Dual-booting works fine. You can even have more than two OSes - for a while I was running Windows 10, Fedora, and Debian. Ended up sticking with Fedora.

base RAM usage down super low (50MB to 100MB range)

A base Debian system (minimal netinstall with nothing selected in the tasksel step) doesn’t use much more than this, or at least it didn’t in the last stable release. For https://dnstools.ws/ I have a few VPSes with 256MB RAM that run Debian and the DNSTools worker. They run fine.

Pika is a GUI for Borg.

Rsync is doable, but it’s not great since you essentially only have one backup set. If a file gets corrupted and you don’t notice before the next backup is done, you won’t be able to restore it. Borg’s deduping is good enough to keep lots of history - I do daily backups and keep every day for the past two weeks, every week for the past three months, and every month indefinitely (until I run out of space and need to prune it). Borgmatic handles pruning the backups that are out of retention.

I’m using Fedora KDE and haven’t set up backups on my desktop PC yet, but on Linux servers (both at home and “in the cloud”) I usually use Borgbackup with Borgmatic. All my systems have two backup destinations: My home server and a storage VPS, both via SSH.

Looks like Pika Backup is a GUI for Borgbackup, so it should be a good choice. Vorta is also popular. GNOME apps tend to focus on simple, easy to use GUIs with minimal customization, so it’s possible Vorta is more configurable. I haven’t tried either.

Don’t forget the 3-2-1 policy: you should have at least three copies of your data, in at least two locations, one of which is off-site (cloud, a NAS at a friend’s or family member’s house, etc). If you’re looking for cloud storage, Hetzner storage boxes are great value. Some VPS providers have good sales (less than $3/TB/month) during Black Friday.

I still call it Twitter because their emails are still branded as Twitter. I don’t actually use it any more but I do get so much spam through DMs that I’m considering deleting my account. I’m mostly holding it just so nobody squats on my username.

Websites don’t have an actual check for a legit email.

Some do. You can connect to an SMTP server and pretend to send an email (send the EHLO, MAIL FROM, and RCPT TO commands, but don’t actually send any content). A lot of servers will immediately reject as soon as you provide an invalid recipient email address.

Of course, that doesn’t work for any domains with a catchall address (where every address at a domain goes to one mailbox), and some SMTP servers don’t reject the email until later (or even just silently ignore emails to invalid addresses) in order to avoid enumeration attacks.

Do you mean in mixed language documents? Can’t you tell it that parts of the document are in a different language? You could do that in Microsoft Word 25 years ago - Word lets you set the default language for a document, but you can change it per paragraph.

Web is a bit easier than native since the browsers handle all the platform-specific details across all common platforms, and you mostly just have to follow some guidelines that aren’t overly technical or arcane. Some examples:

• Use ARIA roles where appropriate
• Ensure sufficient contrast between text and background colours. Should at least meet the WCAG level AA which is a 4.5:1 contrast ratio, but ideally meet AAA which is a 7:1 ratio for body text and a 4.5:1 ratio for headings.
• Ensure you use <label> tags to label for all your <input>s, alt attributes on all images, title attributes where appropriate (e.g. on <table>s to describe the data contained inside the table), etc.

If you use Firefox, its developer tools have an “Accessibility” tab that can audit for common issues - things like missing labels on checkboxes and radio buttons, colours that don’t meet WCAG contrast ratio requirements, etc.

It’s a good time to learn more about building accessible sites and apps given it’s becoming a legal requirement in some jurisdictions. For example, the European Accessibility Act (EAA) goes into effect later this year, and it mandates that sites and mobile apps for various industries (like ecommerce, airlines and other transport, media streaming, social media, banks, and some others) meet accessibility guidelines.

I’m on an all Linux machine and the only accessibility software I know of is Orca and it’s so and so last time I tried it.

It’s probably worth spinning up a Windows VM to test in NVDA. It’s one of the most popular screen readers and probably the most popular open-source one, but only works on Windows since it deeply hooks into the Microsoft Speech API, accessibility APIs, and and other Windows APIs.

It really do be like that. I work with some people who are nearly 15 years younger than me (I’m in my mid 30s and some newer employees have just graduated from university) so I feel this.

schwimmflugel

English

🤔

This is a really well written article. It’s unfortunate that this person has to deal with all these issues.

I suspect the reason that both MATE and the Debian installer have good accessibility support is because their codebases are quite old. In general, it seems like older software is more likely to have better accessibility support than newer software.

Accessibility should be something that’s built into software from the very beginning, but I totally understand that not all developers have time for it or properly understand it. It’s unfortunate.

Edit: I forgot to mention that accessibility is going to be mandated for some types of sites and apps in the EU thanks to the European Accessibility Act (EAA) coming into effect later this year, which should help somewhat. Won’t really help with Linux itself though.

Same with industrial automation. There’s some robotic arms, assembly lines, etc in use today that still use PCs with ISA slots - the predecessor to PCI, which was the predecessor to PCIe. Old 16-bit bus with a max speed of around 5Mbps. That’s why you’ll occasionally see newish “industrial” motherboards that have ISA slots and parallel ports.

They also often have a lot of the hardware in stock and ready to deploy, to handle replacements.

A project I worked on at university (way back in 2010) was for one of the largest providers of air traffic control systems. Our project was interesting - overlaying eye tracking data from Tobii eye trackers they provided (thousands of dollars each at the time) on top of screen recordings taken via VNC, to aid in training of air traffic controllers.

It was even more interesting to learn about some of their processes, though. Whenever they built an ATC computer system for a client, they’d build one or two spares at the same time, with exactly identical hardware. They did this for two reasons:

1. If the hardware breaks down, they can supply a new system that exactly matches the hardware that was verified.
2. If a client has an issue with their system, they can try and replicate the issue on a clone of that client’s system.

We got to see a storage room with a large number of these systems. Lots of different PCs anywhere from a month to maybe 15 years old. :)

These seem to be the two most commonly supported distros by laptop manufacturers. Framework officially support these two distros, too (they have unofficial guides for a bunch of other distros though)

Wow, a post from 2001 that’s still online today. You don’t see that often any more!

Encryption would prevent it - that’s what I meant :)

I think the trick is to convince someone to send that string, so the modem sees it coming from the computer. Similar to tricking someone into pressing Alt+F4 or Ctrl+Alt+Del twice on Windows 9x.

XFree86 was such a tacky name

+++ath0 is a command that tells a dial up modem to disconnect. I’ve never seen it used in IRC this way, but my guess is that the modem would see this coming from the computer and disconnect.

This was back in the days when everything was unencrypted.

A few basic steps can keep Arch just as stable as anything else.

“stable” in this case means “doesn’t change often”. Is that actually doable with Arch?

Debian testing is usually good enough. Packages have to be in unstable for ~10 days with no major bugs to migrate to testing. Of course, you can run unstable if you really want to live on the edge.

If you do run testing, you’ll want to install security updates from unstable, since testing isn’t officially supported by the security team. https://github.com/khimaros/debian-hybrid

But for there to be used cars, there needs to be new cars… How do the people that buy new cars pay for them?