Well—that is certainly a meticulous observation! 🔍

This excuse for an article is the hardest read for me since along time. I probable have an AI summarize it for me.

TNG is also painfully old fashioned. Especially the fist two seasons are … hard to watch sometimes.

Honestly: I would start with VOY. It’s easy to watch, has a certain amount of action, and doesn’t lose it too much with society and politics.

The USA are a circus only existing to entertain the rest of the world.

Yes!

Have we just become numb to ads?

Online I use multiple browser extensions and settings to avoid showing ads. In the offline world there is no way to avoid them but I think I pretty much can ignore them.

I also intentionally do not buy anything I remember seeing an ad for.

They should make it a requestable permission.

That’s mine.

Stock kernel (only custom loader entries), using systemd-boot. No LTS kernel installed. I assume for LTS this will more or less double.

Don’t worry, it’s just fearmongering because the cannot fingerprint your browser and want you to turn of the privacy features.

If you have money to spend, look for a Microsoft Surface. It’s amazing how good they work with Linux, despite being a Microsoft device designed to run Windows.

Their build quality is really good, too.

Thanks! I just prefer simple UIs.

(Screenshots resized due to not wasting too much space.

Here’s a small one of how a website would look like.

Here’s a larger one of how my new tab page looks like (including multiple tabs to show how the tab bar looks like).

// Enable userChrome.css
user_pref('toolkit.legacyUserProfileCustomizations.stylesheets', true);


// Warnings
user_pref('browser.aboutConfig.showWarning', false);


// Style
user_pref('browser.tabs.inTitlebar', 0);
user_pref('browser.theme.content-theme', 1);
user_pref('browser.theme.toolbar-theme', 1);


// Extensions
user_pref('extensions.activeThemeID', 'firefox-compact-light@mozilla.org');
user_pref('extensions.pocket.enabled', false);
user_pref('extensions.screenshots.disabled', true);
user_pref('extensions.getAddons.showPane', false);
user_pref('extensions.htmlaboutaddons.recommendations.enabled', false);


// Zoom
user_pref('toolkit.zoomManager.zoomValues', '.5,.3,1,1.2,1.3,1.5');
user_pref('devtools.toolbox.zoomValue', '1.4');
user_pref('browser.zoom.siteSpecific', false);


// Privacy
//
// Basically do not leak URLs, IPs, etc. to external services
user_pref('browser.safebrowsing.malware.enabled', false);
user_pref('browser.safebrowsing.phishing.enabled', false);
user_pref('security.OCSP.enabled', 0);
user_pref('browser.contentblocking.category', 'custom');
user_pref('app.shield.optoutstudies.enabled', false);
user_pref('browser.urlbar.trending.featureGate', false);


// DoH explicitly off
user_pref('network.trr.mode', 5);
user_pref('network.trr.default_provider_uri', '');


// Cookies
user_pref('network.cookie.cookieBehavior', 2);


// AdBlock
user_pref('browser.newtabpage.activity-stream.showSponsoredTopSites', false);
user_pref('browser.newtabpage.activity-stream.feeds.section.topstories', false);
user_pref('browser.newtabpage.activity-stream.feeds.topsites', false);


// Remove weird URLS
user_pref('toolkit.shopping.ohttpConfigURL', '');
user_pref('toolkit.shopping.ohttpRelayURL', '');
user_pref('browser.partnerlink.attributionURL', '');
user_pref('browser.privatebrowsing.vpnpromourl', '');


// Do not track
user_pref('privacy.trackingprotection.enabled', false);
user_pref('privacy.trackingprotection.emailtracking.enabled', false);
user_pref('privacy.trackingprotection.socialtracking.enabled', false);
user_pref('privacy.trackingprotection.cryptomining.enabled', false);
user_pref('privacy.trackingprotection.fingerprinting.enabled', false);
user_pref('privacy.donottrackheader.enabled', true);


// Beahvior
user_pref('general.smoothScroll', false);
user_pref('signon.autofillForms', true);
user_pref('signon.firefoxRelay.feature', 'disabled');
user_pref('browser.download.manager.addToRecentDocs', false);
user_pref('security.tls.version.min', 1);
user_pref('browser.profiles.enabled', false);


// UI features
//
// https://github.com/yokoffing/Betterfox/blob/main/user.js
user_pref('browser.discovery.enabled', false);
user_pref('browser.shell.checkDefaultBrowser', false);
user_pref('browser.newtabpage.activity-stream.asrouter.userprefs.cfr.addons', false);
user_pref('browser.newtabpage.activity-stream.asrouter.userprefs.cfr.features', false);
user_pref('browser.preferences.moreFromMozilla', false);
user_pref('browser.tabs.tabmanager.enabled', false);
user_pref('browser.aboutConfig.showWarning', false);
user_pref('browser.aboutwelcome.enabled', false);
user_pref('browser.uidensity', 0);
user_pref('browser.urlbar.trimURLs', false);
user_pref('browser.urlbar.showSearchTerms.enabled', false);


// Telemetry
//
// https://github.com/yokoffing/Betterfox/blob/main/user.js
user_pref('datareporting.policy.dataSubmissionEnabled', false);
user_pref('datareporting.healthreport.uploadEnabled', false);
user_pref('toolkit.telemetry.unified', false);
user_pref('toolkit.telemetry.enabled', false);
user_pref('toolkit.telemetry.server', 'data:,');
user_pref('toolkit.telemetry.archive.enabled', false);
user_pref('toolkit.telemetry.newProfilePing.enabled', false);
user_pref('toolkit.telemetry.shutdownPingSender.enabled', false);
user_pref('toolkit.telemetry.updatePing.enabled', false);
user_pref('toolkit.telemetry.bhrPing.enabled', false);
user_pref('toolkit.telemetry.firstShutdownPing.enabled', false);
user_pref('toolkit.telemetry.coverage.opt-out', true);
user_pref('toolkit.coverage.opt-out', true);
user_pref('toolkit.coverage.endpoint.base', '');
user_pref('browser.ping-centre.telemetry', false);
user_pref('browser.newtabpage.activity-stream.feeds.telemetry', false);
user_pref('browser.newtabpage.activity-stream.telemetry', false);
user_pref('breakpad.reportURL', '');
user_pref('browser.tabs.crashReporting.sendReport', false);
user_pref('browser.crashReports.unsubmittedCheck.autoSubmit2', false);
user_pref('app.shield.optoutstudies.enabled', false);
user_pref('app.normandy.enabled', false);
user_pref('app.normandy.api_url', '');


// Disable AI bullshit
//
user_pref('browser.ml.enable', false);
user_pref('browser.ml.chat.enabled', false);
user_pref('browser.ml.chat.shortcuts', false);
user_pref('browser.ml.chat.sidebar', false);
user_pref('pdfjs.enableAltText', false);
user_pref('pdfjs.enableUpdatedAddImage', false);

and

@namespace url("http://www.mozilla.org/keymaster/gatekeeper/there.is.only.xul");


/* Tabs styling */

#TabsToolbar {
    background-color: #cccccc !important;
    --toolbarbutton-inner-padding: 0 !important;
}

.tabbrowser-tab {
    padding: 0 !important;
}

.tab-background {
    margin: 0 !important;
    border-radius: 0 !important;
    background-color: var(--toolbar-bgcolor) !important;
    box-shadow: none !important;
}

#alltabs-button {
    display: none !important;
}

#tabbrowser-tabs {
    min-height: unset !important;
}


/* secondary label indicators */

@font-face {
    /* copy font file to same directory as this CSS file */
    font-family: 'SymbolsNerdFont';
    src: url('SymbolsNerdFont.ttf') format('truetype');
}

.tab-secondary-label {
    display: none;
}

.tab-text::before {
    font-family: SymbolsNerdFont;
    padding-right: 0.25em;
}

.tabbrowser-tab[soundplaying] .tab-text::before { content: ''; }
.tabbrowser-tab[muted] .tab-text::before { content: '󰝟'; }
.tabbrowser-tab[activemedia-blocked] .tab-text::before { content: ''; }

/* unselected tabs */

.tab-background:not([selected]),
.tab-icon-image:not([selected]) {
    opacity: 0.4 !important;
}
.tab-text:not([selected]) {
    color: #555753 !important;
}

#tabbrowser-arrowscrollbox {
    min-height: var(--tab-min-height) !important;
    max-height: var(--tab-min-height) !important;
}

scrollbox[part="scrollbox"] {
    gap: 2px;
}

and

/* Style about:home and about:newtab */

@-moz-document url-prefix(about:home), url-prefix(about:newtab) {
    .logo-and-wordmark {
        background-image: url(REPLACE_ME_WITH_YOUR_FAVORITE_IMAGE.jpg);
        background-size: cover;
        background-position: center;
        aspect-ratio: 16/9;
        border-radius: 1em;
        position: relative;
        width: auto;
        height: auto;
        max-width: 80%;
        max-height: 60vh;
        margin: 0 auto;
    }

    .logo-and-wordmark .logo {
        display: none !important;
    }

    .logo-and-wordmark .wordmark {
        position: absolute;
        right: 2em;
        bottom: 0.5em;
        --newtab-wordmark-color: #eb8819;
    }
}

So … Basically just another preconfigured Firefox with extensions?

Getting a burner phone and account and only tun it on when you want to check the messages is a good start. Do not use any of your real information.

When I left FB a decade ago they didn’t force a phone number for the messenger, thy basically just requested all possible permissions.

Navigation elements should not change their position or disappear.
-----------
Change my mind.

I can’t go back to other browsers now, they’re all too cluttered

Cluttered? What do you mean?

Made the window smaller to not create a huge screenshot, but this is what my browser looks like.

Anything more than that, and I would be really annoyed.

“bookworm” is now oldstable and “bullseye” is oldoldstable.

So “bullseye” got promoted from outdated to antique?

Security … Depends. If you want to sell the SSD, then yes, wiping the SSD is advised. You don’t need complicated random multiple-write patterns. Just make sure to wipe everything (keywords: wear-leveling, cache), you could use blkdiscard for that.

Performance-wise nothing noticeable would change. Physically, SSDs are fast enough to modify the charge traps to store the bits as needed to store files regardless of what’s in those traps (that’s quite a rabbit hole).

If you plan using the SSD for your own, you don’t need to wipe it, just repartition as needed and create the file systems in the partitions. What I do, is writing some data to the storage to destroy the partition table (dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/XYZ where XYZ is my target device – and then leave it runninf for a few seconds).

Since you’re using encryption, the common tools only see garbage and no data (i.e. file system). So simply don’t decrypt and work with the mapped partition but use the device directly.

They would lose likely 98% of their player base.