Privacy – TheTuupiainen

14/11/2024

Dual booting 2019 Macbook pro 16 linux – don’t do it! PART 1

I’ve been using linux as my main os for about eight years now. Before converting I was a life-long Windows user. I might reveal my age but my first windows was Windows 95 and I’ve used every Windows os. I’ve learnt to live with Windows quirks and shortcomings but with Windows 10 telematry & spying I’ve made the jump to Linux.

Linux as an os is great and fast but with a plenty of caveats. When everything works it is great and smooth but only when it works. I think Linux will never be os for everyone. There are just so many small things that you have to search online answers and command. If you go Linux you just have to take that side of things as well. But it makes you feel like a hacker when you get things to work and the workflow in Linux is lightning fast when you get everything set up. I’ve tried many distros and for now I’ve settled on Manjaro. Printers and software and gaming works with my computers better with Manjaro than other distros. Only thing that has been an issue is scaling and that problem grows bigger when switching between laptop mode and desktop but that’s Linux.

My main computer is Dell xps 9310 (2020) with good enough specs for me. I buy my electronics usually second hand and this Dell xps is off Ebay for a reasonable price (about 600 ╒ in early 2023). It is a great little machine and light-weight. It works great with Linux and thunderbolt docks. My unit was beaten up quite a bit. I replaced the battery and bought new old stock back cover plate and put a Dbrand skin (not sponsored but taking offers if Dbrand is interested) on top cover.

A big me problem is that I live in Europe so when buying laptops I need a ISO layout and preferably a Nordic keyboard layout. So everything in US is off limits and missing keys that I need and customs are huge even if the asking price is usually lower . That means that selection is scarse and pricey in Ebay. I buy usually laptops with German keyboard layout which is a good enough. I touchtype so weird places for Z and Y (and umlaut U looks close enough to Å) is not a big deal when you can change the language in os.

Dell XPS works great when traveling and with thunderbolt dock as a desktop replacement. I game with Steam Deck and with Playstation(s) so I hadn’t had gaming pc forever. A big screen and proper keyboard (or many keyboards which is a post on its own) is still a must for any serious work or fun. Only problem with my XPS is one of its strengths and that is it is a small ultrabook. The screen is 16:10 and it has enough screen real estate for most things but if you want to use it on a couch and in your lap like a laptop and want to have the feel of a desktop it isn’t that device.

As of any other pc user I’ve felt envy for Apple users and their sleek laptops and their outstanding battery life. So I started to look for and research for Macbook with 16 gb and big screen and option to dual boot Linux. Problem with Linux is Apple’s own chips. Asahi linux has come a long way and now everything is starting to work now with Linux and with Apple silicon chips. But one big thing is that thunderbolt dock support is still a lacking feature. So that meant that if I wanted to dual boot Linux and I like to use bare metal when that is possible, the way forward was Macbook with an Intel processor.

Last Macbook pros with an Intel processor were made 2019-2020. So I started to scan Ebay for those. In the summer this year I finally found one with 16 gb memory and 512 gb ssd and 16 inch screen for a good price. As usual it was from Germany so with a German keyboard layout but that’s normal for me. So that was my new device.

I have briefly tested living the Apple life with a Macbook pro 2015 but I never got used to os. With this new device I gave Mac os a second chance. But it wasn’t meant to be. Privacy point view wise Mac os isn’t any better than Windows so that was a worry for me. But a bigger issue was that I couldn’t get the apps I wanted to use and run to work in Mac os or I couldn’t find an alternative. Living FOSS way of life meant that like hell I would pay for my programs. So I started to seek a way to install Linux bare metal to dual boot.

But then came the issues with T2 security chips and part two is all about that adventure.

08/01/202408/01/2024

My EDC in 2024

Top row, left to right:

Panasonic Lumix DMC-GM1 + 20mm f/1.7: For my purposes, the best small compact DSLR that takes micro four third lenses. I love this little thing and it fits in my jacket pocket so I take it everywhere.

Calendar: My pocket calendar for boring work meetings and personal stuff.

Punkt MP01: The dumbphone in this dumbphone EDC. In my country 2G networks still work, but the inevitable is coming in a few years. I love the aesthetics of this phone; it is like something from East Germany. All the positive effects of using a dumbphone are true, at least for me. I’ve been using this little thing for a few months now as my main phone.

A notepad: A little notepad. I like the detective notepad style of this one.

Bottom row from left to right

Boox Nova Air: An e-ink tablet. This has been one of the best electronic purchases for me and I read it almost every day. The convenience of getting books on it and the e-ink screen has increased the amount of books I read. I am now going through Jim Butcher’s Dresden Files books (which are like Jack Reacher but fantasy).

Sony Walkman NW-A45: My mp3 player. It has an SD card slot, so all our music lives in this device. It sounds great and the battery lasts forever, even in this old thing. The main drawback is that it sucks as a podcast device – you can move podcast files to it from computer, but it doesn’t remember where you left off listening to a podcast. So you either have to listen to the whole episode or try to remember where you left off. If you’re looking for an mp3 player, get the new NW-A306.

Apple Earpods: I have tried a lot of wired and wireless headphones, but I always come back to these. They’re lightweight and sound great.

3DS: A Pikachu 3DS. This is the console I’ve played the most. It is a great device and it has been jailbroken so it has all the games.

Not shown in the image:

Bangle.js smart watch: An open source smart watch that doesn’t track you, but has all the features you need.
A wallet
keys
etc.

My quest was to find a way to go through life trying to stay as private as possible. I have a smartphone but it has the Lineage OS in it and it lives on my desk as a 2FA device these days. The added plus has been all the positives of living the dumb phone life. Not having to look something up on the phone has reduced stress and made me more present. It hasn’t turned me into some kind of Superman – I can still procrastinate quite well without a smartphone.

28/05/2023

So what you REALLY have to do if you want to stay incognito

This is really interesting exercise of what hoops you really have jump trough if you want to visit Disney Land and stay incognito by Janet Vertesi:

Data Free Disney

So how many of us would really go through all that. It is bizarre that we would have do all that work to visit a tourist resort but it is really scary that kind of surveillance is all around us and if we really want to keep our privacy we should do all that every day.

This is a little companion piece for this bigger story and it is a great read too:

Data-Free Disneyland

12/05/2023

AI Revolution

https://www.fastcompany.com/90892235/researcher-meredith-whittaker-says-ais-biggest-risk-isnt-consciousness-its-the-corporations-that-control-them

This is a great take. I read these comments of Hinton earlier and I got the feeling he is trying to pose himself as modern day Oppenheimer a little too much after he made millions of dollars of it.

My own adventures in AI revolution consist of couple hours in image creator app creating an all cat power metal band and couple of minutes in Chat GPT which made me a fantasy story of a Finnish politician rescuing a princess – it wasn’t really good and I wouldn’t buy it as a novel and not even borrowing it from the library.

Yeah so my opinion about AI or these language models is that everything surrounded it is mainly hype but it will come commonplace eventually as part of every day life and work. I can see it being useful in excel as it would make all the formatting and tables by just asking it nicely.

03/05/2023

Damn you Mark Zuckerberg!

Yeah so Instagram decided to ban my account. For unknown reasons. Probably because of questionable material on the account. Material which consisted mainly of pictures of cats and paper models. I have my suspicions about what my have happened but I don’t know for sure. I think that somebody might have reported my account to Meta and Meta doesn’t do anything but just bans accounts. I started to follow this vegan-account and it was banned by Meta same time as my account.

I could get the account back, though, if I agreed to give my phone number and provide my own face photo to Meta. Those are pretty big privacy issues to hand over to someone as reputable as Meta. So I just decided to let that account go. Which is a shame in itself, as that account had about 160 photos and a lot of followers – far more than on YouTube, for example. And I was more active on Instagram than on YouTube. All of that is now gone.

After the initial shock, I realised that Meta had done me a favour in its own way and a lot of idle scrolling was out of the way. I thought I’d leave making a new account and enjoy my own freedom from having to scroll mindlessly through Instagram. But I made an account again and with a new name @thetuupiainen_ig, but I’ll see if I’ll start updating anything there.

One of the absolute best things about Instagram is the online photo archive, which you can access from anywhere and I miss that. I plan to start collecting and publishing photos on this site, so they are at least in my hands and no mega-company can decide what happens to them.

With Twitter in the eye of the storm, this own Instagram-gate reminded me of the problems that come with these social media platforms. If I can get my photos collected back here, then at least I know they’ll stay here until I decide what to do with them. The good thing about social media platforms is that visitors come along and have the opportunity to find them. The problem with this site is that visitors have to find their way here to see them. But this site is more of a blog for me than reaching out to a large audience.