• 6 Posts
  • 74 Comments
Joined 4 months ago
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Cake day: April 27th, 2026

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  • *mi phones used to be the go-to for the enthusiast; stellar hardware for an awesome price and a wide custom ROM support base. none of those things is true anymore.

    as you can tell from https://wiki.lineageos.org/devices/#xiaomi the support is lackluster. the way I heard it the dude who was in charge of publishing kernel sources quit/got fired (?) and now there’s a backlog and they ain’t super-enthusiastic about keeping up. the unlock process was a shit-show even before they tightened the torture rules, now it’s downright masochistic to participate in that scam, with additional limits per year, evermore extending “wait periods”, mandatory mi account, etc.

    my advice, go get the F3 if you ain’t tossed it and replace the battery, it’s fairly easy.






  • got a busted Lenovo Ideapad 520ISK out of a dumpster, missing screen but otherwise perfectly functional. the thing has i5-7200u, 8 GB, two SATA ports inside and this prompted me to look up converting the thing into a server, specifically figuring out how to run 3.5" drives off it; I’m very anti-friendly towards using USB solutions for such a task.

    searching was arduous, both web and yotube, and except one lonely forum post (remember those?) didn’t find anyone attempting let alone succeeding in running it thus. the 2.5" and 3.5" connectors are identical (there are micro SATA to SATA adapters for the DVD port) but the drives will need 12 V that the 2.5" ports ain’t got.

    what I’ve concluded is that all that’s needed is a M/F SATA extension cable which I have trouble sourcing locally; the power will come from a separate ATX PSU for the time being, although I’m sure I can pull 12 V from somewhere on the board.

    don’t got no 3d printing nor fabricating options, so it’ll likely look super-janky, but that’s not a huge concern for me now. I’ll do a write-up if I succeed.



  • I’ve downgraded my server from 1st gen i7 10 GB RAM (don’t ask) to Core 2 Duo 4 GB with the same load and barely felt it. my entire infra including desktop, laptopS, tablet, phoneS, etc costs like a third of this “missed value”.

    not shitting on your choices, but positing that the price-gouging retail market is all there is, kinda disingenuous; there’s sooo much stuff being discarded although perfectly usable.

    like, I couldn’t bear the super-expensive raspberries while they were in the $50 range, let alone now. marketplaces are awash in busted laptops, with way better value and performance. discarded corpo desktops can house cheap HDD and run 24/7 for eons. etc.






  • the video blows, dude. jolla are opensource takers, they don’t have a free tier so you can’t just install it and take it for a spin. so an actual “here’s how it works” video is beneficial.

    my contention is that sailfish should be the next thing, after wrangling it out of the hands of those fucks. not forked android, not tweaked gnome shell on postmarketos.

    this video wastes time on converting imaginary people over who don’t know they’re being spied on (the three hour long, or so it felt, intro with pichai and friends) showing ubuntu touch (wtf) and the presenter’s face in the frame for what feels like 90% of the video.

    this is a shit video on its own and especially for the target audience here.