In '99 my 8GB disk died, and shortage of stock gave me a 12GB disk as warranty replacement.

I guess empty ones are hard to find - but some manufacturers (like Foma) are selling their films in them. In other news, I'm drowning in those things.

RDS and related protocols like TMC have specifications for both FM and AM transmitters. Those are used to stop playback if an urgent message comes. I'm assuming you have AM stations with such signals in the US (I don't think we have in the EU) - otherwise the AM radio mandate would indeed be stupid.

edit: did some digging (it's been almost 30 years since I cared about that stuff) - seems the US was pretty late to the party for radio data channels, and side channels for AM (which wasn't of that much interest here due to the FM heavy radio landscape in Europe) only was discussed in the early 90s for the US specific variants. I couldn't find any details if that actually ever got implemented. Given that most documentation available on that topic is heavily focusing on EU I'd guess it never got that much use in the US.

You still might want to do something like alias pbtar='tar --use-compress-prog=pbzip2 to easily use pbzip2 - unless you have an ancient system that'll speed things up significantly. And even if you don't it'd be nice to use it for creation - to utilize more than one core the archive needs to be created for parallel extraction.

Easiest and most affordable is probably a security key like the Nitrokey or the https://www.yubico.com/. I personally don't like the company behind yubikey much, but if you want something small you can always leave in the device that's pretty much your only option.

For "cheaper, but a bit more effort" would be just getting a smartcard blank, a card reader (if you're not lucky enough to have a notebook or computer with one built in), and then either write your own applet, or use one of the available opensource ones, and upload it to the card. A variant of that would be the Fidesmo card, where you get a card and their applet.

Or you just use the TPM you may have in your system - though you'll need to be careful with that: Typically one reason for using a hardware token is to make sure keys can't get extracted, while TPMs often do allow key extraction. Software to make that work would be opencryptoki.

Generally you'd use PKCS#11 to have the various components talk to each other. On your average Linux pretty much everything but GnuPG place nice. with PKCS#11. Typically you end up with pcscd to interface with the smartcard (the above USB tokens are technically also just USB smartcards), OpenSC as layer to provide PKCS#11 on top, and software (like OpenSSH) then talks to that.

All of that should be available as packages in any Linux distribution nowadays - and typically will also provide p11-kit configured to use a proxy library to make multiple token sources easily available, and avoid blocking on concurrent access.

ssh-add supports adding keys from pkcs#11 providers to the SSH agent (search pkcs11 in ssh-add manpage), with some distribution (like RedHat) also carrying patches allowing you to only select individual tokens for adding.

If you're also using GnuPG it gets more complicated - you pretty much have two options: Stick with PKCS#11, in which case you'd replace GPGs own smartcard agent with gnupg-pkcs11-scd, or you use GPGs own card implementation, in which case you can forget pretty much everything I wrote above, and just follow the security key manual for setting up a GPG card, enable SSH agent support in the GPG agent, and just use that for SSH authentication.

There's a lot of other stuff where Wayland improves the experience. Pretty much everything hotplug works to some extend on X, but it's all stuff that got bolted on later. Hotplugging an input device with a custom keymap? You probably can get it working somewhat reliably by having udev triggers call your xmodmap scripts - or just use a Wayland compositor handling that.

Similar with xrandr - works a lot of the time nowadays, but still a compositor just dealing with that provides a nicer experience.

Plus it stops clients from doing stupid things - changing resolutions, moving windows around or messing up what is focused is also a thing of the past.

Windows for Arm is surprisingly useful, and especially the x86 emulation works pretty well - for what I've been doing so far more seamless than the emulation on MacOS. The bigger problem is that the tooling for utilizing it in a corporate environment is still pretty much missing. You can't get release images from Microsoft, you either go via insider builds, or download release builds via 3rd party sites which index and extract Microsofts artifacts - both not really acceptable. Additionally the tools for customising installations and creating unattended images don't work for Arm yet.

On top of that there's not much hardware available, and it tends to be overpriced. I got a bunch of HP notebooks quite cheaply, and recently was looking into getting one Thinkpad as they have a 32GB option (HP has 8 and 16, and 16 is not enough for serious use nowadays). Seems the 32GB option is not available in EU at all, and while they're running a sale in the US which makes a 32GB available for a decent price there here in the EU I'd pay significantly more for a lower spec variant.

Looks like Sweden and Finland are getting married.

You nowadays let your colonies do whatever they want?

How do people even use the magsafe cables? Not a mac user, but I initially liked the idea - so I got some cables and port inserts which pretty much look like the apple variant. I stopped using it after killing a charger by shorting it out with some metal particles trapped by the magnet, and noticing that all cables started collecting small metal particles when used outside of a sterile environment.

I'm currently bringing her to that specific hobby as it's a bit further away than the area she's usually roaming around in, and she needs to cross one major road (connection to the highway) to get there - but I guess in a year or two she'll be able to do that by herself.

She sometimes gets brought to school in the morning as it's the same building her brother is in for daycare - but if she starts at a different time than him she can get there by herself, and of course she comes back by herself when it finishes. She's also not required to take the direct way home - or could even decide to go home with friends, as long as she calls us if she's coming unexpectedly late.

Both. Some work chats also are still IRC, but unfortunately less than they used to.

I also bridge whatever is possible into IRC via bitlbee. Unfortunately not that useful anymore, but looks like there's now an active project to bridge matrix again, which probably can take over.