NordVPN merges with SurfShark, breaks the “Linux” client again. Starts harassing Windows users to go on autopay.

NordVPN is acting super sketchy again. While being investigated in California for a potential class action lawsuit for making it difficult to cancel, NordVPN merged with another VPN company, SurfSh…

POZ - Health, Life and HIV

POZ serves the community of people living with and those affected by HIV/AIDS with daily news, treatment updates, personal profiles, investigative features, videos, blogs, forums, personals and an extensive online social network.

MetroMile: Cheap car insurance, but the OBDII dongle doesn’t actually report Check Engine codes.

I use MetroMile for my car insurance. With what my ex did to ruin my credit, they’re the only car insurance company that isn’t taking it out on me with really sky high insurance premium…

The doctor refused to treat my blood pressure, so I took matters into my own hands. Bonus: Insomnia, Depression, and COVID-19

Back in March, I started having problems with my blood pressure running too high. Coincidentally(?) it was after the second Coronavirus vaccine (Pfizer) and I don’t know if the two are relate…

Optometrists continue to openly sabotage people who prefer to buy eyeglasses online.

My spouse and I stopped by the Walmart vision center yesterday. He needed a routine eye exam, and the optometrist took forever. We had a 2 PM appointment, and we weren’t done until nearly 5:3…

Chicago mandates vaccine passports as the vaccine fails to slow the spread of COVID.

Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot (D) has announced that everyone who wants to go pretty much anywhere but the grocery store and church will need a vaccine passport starting January 3rd. The COVID vacci…

Walmart lets orders to PO Boxes go through, then sends them to FedEx, which can’t put anything in a PO Box.

Recently, I made an online order at Walmart. I normally don’t buy anything online if I can avoid it, and I have started to steer away from “self”-checkouts as well. (We’re h…

Intel uEFI disaster strikes again with more uEFI updates inbound. Bonus: Intel disables DirectX 12 on older systems to push hardware sales.

Intel already had one round of these this year, but there’s a second batch. I’ll be damned if I install Windows again just to update my uEFI firmware. I’ve posted before, several …

Fallout 4 apparently uses Windows Media Audio, and this creates issues with Wine.

Windows Media Audio…. The proprietary competitor to Ogg Vorbis and MP3 from 20 years ago that you figured you’d never hear about again, apparently actually is used in some Windows games…

T-Mobile Home Internet Nokia modem took a dump on me. No internet for three hours and then very slow speeds.

T-Mobile recently announced price cuts to $50 a month (down from $60) for their Home Internet plan. If you want to know why, here’s why. This is the best signal I can get. Not that Deutsche T…

Linux 5.14.9 starts to land in Debian Backports for Debian 11 “Bullseye”.

Linux 5.14.9 has started to land in Debian Backports for Debian 11 “Bullseye”. Right now, the only kernel image available is “unsigned”, and there are no new device firmware…

Free Software Review: Yoga Image Optimizer. Google Guetzli? WHY!?

I had some JPEG images to make an optimization pass on. Many programs that write JPEG files don’t do the best job at using the format efficiently. So, there are many suboptimal JPEGs floating…

Free Software Review: Balena Etcher couldn’t be easier for writing ISO images, but do they really need telemetry?

Debian 11.1 was released a few days ago and that means it’s time to refresh your installer media in case disaster strikes. It usually doesn’t strike, of course, but the thing about disa…

Flatpak 1.12.1 hits Debian 11 Backports, fixes bugs, and makes Steam run Windows games again.

Flatpak 1.12.1 has been pushed to Debian Backports for Debian 11. Among the new features, Steam works again. According to the release notes for Flatpak 1.12.0: “The major changes in this seri…

DuckDuckGo Meme

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Samsung is the worst phone for privacy in the Android market, and if you try to fix it, they will punish you.

A new report shows that Samsung is the worst Android vendor for invasions of privacy. Among the problems unique to Samsung is that they’ve foisted Microsoft spyware and Clown Computing that p…

End of Life Google Chrome devices should be repurposed with GNU/Linux.

Of all companies, Lenovo gave me an idea. They mentioned GalliumOS as a potential Chrome OS replacement on some of their own Chrome devices. These are considered low end by PC standards, but they r…

More GNOME Software FAIL. Useless software reviews.

It’s come to my attention several times now that if you want information about a program for GNU/Linux, don’t bother reading the reviews that people put in GNOME Software. Some of it is…

macOS 11.6 makes the theme worse then ever. Free Software GUIs are whatever you want them to be.

Jamie Zawinski commented that his perfect Mac experience continues with light grey text on light grey backgrounds. These have been a problem for years, and it’s only getting worse. It’s…

Wine (still) needs 32-bit MP3 plug-in from Gstreamer that the package doesn’t depend on in order to play MP3 in certain Bethesda video games. Gaming on Debian 11 GNU/Linux.

A long time ago in Fedora, I ran into a bug in Wine’s packaging and it seems the bug is still a problem today in WineHQ’s official packages for Debian. I reported this issue to them in …