I wish these implementations of secure boot were designed more to protect the SOFTWARE against “theft” than the HARDWARE against “tampering”. Let us wipe the secure boot keys, but in the process erase the firmware (or have the firmware encrypted so that erasing the keys renders it unbootable) and then allow new code to run. Blocking third party firmware on consumer devices is a shit move. It just creates more e-waste when the OEM stops updating it and the community can’t make their own replacement firmware.

True, but if you buy a finished product that uses the new chip that has secure boot enabled, you can’t flash your own firmware. From what I gather, the boot keys are burned into OTP memory so they can’t be erased or changed. The chip is permanently locked to that firmware.

Not really a fan of putting secure boot on. The only purpose that serves is locking the customers out of their purchased hardware. Raspberry Pi is clearly not targeting the maker market with those changes, they want that corporate money and are willing to stick the finger to hackers and makers in the process. Can’t make custom firmware if you can’t boot it.

RISC-V support is nice. I like the idea of being able to work as both an ARM and a RISC-V microcontroller while sharing the same array of peripherals.

Honestly, Mozilla has been peddling adware for a long time now. The writing has been on the wall. It started with putting sponsored links to Amazon on the Firefox home screen, then the shitty Pocket acquisition and the stupid featured stories/recommendations garbage, then the full screen Mozilla VPN ads…Firefox has been adware for a while. Use a fork that removes the bullshit. Switch to LibreWolf.

Mozilla is going to absolute shit lately. Partnering with a fucking ad network? You’ve got to be kidding me. Firefox is still the better browser, but it’s time to abandon Firefox proper for forks that get rid of Mozilla’s bullshit. I have been using Librewolf for a while and unlike Firefox, it’s not adware.

I find 1080p to be too small these days. For desktop use I like 1440p or 2160p (4K). For video, I don’t notice the difference between 1080 and 4K too much but for productivity it is a massive step up. My laptop is a 14" 1440p screen and I have an older laptop with a 13" 1440p screen. I use both with 100% scaling (no enlargement) and it’s fine. I don’t think it’s hard to see and I love having the extra screen real estate for coding and multitasking. Being able to have 2 windows side by side and still have enough room on each for a decent length line of code is great. For my desktop, I used a 28" 4K for a long time and being able to have 4 1080p windows open is amazing. 28" 4K is the same PPI as 14" 1080p, and I am already comfortable with 14" 1440p so from a reasonable distance it’s no problem. I went to a 27" 1440p for a while on my desktop after that because I upgraded to a 144Hz VRR display, but just last fall I again upgraded to a 32" 4K 144Hz VRR and it’s great. No problem with reading text at 100% scaling from a normal distance and it’s amazing for games. I do notice games being clearer at 4K but I mainly got the 4K monitor for productivity as I missed it and now that 144Hz 4K was available I wanted it back.

Recommendations and App Promotions sound an awful lot like ads to me. Showing me things I didn’t ask for that you wish to sell me…that’s called advertising and I don’t care what dumb name you call it, they’re still ads. Show me only what I actually want to see - the stuff I explicitly choose to pin to my personalized Start menu.

Yeah, this headline is stupid ragebait. RISC-V development board company chooses RISC-V chip for their latest RISC-V development board doesn’t have the same level of nonsensical anti-China rage in it.

I’m not sure. I don’t know how or when DSC gets used. My new monitor is a 4K 144Hz display connected over DisplayPort and my GPU is a Radeon RX 7800XT. I don’t think DSC is being used in this setup but I don’t know for sure. I also used this display with an Arc A770 and GNOME VRR worked just fine there too, though I had to comment out a line in a udev rule that excluded VRR support on Intel GPUs for some reason.

VRR has landed!!!

Can’t wait to try out the official version of GNOME VRR after using the patched mutter-vrr for several years now. It’s a very solid VRR implementation and I feel it’s better than KDE’s. It’s about time it made it into an actual GNOME release. Just wish they would’ve fully committed and added the VRR toggle in settings rather than hide it behind an experimental flag. Hopefully GNOME 47 moves it out of experimental.

Hacker’s Keyboard is the only keyboard app I’ll accept on Android.

Drastically nerfed the quotas. FOSS projects with a valid license used to have GitLab Premium access to shared runners and now even FOSS projects with a valid license get a rather useless 400 minutes. They also require new accounts to add CC info just to use that paltry sum which means FOSS projects can’t rely on CI passing on forks to ensure a merge request passes the checks before merging, as even if you have project specific runners set up forks don’t use them and neither to MRs.

I wish companies didn’t offer what they can’t support from the beginning rather than this embrace, extend, extinguish shit. I guess in GitLab’s case there was no extend, it was just embrace FOSS projects and let them set up CI pipelines and get projects depending on the shared CI runners as part of merge request workflow for a few years and then extinguish by yoinking that access away and fucking over everyone’s workflow, leaving us scrambling to set up project side runners and ruining checks on MRs.

I still left my old and unmaintained projects on GitHub but I moved all my active projects to GitLab and any new projects go there too. I have them auto mirrored back to GitHub though as the more mirrors the better. I also recently set up a Codeberg mirror for some of my projects, though GitLab’s CI is what is keeping me on GitLab even though they nerfed the shit out of it and made it basically a requirement to host your own runners even for FOSS projects a year or two back. Still hate them for that and if Codeberg gets a solid CI option, leaving GitLab would make me happy. They too have seen quite a lot of enshittification in the years since Microsoft bought GitHub.

I’ve used Raspberry Pis since the first model came out and other SBCs and the lack of RTC has never really been an issue. The Pi syncs time by the time it makes it to the desktop. I can see it being useful for early boot timestamps but the most useful such log (dmesg) is just elapsed time since power on anyways. I can also see it being useful for devices doing data logging without Internet or regular power supply like a remote sensor logging device. I guess I just don’t see it as a crucial component of a home router. I agree it’s a cheap and useful addition though, just not maybe the most essential of one.

Interesting, though I question why a battery backed RTC is seen as so critically important. Of all the features I can think of wanting in a router, a battery backed RTC doesn’t even begin to make the cut. A device that is powered up 24/7 and connected to the Internet can just get NTP time whenever it boots up and keep time using the OS. What is so necessary about an RTC here? I get that time is used for certificate verification and other security stuff, but again NTP and always powered. Are they concerned that NTP could be an attack vector?

I’m interested in a new OpenWRT router as my WRT1900ACS is getting older and the WiFi driver on it never had amazing support. Right now the Banana Pi R4 looks promising as a WiFi 7 OpenWRT supported router as it looks like most off the shelf WiFi 7 routers do not have OpenWRT support.

LibreWolf. I don’t need to see “sponsored shortcuts”, recommended bullshit, abd Mozilla VPN ads when I open my browser. Firefox is by far superior to Chromium based alternatives but let’s not pretend Mozilla are saints when it comes to annoying bullshit in their browser.

Hopefully they do release 1 and 2GB memory varoants which should be $35 and $45 respectively if they follow the pricing of previous models. The performance does look like a big upgrade over the Pi 4 at least.

I’m not sure you can go more than 320kb/s on mp3. I have my music collection on my home server in FLAC but I transcode to 320kbps constant bitrate mp3 for my car and phone. I chose 320 because it’s the highest that I’ve seen mp3 converters able to go.

Or choose btw (Arch)