Curious Canid

I’ve just been looking for something to replace One Note. The timing of this announcement worked out really well for me. :-)

Thanks!

Take a look at the suggestions in this article: https://www.lifewire.com/stop-alexa-from-listening-5121012

If you disable the microphone, except when you want to use it, that should severely limit what it can do. If you also set the option that tells Amazon not to keep any of your recordings that should keep you fairly safe.

The caveat is that Amazon can decide to cheat at any time. They have repeatedly lied about what information that acquire, how long they retain it, and what they do with it. At the moment, they don’t seem to be cheating on the Echo functions, but that could change at any time with an invisible firmware update. There isn’t anything you can do about this except to be aware of the possibility.

It is definitely worth using the privacy options they offer, even if they aren’t enforced through hardware.

Every years or so I try out a bunch of alternate keyboards. Then I go back to using Gboard. {sigh}

I’ve been using swipe typing for years and I just can’t get by without it. None of the privacy oriented keyboards do it well enough to really be usable yet.

Glad I could help. :-)

I had somehow missed that one. Thanks for giving me something else to laugh about.

How could even Microsoft release a product named WinCE? I’ve marveled at it for decades.

I don’t know if this will help, but I’ve been using Plex to manage my music and other audio for more than a decade. It pulls in metadata from online sources and allows me to search or apply filters. That is a lot more versatile than anything I could do directly with the files.

If you aren’t interested in running your own server, look at some of the more sophisticated player apps. Many of them can provide similar metadata features. Then you wouldn’t have to worry about how the files are physically organized.

I use option #1. Each instance of KeePass maintains a local file, but updates them automatically whenever it opens or closes. I also back up the file to my personal server automatically, so I have a copy even if the cloud service fails for some reason.

This setup has been serving me well for a long time.

I have tried it multiple times with various devices, going back to the Palm Pilot. Modern Android does the best of any environment I’ve tried, but I still consider it unusable for editing. There may be some clever, outside-of-the-box solution that would make it viable, but so far there hasn’t been enough demand to drive that kind of development.

Despite all of the “this is new” in the article, nitinol has been around for a long time. I have a great set of small split rings made of nitinol from at least a decade ago. Wish I could get more of them.

I have a small UPS to keep my fiber and router working for a while and I have a larger UPS for my server. Even the larger UPS will only keep the server going for maybe half-an-hour, but most outages here are short. For me, the most important benefit is that my UPS will tell my server to shutdown when it begins to get short of power. Graceful shutdowns remove the risk of corruption and data loss.

I’m not sure requests for help with Linux would be that much more frequent than the ones I get now asking for help with Windows. The Windows UX is getting worse while the Linux UX has been getting better for a while now.

If you need to add more than one drive you should look at external enclosures. There are 4-drive models just over $100 and 8-drive models just over $200. You connect them with eSata, USB 3, or USB C, depending on the enclosure.

GIMP and LibreOffice are what I’ve been using.