…until the owners of that company realize how much more money they could make by introducing stuff like planned obsolescence.

Humans that have no price are really really rare.

There are 2 kinds of companies:

1. Evil companies
2. Companies that are not evil YET.

What this means in this case is that only your own E-Mail server running on a Raspi in your own home can be considered private or secure in the long run. Unfortunately this is really really hard to do, which is the only reason i have not done it yet.
Personally i do not consider any E-Mail private, because E-Mail is not E2E-encrypted, and 99.9% of times one side of the conversation is going to be hosted on some shady companies servers.

Of course Proton delivers a great service, because they make an insecure protocol a little less insecure, and i personally use Proton mail. Unfortunately their closed-source nature makes it impossible to switch providers without abandoning their great software.

As for services like Drive, they can actually be hosted privately and securely on your own Raspi with stuff like NextCloud/OwnCloud.
For those that can’t/don’t want to self-host, i would recommend paying for a hoster that hosts FOSS software and contributes to it either with money or code. In that case you would probably loose E2E-encryption, but gain the ability to switch providers once your provider turns on you. In that case at least some of your money would continue to offer value to you by having improved the software you are still using.

Personally, i have never experienced problems while reading from USB sticks, but i have while writing. I have a 15+ years old USB2 stick and a new USB3.x stick. The USB2 stick writes with constant ~20MB/s, while USB3 is all over the place between 200MB/s and ~0.1MB/s. Unusable for me. For a while i used external HDDs and SSDs over USB3, as they somehow run without problems, but they are cumbersome and expensive.

Therefore i have switched to transfer files over the network (for large files i plug in Ethernet) using KDE connect. Unfortunately it can not send folders (yet), so i would .tar them before sending, and untar them after.

LocalSend would also be an option. Maybe that can do folders natively.

Signs of Addiction:

• Inability to stop? Yes. I drink even when i don’t want to.
• Increased tolerance? Yes. I drank less when i was a child.
• Intense focus on the substance or activity? Yes. I have many glasses for water, bottles, carbonated water,…
• Lack of control? Yes.
• Personal problems and health issues? Depends on water quality. Maybe.
• Withdrawal? Absolutely.

We are going at 560,000 miles an hour trough the unrelenting darkness of space, and just decided to destroy our life support system.

I am running BTRFS on multiple PCs and Laptops since about 8-10 years ago, and i had 2 incidents:

1. Cheap SSD: BTRFS reported errors, half a year later the SSD failed and never worked again.
2. Unstable RAM: BTRFS reported errors, i did a memtest and found RAM was unstable.

I am using BTRFS RAID0 since about 6 years. Even there, i had 0 issues. In all those years BTRFS snapshoting has saved me countless hours when i accidentially misconfigured a program or did a accidential rm -r ~/xyz.

For me the real risk in BTRFS comes from snapper, which takes snapshots even when the disk is almost full. This has resulted in multiple systems not booting because there was no space left. That’s why i prefer Timeshift for anything but my main PC.

Life is a cycle. I am suffering today so i can afford to suffer tomorrow. Makes sense.

Life is only worth living if you are a masochist.

Nothing will change as long as we are piloting decaying, constantly hurting meat-bags trough a world of artificially created horrors like war, hunger, poverty and natural horrors like disease, aging and drought.

Whenever you feel overwhelmed by life, lay down on your bed, close your eyes, and listen to this.

Here some info about how much and what kind of user data is being sold (GPS position,…), and the legality of it all.

Tipps to prevent future accidents:

• Set up BTRFS snapshots with Timeshift or Snapper. Switching to BTRFS is worth it for snapshots alone.
• Do regular backups on a device that can not be reached by rm: vorta local on external hdd that you connect once a week OR vorta/borg2 to a NAS/Server that does BTRFS snapshots itself OR Nextcloud to sync to a server that has a trashbin OR git to a server. Just remember that Nextcloud and git are unencrypted, so the server has to be secure and trustworthy. Vorta and borg2 can be set up with encryption.

Mistakes are unpreventable due to our error-prone brains, but it is a choice to repeat them.

Extracting the keys locked to an TPM is supposed to be impossible, so you do not need to worry about somebody stealing your keys.

TPM sniffing