Read The Autocracy App, published in The New York Review of Books, and draw your own conclusions. It’s a long, but well worth, text about the impacts of Facebook on our societies and the apparent inclination it has for favoring dictatorships and autocracies. It gave me the chills…

If we get a cat (we’ve talked about it one or two times), we’ll have to get one of this spaceship-like cat beds, from Myzoo Studio, eventually. Most likely a DIY one, because these ones are too expensive. But they are so cool! Even I would like a bed like this.

WARNING Third-party repositories will be enabled and it was only tested on Fedora 28. This could have an impact on your system ranging from none to destroying all cat videos on the internet. You have been warned. Disable annoying AMD iommu warnings on boot Only for some AMD CPUs, like mine, an AMD A9-9420 Edit the /etc/default/grub file and append the following to the GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX line: iommu=soft amd_iommu=off Full example: ...

Popular Science published an article on May 2018, that I only just read, about flaws in the concept of IQ and IQ tests. The text actually presents some good arguments. From the article: Too many of us use the terms “IQ” and “intelligence” as if they’re interchangeable. They’re not. An IQ score isn’t a magical signifier of smarts; it merely quantifies your ability to take a particular kind of test. Wealthy, white Westerners tend to perform among the best on these exams, but that doesn’t mean they’re smarter than the rest of the world. Research increasingly indicates that the advantages that group enjoys—like better education and healthcare—set them up for success on such evaluations. And it doesn’t hurt that the most expensive education is generally geared toward improving one’s ability to fill in the proper bubbles. Access to money, school, and medicine can all change apparent acumen—but IQ ignores inherent intellect. ...

About 7 or 8 years ago, I was diagnosed with IBS. If you don’t know what it is, it stands for Irritable Bowel Syndrome and it’s a functional gastrointestinal disorder that’s estimated to affect 10% to 15% of the world population. In most cases, as far as I know, a simple change in diet allows one to keep the symptoms mostly at bay and have a normal life. For some unlucky few, it will fuck up their life in ways they can’t imagine. And I don’t mean quitting coffee like I had to do (I had an gigantic headache during the first two weeks after quitting) or develop a lactose intolerance (like I also did) that forced me to exclude even more food from my diet. I mean things like wanting to go out with your girlfriend and/or friends but choosing to stay at home because your bowl feels a little strange and that’s always a sign that acute pain or some other symptom is just around the corner. Or feeling outright tired for no reason other than being in pain. ...

Google Chrome is such a privacy hell that it has become it’s own hell in the japanese folklore. You’re better off with Firefox and you get better performance. But if you really want Chrome, Ungoogled Chromium is based on the previous (technically, it’s based on Chromium) with some bits removed for added privacy.

A few days ago I bought a Lenovo Ideapad 320-15AST. I had a budget of €400 and, after browsing a few stores for a couple of hours, I found this one for a bit less than €350. At the hardware level, the computer has reasonable specs. They are (retrieved from inxi): CPU: AMD A9-9420 dual core (1397MHz/3000MHz | boost: 3600MHz) GPU: AMD Radeon R7 M260/M265 HDD: 1000.2GB 5400RPM RAM: 8GB DDR4 This is the first time I’m buying Lenovo. I’ve always had a preference for Asus that dates around two decades, either in laptops or in desktops and components. Also, I haven’t used AMD for probably 10 years or more, but I have good memories of their CPUs at the time, so let’s see how this goes. The expectations are high. ...

In order to adapt a bit more my Debian Stable installation to my workflow, I’ve been tweaking the bash prompt. Simplicity and small line width are key here, because I often have tmux running with several panes in the same window and small panes with large one-liner prompts suck a lot! Everything feels crammed and hard to read. Just take a look at the image below to get an idea. ...

Não fazia ideia até ter tido a ideia de escrever este post, mas tenho conta no Spotify desde pelo menos Janeiro de 2013, que é a data do email mais antigo (do serviço) que encontro na minha caixa de correio. Só há uns meses, no entanto é que subscrevi a conta premium. Desde então, tenho aproveitado para criar algumas playlists na plataforma. Isto não é algo exclusivo das contas pagas; estúpido seria se só os utilizadores pagantes pudessem criar listas de músicas. A verdade é que eu não utilizava assim tanto quanto isso o serviço até passar a ter conta paga e por isso não tinha dado a atenção devida às playlists. Para as lides musicais online, normalmente usava o Youtube, o Mixcloud, o Soundcloud e o Shoutcast. ...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gsdi-1CYmf8 Link Ainda bem que fazem coisas que soam tão bem!