SDF Chatter

Title is a little sensational but this is a cool project for non-technical folks who may need a mini-internet or data archive for a wide variety of reasons:

"PrepperDisk is a mini internet box that comes preloaded with offline backups of Wikipedia, street maps, survivalist information, 90,000 WikiHow guides, iFixit repair guides, government website backups (including FEMA guides and National Institutes of Health backups), TED Talks about farming and survivalism, 60,000 ebooks and various other content. It’s part external hard drive, part local hotspot antenna—the box runs on a Raspberry Pi that allows up to 20 devices to connect to it over wifi or wired connections, and can store and run additional content that users store on it. It doesn't store a lot of content (either 256GB or 512GB), but what makes it different from buying any external hard drive is that it comes preloaded with content for the apocalypse."

I was introduced yesterday to the FIMS hypothesis by PBS Eons.

The Fungal-Infection-Mammalian-Selection (hey that ryhmes!) hypothesis asks the question of why reptiles didn't bounce back as much as mammals did after the asteroid K/Pg extinction event.

After all, they need less energy than mammals as cold-blooded creatures, and they produce way way more offspring than mammals.

One theory is fungi: there was an explosion in fungal activity after the asteroid due to the now dark and dingy hellhole the Earth became, and a ton of fungal spores were floating around at the time, as seen in geological record.

Apparently fungal infections are not that deadly to mammals (it just irritates us), but were disastrous for reptiles. Plus us mammals had a new food source in the absence of plants and meat.

There's no conclusive proof, still, it's an interesting theory as to why the dinosaurs didn't bounce back and why us mammals took over.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/28662179

Israel has completely wiped out Rafah, turning a fifth of Gaza's territory into a giant buffer zone. This is part of Israel's plan to permanently remain in Gaza and facilitate the ethnic cleansing of its people.

Summary

Trump's support among Latinos has plummeted as he nears his first 100 days in office, with many saying they feel betrayed by the scope of his policies, particularly immigration enforcement.

Almost three in four Latinos (72%) now disapprove of the way Trump is handling his job as president.

Many Venezuelans, for example, have been impacted by the decision to revoke their Temporary Protected Status (TPS).

“Today, I feel the same way I felt in Venezuela— that they're going to come take me somewhere I won't be able to escape from.” “This is completely different from what I thought it was going to be.”

cross-posted from: https://rss.ponder.cat/post/165736

At least in the U.S. and Canada, that is.

This was brought to my attention thanks to a Reddit post where a user (presumably a resident of Canada), had posted how Lenovo was shipping laptops with Fedora and Ubuntu at a cheaper price compared to their Windows-equipped counterparts.

Others then chimed in, saying that Lenovo has been doing this since at least 2020 and that the big price difference shows how ridiculous Windows' pricing is.

Cutting the Windows Tax

When I dug in further, I found out that the US and Canadian websites for Lenovo offered U.S. $140 and CAD $211 off on the same ThinkPad X1 Carbon model when choosing any one of the Linux-based alternatives.

US pricing on left, Canadian pricing on right.

Interestingly, while the difference in pricing is noticeable, your mileage may vary if you are looking for such laptops on the official website. Not all models from their laptop lineup, like ThinkPad, Yoga, Legion, LOQ, etc., feature an option to get Linux pre-installed during the checkout process.

Luckily, there is an easy way to filter through the numerous laptops. Just go to the laptops section (U.S.) on the Lenovo website and turn on the "Operating System" filter under the Filter by specs sidebar menu.

Yes, it's as simple as that. You can do the same for the various official online regional storefronts that Lenovo runs to see whether Linux-based operating systems are being offered on their laptops in your country.

Closing Thoughts

It is good to see that Lenovo is offering Linux in its laptops. In fact, there is another big-name laptop manufacturer, Dell, who also does something similar with its Ubuntu-certified laptops, but both have the same constraint of having limited options for buyers.

Also, as far as I know, Dell doesn't reduce the pricing if you choose Linux instead of Windows. Correct me if I am wrong in the comments.

Nonetheless, I think these manufacturers could do a better job in marketing these Linux-based alternative operating systems to general consumers, showing them how they can save big when opting for these instead of the pricey and bloated Windows.

Otherwise, we might have to start observing Windows Refund Day again.

💬 Your take on this? Would mainstream users benefit from having Linux pre-installed on their laptops?

From It's FOSS News via this RSS feed

This post is "FYI only" for blahaj lemmy members. It is not a debate, and is not intended for non blahaj lemmy users to weigh in and offer opinions.

I recently received reports of a feddit.uk user espousing transphobia. Specifically, this was a feddit.uk user refusing to use the word cis, repeating the "adult human female" dog whistle, and claiming that trans women are not women. I approached a member of the feddit.uk admin team and raised my concerns and sought clarification of their stance on posts like this, where the transphobia is mostly dogwhistles, and "civil disagreement" on the validity of trans folk.

I was told by the feddit.uk admin that their preferred response is this kind of transphobia is to "sort it out through discussion and voting". However, the comments in question are currently more upvoted than downvoted, and little "sorting out" has occurred. The posts remain in place.

At this point, the admin stopped responding to my messages despite being active elsewhere on lemmy. When it became clear they were ignoring my messages and had no intention of removing the posts in question, I made the decision to defederate the instance.

I know some folk agree with the feddit.uk admins approach of pushback through discussion and voting, but this instance is not designed to be that kind of space. Blahaj lemmy is meant to be a place where we can avoid the rampant transphobia universally visible on nearly every other social media platform, and where we can exist without needing to debate our right to do so.