem with it being at a fruit supermarket is that if you just toss pineapples in your cart and one is upside down it can be mistaken.

That supermarket should lean into it and sell SPECIAL pineapples at a much higher price and then they would make a killing. 😜😆

Yeah they talk about this kind of stuff in this story and how it isn’t going to save us. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rR2sYlDqdnw&t=762s

Well except that if you are doing it with cards you have to worry about being skimmed. Here in Canada they have chip and pin but guess who gets stung with purchases 4 out of 5 times when it happens because it doesn’t ask for the pin all the time.

Now if you do it through a smartwatch, phone, or some other device that can’t be skimmed when it isn’t being used, then that is the way to do it.

There are loose plans to do that here in Canada long before that, but nothing solid right now. My guess is they are going to have to move from rounding to the nickel to rounding to the dime and pricing and taxes will have to follow. From when I was a kid a penny and a nickel are worth 1/5th of what they were in purchasing power.