Doctor, Doctor, my brother thinks he’s a chicken!
Too much fun! Like many other Comp. Sci. students, I spent way too many hours trying to get Eliza, an automated psychiatrist from MIT, to say something shocking. Weizenbaum, the developer, “was surprised and shocked that individuals, including his secretary, attributed human-like feelings to the computer program.” In this sense AI is nothing new because Eliza passed the Turing Test in 1967.
I can do better than that by using *.csv files on a desktop machine, and I’m squeamish about taking them mobile. so I don’t have to deal with sync’ing them.
I’m mystified that poppler-utils is not a viable option. Of course the *.pdf file would have to include the text itself, but many do.
Continue following best practices to mitigate surveillance.
The slimy part of FISA has always been that the data it collects about overseas communications never sunsets. Moreover, Federal law enforcement officials used to be able to troll through the data without a lot of oversight. In 2020 and 2021, there were 270 thousand questionable uses of the data by the FBI looking for dirt — not on foreigners (who are fair game apparently) — but on citizens. The furor over that is what fueled the failed opposition to re-authorization, which succeeded primarily because the FBI insists that the data provides early-warning of terrorists plots and that [the FBI] promises to play fair in the future by digging for dirt only on terrorists here and abroad.
I can kind of understand VPN and TOR blocking when those are often used by people wanting to post illegal content or engage in illegal activity that could also be harmful to the service that ends up blocking them.
I can’t understand that at all. If they are able to identify a real threat, they understand more about their users than their IP address. Blocking IPs is a brutal and lazy way to deal with an imaginary threat. I they are truly that paranoid, they should do what Reddit does: Ban everybody.
I’m agnostic about password managers, and I’m agnostic about sync’ing password repositories between devices. I believe there would be grave risks of losing access to my own repositories by misplacing their pass-phrases or bungling other kinds of authentication. I try not to put anything on portable devices that is super confidential. On the other hand, I restrict physical access to my desktop computer. I back it up continually, power it from an uninterruptible power supply, and run only a handful of server-side processes there. … so I feel safe … sort of.
I suppose it may seem heretical to members of this community, but I put all my passwords in a plain-text *.csv file on my desktop machine that I maintain with my own python script.
I may have to build [journal software] myself, with my rudimentary knowledge of qt.
Don’t do that! Take a look at Tonto2.
sakura terminal emulator for me 'cause I can edit color sets in its .config file and then switch between them under the right-click menus.
I used to use [a Windows 3.1 shrink-wrapped software package] that offered notepads and appointment calendars. Then I switched to Linux. That was 16 years ago. To take the place of the Windows application, I had to write my own list-maker from scratch. Today, there’s a new python3-pyqt5 version (under GNU General Public License) of my script for Linux and Windows desktops to help maintain the equivalent of index-card files. Obviously this is not something you’d use just to be like everybody else. I use it because I don’t really know how others handle their everyday lists and I can’t think of an easier way. If you, too, suspect it ought to be easier than it is, it may be. Please look at Tonto2. Thanks.
There’s no doubt there are a great variety of Linux packages in use.
Recently I did a CD install of Debian 12 (Bookworm) desktop with Gnome, which loads a bunch of stuff over the Net. Here are extra packages that I installed manually. The first set is used by and with an automated configuration script that I wrote, so they have to come in to begin with.
Here are third-party packages I admire. These are not available in Debian repositories although some provide Debian-compatible repositories of their own.
Tor Browser Bundle: Anonymizing Network Browser
This is available from https://dist.torproject.org/torbrowser/ as a tarball. This should be unpacked and the whole tor-browser_en-US directory moved to the ~user folder. This is so that the browser can auto-update at user authority as the need arises.
RetroShare: Secure Communications with Friends
This has its own Debian-compatible repository.
metar: A Package to Parse METAR Coded Weather Reports
weeWX: Open source software for backyard weather stations.
From http://weewx.com/docs/debian.htm. Although a Debian package exists, doing any development practically requires that all the code be in user-space, so don’t install the package. Download it instead.
OpenHAB: Home Automation
This has its own Debian-compatible repository.
Ant: GTK3/4 Themes by eliverlara
From https://www.gnome-look.org/browse?cat=135&ord=latest.
This is for claws-mail. It provides better contrast.