• 16 Posts
  • 29 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: February 22nd, 2023

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  • Yes I recognise this post was more typing than a few decades of system rescuing but it’s also more relaxing because my laptop already works and a one character typo won’t be as much of a hassle here. It’d make an unpleasant chore more pleasant if there were a simple alias for this, which I occasionally speculate on proposing but ehhh I don’t need it so often.

    So it appears this time I’m motivated enough to make a post here. But not quite motivated enough to:

    • figure out how to wedge something to do this into the filesystem on my rescue ISO (because I’ll either lose that USB or need to remember to repeat it for the next Debian stable release which might come out before I need this again — I’m thinking on a longer time scale)

    • learn how to formally engage with the Debian community (which seems lovely and welcoming but also extremely bureaucratic for sensible reasons and like I’ll have a pretty long road ahead of me to get a patch together and properly formatted and somehow applicable to all architectures and documented/internationalised and a lot of other steps I’m insufficiently motivated to undertake but perhaps eventually once I have a critical mass of contributions in mind that it feels worthwhile to dive in).





  • I got a nice deal on the x280 and am happy with it, was also looking at the various X1 carbon. Two criteria I had were I wanted USB-C charging (since I have those chargers around and they can handle these laptops) and a single battery (eg. the T470s I have from work is nice but it has two small capacity batteries that each cost the same to replace as the full size single ones in the carbon and x280). One thing to keep in mind is some of the earlier X1 carbon don’t support NVME SSD (I think it started with 5th gen?)

    Edit: another thing to consider is soldered RAM. Part of why my x280 was cheap was it’s only 8gb and can’t be upgraded. Since you’re looking at lighter weight things and using FOSS (and perhaps open to tinkering with things like ZRAM) that might be a useful aspect to focus on because there is probably a glut of such machines given how memory inefficient things are lately with every trivial app running a whole browser engine. OTOH, depending how many tabs you tend to have open and how many electron apps you tend to keep floating around, 8gb might start to feel cramped. Especially if you think you might want some VMs around.












  • Really appreciate you taking the time to write that. I have a sense of most of that (“defense in depth” and “threat model” are good lenses to think about such things through for sure!) but what I was trying to get a better grasp on was how much risk from automated attack was a normal person without worries of an “advanced persistent threat” taking on by using a device past EOL. Like you say, “Quantifying how much of a difference it makes is not trivial” so I feel less conflicted to know that you’re comfortable with your dad taking that risk.

    I would think that the main thing at stake for a typical user isn’t just browsing history or email though but rather identity theft since a successful attacker can use the device to get through 2FA.