monovergent

Just noticed that the lower right corner of my X230 just barely hovers above the table. It gives ever so slightly when I press on that corner and I can hear the rubber pad squish against the table.

Also, the table isn't crooked; my other laptops sit perfectly flat. Has anyone else had or solved this issue on their X230 or other Thinkpad?

The storage and processing power of modern smartphones are touted to rival those of a typical laptop. Yet, my trash-picked testing system from over a decade ago with a bottom-of-the-barrel SATA SSD can still boot to the Linux desktop faster than all but one of my Android devices.

Understandably, this isn't a huge priority since very few people are cold booting their phones every morning. But is it just plain unoptimized? How hard would it be to optimize? Do security features and checks bog it down? Is it that there's many tiny files to load when booting? What gives?

Seems to come up regularly in Youtube video essays and the like, for instance around 7 minutes on this Whang video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mnMRXZQLL_U

Next to impossible to find without being in video credits, and it never really makes it to the credits or description. Anyone know what the background track is called?

I was putting up some wall decorations earlier today and was painstakingly realigning everything until it looked level to my eyes. It might be just a hair off, but if I don't correct it, I'll see the misalignment almost instantly and get bothered for the rest of time until I fix it. Has anyone investigated, or is there literature on the minimum perceptible angle from level to the naked eye?

This was slowly driving me insane over the past few weeks and there were no results when searching for it, so I'll post it here for posterity.

I have a work profile set up through Shelter on one of my phones. Several weeks ago, I started noticing that a few times each week, I would be prompted for my PIN when trying to open a work app while the work profile was deactivated. Not once, but twice, once to activate the profile, and a second time to open the app itself. I checked every relevant setting I could think of, including "Use one lock" for work profile and device screen, and all the PIN prompts said were "For added security, enter your device PIN" with no further explanation.

Today, I snapped, stormed into the security settings, and disabled my device's PIN entirely. I think the resulting catharsis let me finally think straight and realize in the next two minutes why. Sometimes, I'll turn off the work profile. Sometimes, I'll unlock with my fingerprint instead of my PIN. The two coincide a few times each week.

The PIN can unlock both the personal and work profiles. But the fingerprint only unlocks the personal profile. So if I unlock with only my fingerprint, when it comes time to unlock the work profile, it isn't "sufficiently unlocked" and I need to enter the PIN. Why at the end of this process I still need to enter it again to open the app itself is beyond me.

TL;DR: Unlocking your phone with the PIN unlocks both personal and work profiles. The fingerprint only unlocks the personal profile.

In the absence of privacy-focused ROMs for my tablet, I settled on flashing an AOSP GSI without Google apps. TrebleDroid to be specific, which is essentially vanilla AOSP, but with some additional drivers to maximize compatibility. Compared to privacy-focused ROMs like GrapheneOS, what exactly does AOSP send back to Google?

I work a rather demanding job and I've constantly been feeling tired and underperformant compared to my colleagues for the past few months. I keep evading responsibilities or putting them off until the last minute.

Many people would kill to be where I am. Yet, I show up every day unmotivated.

There were several stressful years leading up to my current job and I'm wondering if I'm burnt out at this point or if I'm just not pulling my weight.

Edit: Thank you all for your support and guidance. I haven't given too many details here, but personal life has been moving along smoothly, chores get done, etc. But I definitely need to reconsider where I'm going with my job.

The frowning face that pops up when the internet connection drops out or Youtube breaks something. I don't know if it's how suddenly it pops up, my horror and true crime habit, or its lifeless eyes, but I have a jarring and visceral reaction when it shows up.

It's all subjective I suppose, and I could make personal builds to patch it out, so I don't know if it merits me making a Github account and raising an issue. I'm curious if anyone else feels the same way about the frowning face error.

Work uses Slack, which is quite entrenched in the organization, so trying to move all of my contacts over to something else would be nontrivial. Colleagues use it to send moderately urgent messages every now and then, so notifications on my phone would be a nice-to-have.

I haven't had much luck finding well-maintained open-source clients for Slack. I could sandbox Play Services alongside the official app or a browser, but I'd rather not make my phone run the whole Google Play stack just for those notifications. Did I miss any low-hanging fruit or is hosting a Matrix bridge the only alternative?

It's not worth shipping and handling, it's beaten up, and I don't know anybody who wants it. Nothing is upgradeable, unless you count inserting a microSD card.

Of course I could use it as a janky media server or a dumb SSH terminal, but I've already got other machines for those jobs. Or I could recycle it, but what's the fun in that? Suggest me your wackiest programs to try, dangerous distros, or most unorthodox setups to make use of it.

Got Ollama set up with an 8GB AMD graphics card at my disposal. Any recommendations for the most unhinged model I can run on this? i.e. I can ask it how to annoy my neighbors and it won't go on a rant about morals or its supposed purpose as an LLM?

Summary: nothing seems to have changed on my phone except for an initial notification that my device is no longer supported.

The Pixel 4a with GrapheneOS is my secondary phone where I test out apps before committing to them on my main phone and sequester less desirable apps like Whatsapp. GrapheneOS support for it ended over a year ago, so the update notification today was quite the surprise.

With Google recently rolling out an update to the 4a that cripples its battery and charging, I was very wary, knowing that at least one of the GrapheneOS maintainers intends to discourage use of older, unsupported models.

My Pixel had been on the 2024092100 release of GOS, which oddly enough is not tagged in the repo. Comparing the closest release, 2024080800, with 2025012100 yielded no differences in the code (https://github.com/GrapheneOS-Archive/device_google_sunfish/compare/2024080800-sunfish...2025012100-sunfish). So I went ahead with it.

Upon booting, I found a notification saying that my device is no longer supported with a brief explanation. I dismissed it before I could type it up here since I was worried it was a sticky nag banner. It seems that this is acting upon what was mentioned on their Mastodon some time ago:

https://grapheneos.social/@GrapheneOS/111170300209864856

I'll come back to update this post if it does become a nag notification.

However, the lack of code changes might just point to me having dismissed the warning last update and then forgetting about it. But why else would they put out an update at this point?

Regardless, I can happily say that there is no impact on my Pixel 4a's battery life and fast charging is still allowed. I have no evidence that anything should have changed, but I'm not knowledgeable enough about the GrapheneOS code to make any promises.

Update: The notification does come back upon reboot, which was not the case before the update. It reads:

This device is no longer supported

This device stopped receiving full security updates in September 2023 and isn't safe to use anymore regardless of OS choice. It's strongly recommended to replace it as soon as possible. Tap to see more info.

Tapping opens up the GOS FAQ section on device support. I'll come back in a couple days if it recurs without reboot.