

As a student, most things are more interesting than studying.
I like computers, trains, space, radio-related everything and a bunch of other tech related stuff. User of GNU+Linux.
I am also dumb and worthless.
My laptop is ThinkPad L390y running Arch.
I own RTL-SDRv3 and RSP1 clone.
SDF Unix shell username: user224


As a student, most things are more interesting than studying.


5G is fine when comparing with 4G. Just a step up. My issue with them is rather whatever is going on with VoLTE and VoNR. 2G/3G just worked for phone calls, but now you only get that guaranteed by purchasing a phone directly from the carrier. Hell, some carriers even blacklist or whitelist devices just because.
And in Australia phones are now getting blocked completely, even if they worked with VoLTE because the carrier decided they didn’t.. Hugh Jeffrey also made a video about that.


I achieve the same by disabling VoLTE and VoWiFi and setting the phone to LTE only in *#*#4636#*#*.
I love these service menus. *#*#3646633#*#* has so much stuff to permanently screw up on some MediaTeks. But also some useful ones like selection of frequency bands, or even specific frequency and cell id.
But yeah, some settings can persist factory reset, and some may even be illegal like Tx tests (verified that it does transmit garbage on selected frequency with SDR) or IMEI change. Not all settings are on all devices, and they may even be partially broken.
But yeah, these settings are don’t touch it for the most part (some are just huge lists of undocumented variables). Some don’t even seem to be resettable from the menu, I mean menus where you select one option, but by default they are unset. And the band mode selection on Moto G54 5G was… interesting. Rather than a nice selection menu, you can type in a number and select to add or remove it from a vector variable for 4G and 5G. Of course, nowhere does it list valid options or give a reset button.
And lastly a thing that serves me as a warning for future, when I was playing around with a leaked service program for some Realtek Ethernet adapter, I found out what eFuse memory is. There is no going back.


From a deal on racknerdtracker.com (so RackNerd as the name suggests).
But their panel is a bit limited. If you want a custom OS that isn’t provided, you have to open a ticket with them to get an ISO mounted. You can also boot into recovery environment, but that is outdated minimal installation of Debian 9 without working APT. I was still able to use it to install Arch Linux from bootstrap image though. I just had to decompress it on my PC, create a temporary partition for it and scp it over.
And I am again mentioning Arch. It comes naturally.


https://racknerdtracker.com/ keeps all the deals that don’t expire.


Not at all. And that’s without whois privacy.
.com .net .org .us .me are $24.95/year
.meme is $24.99/year
.io is whopping $69.00/year

The start.
Pretty obvious.


I asked a lecturer some question, I think it was what happens when bit shifting signed integers.
He asked an LLM and read the answer.
Similarly he asked an LLM how to determine memory size allocated by malloc. It said that it was not possible, and that was the answer. But a 2009 answer from stack overflow begged to differ.
At least he actually tried it out when I told him.
But at this point I even had my father send me an LLM written slop that was clearly bullshit (made up information about non-existent internal system at our college), which he probably didn’t even read as he copied everything including “AI answers may be inaccurate.”


For quick graphical management I use FX File Explorer because it keeps the timestamps when moving files.
For something more I use… Termux. I like to sort things based on timestamps as well, but often I like to set some custom modification time, or copy modification time of a file being replaced (e.g. replacing old 128kbps MP3 for FLAC), and I don’t know of any other way than touch.
Similarly I don’t know what else to use for syncing directories other than rsync.
Plus, I can run SSH in Termux, that means Rsync-ing between PC and my phone is pretty easy.
And it also means I can mount the phone over SSHFS (granted KDE Connect already takes care of this).
I can also use GPG for encryption and decryption of files.
And Vim works fine for me for text editing too.
And now since I already have that, say I want to access some files on any computer. It probably has a browser, and Termux has NGINX, coupled with FancyIndex it gets pretty nice for file access. I like the Material theme.
Now, a bit of a disclaimer: BE CAREFUL WHAT ADDRESSES THE PHONE IS LISTENING ON
I set them manually rather than the typical default of all interfaces. Unfortunately, Android seems to have no firewall. I can easily reach things on my phone connected to mobile data thanks to IPv6. This may or may not be desired. Oh, and NAT isn’t for security either, so don’t think you’re safe because you only use IPv4. Perhaps devices behind same NAT aren’t isolated.
Edit: Example of the WebUI with Material theme (sorted by date because I was able to set the file timestamps):



I have similar issue with Google.
At some point I used to use Google Photos backups. I wanted to delete the backed up files, but there’s no way to do that. It would also delete them from the devices.
And I guess it checks them based on hash, because even in the main view it always figures out where the files are currently stored, if on device, even after I moved them elsewhere. Otherwise these other images only show up in their respective folders, not the main view.


I guess CRTs were fine. I used to play a lot with that. If it’s looking funny, use degauss and watch the magic.

Might be just gathering choices.
Asks 20 people to DM if interested.
7 respond.
The guy picks 1 who he likes the most and drops the rest.

I used to do absolutely everything on my phone, until I got a ThinkPad.
But yeah, I went from a terrible HP that had SMR HDD and a TN panel where I constantly had to move my head depending on what I wanted to read because it had no contrast to 2-in-1 ThinkPad with pretty nice touchscreen IPS and NVMe SSD that I can charge with the same power bank and wall adapter I use for my phone.
I am not really joking with that screen. When I wanted to do something beyond text, I’d either connect it to TV, or use a HDMI USB capture card connected to my phone.


I thought I’d be fine, that I’d buy the other 16GB stick later. Now is later, I am screwed. I had to enable the use of ALT-SysRq-f to manually invoke OOM-killer because I often run out of RAM.
8GB just feels like way too little for a new laptop. Well, maybe the absolutely cheap ones, but “mid-range”, no.
It’s crazy. A bit over a year ago I got a refurbished ThinkPad for €180 with 1x16GB of RAM. Now that RAM costs around €120.
For the future people, who will be curious what is actually under that number: https://github.com/archlinux/archinstall/issues/4269


I’d like something like on Cisco equipment.
Tab completes a command
? prints possible options with brief descriptions, filtered by starting letters if you already typed anything
if there is just one option left, you can just use it directly, so you can write shortened commands (similar to ip commands on Linux)
Based on nothing I’ll go with B.


I probably got something like that. I am not really into minimal installs, kde-applications-meta and plasma-meta is what I go with. Absolutely everything.
I just wish I could safely use KDE Discover for updates. That’s probably what would work with “apply updates on reboot”, which sounds like the safest option. But for some reason packagekit-qt6 which would (probably) make this possible is not recommended to use.
Preferably I’d go with something like KDE Neon or Kubuntu. I just really like KDE. But there’s just no sweet spot for me. Arch gives me new packages with all the bugs. Each update feels scary, what will I discover. Based on my Timeshift notes, last point without major bugs was 31st of October. Something like Linux Mint was stable, but I was missing some newer packages, and even drivers when my laptop was new. And major version upgrades also feel scary. Although, I don’t even know how they work. This is where Arch makes more sense to me. Linux as desktop OS is really just a huge bunch of packages working together, and they slowly get updated. When packaged into an entire OS, how do you even define a version?
I can imagine it being nice for a tablet. They even have programs for calls and SMS if you have a cellular modem.