Maroon

I am seeing a growing discussion on the need for more Linux phones in the market given Google's problematic behaviour w.r.t the changes that will be introduced to that OS.

One very good point that some community member raised was that Android itself wasn't the problem but the locking of the bootloader in the phone. If the bootloader could be unlocked, then it significantly lowers the bar for the end user to install their OS of choice.

I have dabbled with flashing OSs in old smartphones (GrapheneOS, Post market and Lineage). I commend the developers because I could do that without truly having to "understand the code" at the lower levels. But I assume that was possible because the boot loader could be unlocked somehow*. It seems that isn't the case with many/most phone fro. Samsung / Xiomi, etc.

Are their bootloaders truly unlockable? Is it simply impossible to unlock and relock bootloaders?

• I know that with lineage, the bootloader couldn't be relocked and that was touted as a security flaw. If someone could explain why this lock/unlock is so complex, I'd appreciate it.

I won a new grant (yaay!) and dipping my toes in the role of PI in my university. For now, I will have a PhD, a post doc and a couple of masters students in my team.

In all my previous labs, everything was on paper and very poorly documented (...don't ask). I myself used to use LaTeX to keep a "neat" labnote. Obviously, it is not easy to collaborate and work with others.

Any researchers here who have experience hosting their own e-lab book in their labs?

I am in the EU. I want to help make the TOR network more robust by contributing a relay node. I have one of three hardware options: a raspberry pi zero W, raspberry pi 4B, or ThinkPad T470s.

In your practical experience, which of these computers would be the best for the network? As I understand, beyond a point, the CPU power doesn't matter unless massive traffic loads go through the node.

P.S: Not sure if this is relevant, but I currently have a pihole hosted in a separate RPI zero. I plan to host this at home. I do not have a separate connection line. My router doesn't support vlan.

Add: Thank you for the kind replies. Based on the feedback, it think I'm currently not setup to help the network. I will instead continue with my annual contribution.

I will look into hosting a node on a VPS and just pay a monthly subscription fee or something.

You will see that I have posted about this before asking for suggestions on which software I can use to convert PDF to docx/odt.

I am a teacher. During my time as a researcher I wrote a lot of documents and regularly draw upon them to teach my students. I often have to take the text, modify them, or build upon them. A lot of my material is bound up in PDFs. Sometimes, I have grant applications to write where a previous draft I wrote was stored as a PDF. Converting them to text has become the bane of my life.

I am forced to use online tools because none of the software I have seem to do the trick. Lot of people keep saying pandoc. Pandoc does not convert PDF to any other format. It can only be the output format.

Is there a magic open source solution that I have missed out?

I have a thinkpad lying around. I have used Linux over the last 5 years and I an NOT a power user. I use Mint and it gets the job done for me.

Lately though, the whole libre software bug bit me and I want at least one machine that is libre compatible through and through. I have heard some stuff like Parabola and GNUIX or something like that, but thought it best to ask around first before even thinking about something like this.

My work essentially involves writing documents (LaTeX and LibreOffice), doing statistical analysis, and making lectures. I access emails via Thunderbird. That's it.

Does anyone here daily drive a fully libre laptop?

I moved away from MS Windows a long while back and have ported everything EXCEPT presentations. I still use a friend's laptop just for PowerPoint.

I have used LibreOffice Impress and it is quite poor in design and the templates are very unprofessional.

I have used LaTeX beamer a lot and I am now tired of fighting it to make simple transitions look good, quickly customise a slide, etc.

Are there alternatives that I can use which are libre friendly as well as user-friendly?

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/25519139

Gut health gone wild

I came across tools like nightshade that can poison images. That way, if someone steals an artist's work to train their AI, it learns the wrong stuff and can potentially begin spewing gibberish.

Is there something that I can use on PDFs? There are two scenarios for me:

1. Content that I already created that is available as a pdf.
2. I use LaTeX to make new documents and I want to poison those from scratch if possible rather than an ad hoc step once the PDF is created.

I am an EU citizen and I have heard about privacy.com for virtual cards. As I understand it is only for those US bank accounts and Credit Union accounts. Are similar services available for EU citizens where we can get disposable virtual cards?