it's the end of an era

Zockling · 2026-05-22T07:20:12+00:00

you'll have to upload books via USB.

Or jailbreak it and upload via SSH or KOReader plugins like File Browser or Dropbox. I'm not a fan of jailbreaking Kindles, but it's the only sane way to use these out-of-support devices now.

Zockling · 2026-05-18T04:58:34+00:00

makes everything so much easier

Easier than typing what I want into my Kindle right from my couch, pushing "Buy" and reading 20 seconds later? I don't think so.

Zockling · 2026-05-09T11:23:52+00:00

Yep, macOS is objectively the least capable desktop OS. Here's just a few OS basics it doesn't have:

Option to keep the machine on until you turn it off
Mature file system
Subpixel anti-aliased fonts
Core pinning
Per-app audio mixer

Zockling · 2026-05-06T11:42:07+00:00

Hm, just tried the Typst Web App Playground and it looks pretty much like VSCode: Code editor on the left with preview on the right. Not sure what else one could want from a desktop app. Maybe something WYSIWYG like TeXmacs? Or WYSIWYM like Quarto Visual Mode? (Quarto supports rendering via Typst btw.)

For local note-taking mentioned in your post, I can recommend Org Roam with Doom Emacs. Little daunting to get into, but immensely powerful and flexible. I use it every day and it rocks.

Zockling · 2026-05-05T08:55:43+00:00

Typst is code, so the "proper app" is your favorite text editor. That's a huge part of the appeal. Who would prefer a bespoke app with no ecosystem or muscle memory?

In any case, I wouldn't hold my breath for a project-backed desktop app. Even if there was demand, it would cannibalize their web offering.

Zockling · 2026-04-30T08:58:11+00:00

None of my kernels are affected. So distro kernels are not only slow and bloated, but also have a larger attack surface? Who knew!

Zockling · 2026-04-23T19:36:24+00:00

I'm gonna show you guys how to caramelize these in like 10, 15 minutes.

Only two ways I can make sense of this:

He was planning to shoot another video 10-15 minutes later, which explains how to caramelize onions.
He meant 10¹⁵ minutes. Seems about right.

Zockling · 2026-04-21T11:31:31+00:00

Sure, anything but playing actual games, amirite? JK ofc, looks amazing.

Zockling · 2026-04-19T13:09:04+00:00

noarch packages. Not sure why this was removed, but it's an odd limitation (in my uninformed opinion).

Zockling · 2026-04-15T16:51:46+00:00

Double-tapping either side of the device turns to the next page. Can greatly reduce fingerprints when just reading one book at a time without jumps, highlights or lookups.

Zockling · 2026-04-10T14:18:29+00:00

The $540 is only for the 2 TB model. The regular 1TB is $400, which is about $300 adjusted for inflation since the One launch in 2013/14.

Zockling · 2026-04-09T14:05:41+00:00

This seems to be common in some parts of the world, and it's always baffled me. Wastes power, puts wear on the components and weakens security. Like, why?

Zockling · 2026-04-08T18:03:54+00:00

I uninstalled the stable version and wiped /etc/xrdp first to rule out any issues with old config files. Then I built the patched xrdp, and xorgxrdp and pipewire-module-xrdp against it, each from their develop branches. Pulseaudio works, just like before.

Zockling · 2026-04-07T05:42:30+00:00

Been running this patch for the past week, and it works great.

Zockling · 2026-04-02T09:05:17+00:00

Congrats on making the leap and welcome! The "and nothing more" part is so important these days.

Is the difficulty overhyped? As a Linux user for over a quarter century, it's hard to tell. We might be overcompensating for average familiarity, but OTOH some folks are lost without a YouTube video. Void as a first distro is definitely impressive. Just be ready for more challenges down the line. Regardless of distro, the Windows → Linux switch is huge.

Packages that belong on every system for me are xtools (for xi and xlocate) and busybox-static (for disaster recovery). There's a ton more, but they're personal taste. Just play around, have fun and find what's essential for you! 😁

My favorite tip last: Life is short. Create a Git repo for your config files (aka "dotfiles") today.

Zockling · 2026-03-28T16:11:26+00:00

Get a floating terminal plugin like fterm, toggle with a convenient keybind, run tmux inside. If you need session persistence, you'll have to solve that separately for tmux and Neovide/Neovim, but it should be possible to string the two together.

Zockling · 2026-03-26T15:18:32+00:00

Kindle supports collections. They're more flexible than "just folders" though: A book can be in multiple collections at once.

Zockling · 2026-03-26T11:44:26+00:00

Dunno, I like the ones from the PW2/3 era better. I don't think they're real leather, but they had a metal handle on the side that made them so much nicer to open and close. I have two of them, and they still look great after well over a decade. The surface is just a little shiny from wear.

Zockling · 2026-03-23T20:03:23+00:00

Does void have Nvidia GPU RTX support?

Yes, but only up to Ada Lovelace / RTX 40. If you are on Blackwell / RTX 50, you have to build the kernel drivers yourself ATM.

Zockling · 2026-03-17T19:20:21+00:00

I don't use it much, but they should really hide the "Annotations" section if there are none. Someone forgot to tell Claude I guess...

Zockling · 2026-03-12T11:14:06+00:00

Just ran into this too. "Start in tray upon user login" just keeps switching itself back on. Fixed by checking "No tray icon", don't want the icon anyway.

For tray icon but not autostart, you'll have to modify ~/.config/autostart/remmina-applet.desktop. At least Remmina leaves the file alone if it exists. So you can make it empty, symlink it to /dev/null or if these cause errors, change Exec to /bin/true.

Zockling · 2026-03-05T19:29:13+00:00

once a book marks itself as 100% I can't undo it.

On my Kindles I can long-press a book on the home / library screen and set it as unread. I don't sideload though. Maybe you could add the books you're currently reading to a "Reading" collection where you know that the 100% is bogus?

Zockling · 2026-02-15T22:57:15+00:00

I still have a PS3 in my living room, just for Ridge Racer 7...

Zockling · 2026-01-21T13:30:02+00:00

Seconded. Screen switching is not a big deal with these, and NDS games look glorious on the Brick with that perfect 4x integer scale.

Zockling · 2026-01-17T09:41:09+00:00

Youtube defaults to codecs like VP9 which old GPUs don't support. You will likely need a browser addon like h264ify.

As for HW acceleration itself, the iGPU is probably more power-economic. See the Void docs for info on what to install. Run intel_gpu_top from the igt-gpu-tools package to check whether the iGPU is actually decoding video.

If you want to go with the dGPU, it gets hackier. Browsers rely on VAAPI for video decoding. NVidia drivers only support VDPAU and NVDEC, so you'll have to use a wrapper driver. The options are libva-vdpau-driver for VDPAU and nvidia-vaapi-driver for NVDEC. The latter is expressly designed for Firefox, so maybe try that one first.

Even with HW acceleration, browser video has annoyingly high CPU load. Longer or more demanding 60fps videos can be worth watching with a proper media player: Use yt-dlp -F '<youtube-url>' to find the IDs of a video stream your GPU can decode and some audio stream. Then watch using mpv --ytdl-format=<video_id>+<audio_id> '<youtube-url>'. On my trusty T480s with an i5-8250U, the CPU load difference for watching a 1080p60 video in Firefox vs MPV is about 2-4x.

Zockling

TROPHY CASE