Dude… That’s bleak 🙂

Because you think this is new?

That’s what happens when Big Tech traps people in information silos and the media manufactures different fake realities depending on the bias of the particular billionaires who happens to own the outlets: people don’t share a common experience anymore and don’t have common facts to agree on.

As a result, everybody has their own truths from their own information bubbles and nobody know the actual facts anymore.

I suspect a lot of people use Facebook because they’ve always used Facebook - mostly older folks at this point - and a lot of the younger folks go there because their favorite association / football club / local restaurant / library are there too.

Meaning Facebook’s success today is mostly inertia: there’s no way any open-source replacement would pull a critical-enough mass of people away from Facebook to fight the inertia and enjoy any meaningful success. I’m pretty sure open-source developers know this and chose something fancier and more exciting to spend their time on.

Creating a Facebook replacement would be about as exciting as creating a Visual Basic replacement: millions of people still use VB, but nobody wants to touch a dying technology.

Am I the only one who thinks Picasso really had very little talent?

I dare not say this to anybody anymore - particularly folks in the art world - because people tend to tell me I’m a yokel who doesn’t understand the finer things in “difficult” art. But really, maybe I’m a thickie, but apart from a few pieces from his blue period, most of Picasso output isn’t “difficult”: it’s just mediocre. This is more proof of that for me.

Facebook is like Myspace: it’s has-been. If I was a developers interested in contributing to the Fediverse, that’s the last social media I’d choose to spend my time reimplementing.

Yes, I have one 🙂 These things, and smoke detectors are legally sold at cost here. But cost is no object to me for things that can save our lives.

The chimney is swept every year by law. Even if you don’t use the chimney, it has to be done, else the insurance company will use it to deny any damage claim - although I think maybe if the chimney is never used, it’s every 2 years.

Anyhow, the chimney sweep came just before we bought the house. It’s good.

It reads levels, and it has a test button.

lol ITT, OP excited and everyone else telling them this is how they die.

That’s the internet for you 🙂

The fireplace is never unattended. We only go to bed when there are embers only left in it.

I turned off the extractor. But this house got me confused, because the previous house we had was less well insulated, and the stove had no trouble breathing even with the extractor at full blast. This one though is much more airtight, and it took me a couple of hours to make the connection between the fire getting choked when I closed the window and the extractor pulling a vacuum. I turned it off and now it’s fine.

I do have a CO detector. Not a peep.

The amount of soot above the door makes me think there’s a persistent draft issue.

In fairness, the stove has been in daily use 6 months per year for 50 years though. I’m not too surprised that the surroundings are blackened.

It’s a brick chimney. It’s a single story house with a low roof. The chimney is maybe 3 feet above it.

And yeah, there is a draft issue. Or rather, it’s a ventilation issue, like in all houses around here: winters are harsh here, and it’s always a fine balancing act between keeping the warmth in and letting enough outside air in to prevent mold and humidity. And when you have a chimney or a stove, letting it breathe enough.

It is a very good design from an electrical and safety point of view.

Sadly it’s also larger than a lot of appliances it provides power to in 2025.

That’s the same reason why I gave Ubuntu Touch a go: CalyxOS going stale on my FP4. But I decided to buy an FP5 to give it a whirl and leave the FP4 alone, because I can’t really do without a reliable phone while I make sure the kinks are worked out.

That’s nice and all. But you’d better hope nothing happens to any of those Nazi yokels, because I guarantee you the minute one of them has so much as a single hair pulled out of his head, the Trump regime will use it as an excuse to launch a full-blown bloody wave of repression.

Sure why not:

• The UI is really quite polished. Honestly, it’s slicker than you imagine.

  There are weird quirk that you simply don’t encounter in Android, like the UI not really tailored for displays with rounded corners or with a camera in the top-middle blocking icons, or the side drag areas being too small for my taste. Or the keyboard’s haptic feedback seemingly not going away when you disable it, because there’s also a general touch haptic feedback that’s well-hidden in the settings menus, that you didn’t know about.

  All this is fixable with enough time and minor hackery, but it still requires time and hackery you don’t need in Android.

• I haven’t tried an external display. I have a computer for that.

• Waydroid - the Android emulation - is very slick and quite stable. Integration is quite good: when you install an Android app, it shows up in the UT menu immediately. Sometimes they show up twice: just refresh the menu by pulling down and the extra instance disappears. At least in my extremely well-supported Fairphone 5, there’s no issues with access to camera, networking, NFC… But the camera has a quirk: you have to open the native UT camera first, otherwise Android apps won’t be able to use the camera for some reason.

• Sharing files between UT and Android apps isn’t a thing natively, but you can download Waydroid helper apps to do that in the Openstore.

• If you want long-winded Android apps, you have to leave the window open. If you close it, the app stops if it was the only one running in Waydroid.

• There’s a thing called Libertine to run native desktop Linux apps in UT: I find it crashy at best. But it’s there.

• Most important apps like calls, SMS, browsing, emails are handled quite well by native UT apps. Other things like maps are handled by web apps, and while I intensely dislike web apps, I must say they work really well.

All of this is easy to live with if you’re willing and persistent enough. But if you want a phone that Just Works™ like most people do, this won’t cut it. That’s why I’m saying, Apple and Google have absolutely nothing to fear from Linux phones: most people aren’t willing to spend a tenth of the time I’m willing to spend on a quirky phone for the sake of principles.

More proof that AI ruins everything - if it was needed.

As an actual person who owns and operates an actual Linux phone that actually works as one of the best Linux phones you can get (Fairphone 5 running Ubuntu Touch), I can guarantee you that neither Apple nor Google are losing a single second of sleep over this - much as I’d love that they quaked in their monopolistic corporate boots…

At this point, I’m convinced the motive for most of what the Trump regime does is gratuitous cruelty. Once you accept that explanation, all those motherfuckers do starts to make sense.