Relevant article on Veronika.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/01/meet-veronika-the-tool-using-cow/

Yes, thank you for that. I should’ve included Orwell’s name. Will edit.

“The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”

• George Orwell, 1984

Edit: omitted attribution

“Colder than a witch’s tit in a brass bra!”

Just keep it to yourself if called to serve.

Yah I was trying to arrange a meeting but the email kept bouncing. Thanks, Microslop!

Oh, glad to hear that. I still check out of privacy-guarding habit.

I think that’s part of the plan. Have an Icehole get shot in the face so they can ratchet up the violence.

I think even with Librewolf you need to open the about:config page and disable browser.ml settings.

+1 - Break out that hammer!

Yes, in the PNW there is a shift from blue to red crossing the Cascades. And even rural areas west of them are pretty red.

I can get to the phone data with Nemo. It’s just flakey. I’ve used Dolphin, but when comparing then the look of Nemo seemed to win. In practice, having nemo bomb out every other day is frustrating. I’ll take a peek at Hnome files. Thanks for the suggestion!

And I do enjoy the command line plugin(?) for Nemo. It is handy for sure (it provides a command prompt that follows along wherever you cd to. Maybe enabling some of the plugins is causing the instability with Nemo….

Thanks! I did see a couple of tools like KDEC, but my main system is wired only. I suppose I could pop in a WiFi card and give that a whirl. If I can do some of those things that’d be nice. To move a file from Signal off my phone I had to use VLC. It worked, but yeesh.

Appreciate the input!

The only two issues I have at the moment are that Nemo is not a reliable file browser. It crashes almost daily. Some of its behavior is also frustrating when I go up a directory and it reshuffles my view and loses where I was. I deal with copious files and directories so this can be painful sometimes. Maybe need to play with Dolphin more or find another manager. Open to suggestions. I miss the expected behavior of the file manager in windows, but I don’t miss windows at all.

That second issue is not having an easy method to manage my iPhone with Linux. Pulling images is awkward and always requires fiddling. No iTunes of course for backup and updates. I don’t like OTA updates. So I keep a W10 VM (with no route out) for that stuff.

Otherwise, Linux works for everything else perfectly fine.

Edit: Mint btw. I do love how Linux makes the OS a tool for me rather than a tool for them.

I believe the suspicion is well warranted. This smacks of the same strategy being employed by Russia. Cut off energy and increase human suffering in the cold. Is it a war yet?

Is it perhaps possible they’ve been negatively coerced or threatened? I feel like this might explain a fair amount of behavior of their ilk and we are dealing with the mob after all.

The ban just makes me want one.

It was Tuberculosis they warned of.

I was visiting family and whilst streaming Santa tracker via YouTube for the kiddos, a very jarring and violent pro-Israeli ad came up. Totally inappropriate. I changed the channel.

A word of caution: If you use bitlocker (copy your keys!), it can have hooks in the TPM/bios settings.

Disable bitlocker prior to attempting a live boot.

It will lock your disk if you don’t prepare for it.

For reference:

https://www.linuxliteos.com/forums/showthread.php?tid=9145

https://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?t=430251

https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/bitlocker-and-tpm-blocks-the-hard-disk-after-booting-from-usb-and-pressing-try-ubuntu/57833/17