Noo, really, idk what Disco was but tags and recommendations from other humans are plenty to find good AO3 fic to read. And AO3 itself has been getting hammered for months, presumably by corporate AI crawlers. A recommendation engine would also have to crawl AO3. That’s very difficult to do because of said hammering. Even the regular download feature barely works now if you use fanficfare for it.

I know some people have gotten Nvidia stuff working, but from what I can tell, it’s still iffy. Maybe you were lucky.

I believe the Nvidia driver situation still sucks and maybe always will due to Nvidia incalcitrance. You could try pulling out that 3060 board. Next, what motherboard are you using? That might also have compatibility issues. Other than that, dual booting has sometimes been a pain, but if the system is coming up you’ve gotten past that. Your system is pretty powerful and should work well.

Get a SIP account with a VoIP provider and run a SIP client on your laptop. I’ve been using Linphone on Android and it works but isn’t great. It does say it has desktop versions. I haven’t looked into alternatives.

Phone OS’s usually won’t let you get at the voice stream, to prevent malware apps from tapping your conversations.

You could alternatively use some Bluetooth hack as someone said. It would help if you were more specific about what you wanted.

I use Debian on an old Thinkpad and (mostly) don’t have such issues. Installs and upgrades in particular work fine. I had probs with the wifi driver on my x220 but it works fine on the similar t520. Framework might be trying to do too much.

Wikibooks might be ok for that.

For howto guides there is wikihow, though its license is noncommercial only iirc.

Wikibooks might also be suitable, as someone said. The other editors there are less insane about rule enforcement than wikipedia’s, anyway.

If you can say what your topic is, that could help.

You can but it kind of sucks and you would only normally do it on a very temporary hacky basis. Otherwise use OpenVPN or Wireguard or whatever. If you want to do it with ssh, see the VPN instructions on the man page. But I mean it’s janky.

Cig lighter phone charger won’t supply the 5v? I’d have thought the camera mount and enclosure would take the most effort. Raspberry pi zero with their camera accessory would be the main camera.

That’s pretty cool! Any hardware info? I had thought a diy dashcam project would be most about hardware (rpi zero and 3d printed enclosure maybe) with the software being relatively simple. Using an old phone might be another approach.

Do the police take your dash cam if they pull you over? Does that show on their own badge cam?

Streaming live video takes a lot of bandwidth and connectivity from a car can be intermittent, but maybe it’s enough to send a timestamped hash every few seconds, so there is tamper evidence in case of a deletion.

Anyway, deleting video through a dashcam user interface is like deleting a file on a computer: basically a little bit of metadata is overwritten but the underlying data can usually be mostly recovered with filesystem repair or forensic tools. To really delete it for sure you have to either destroy the media or use special tools to overwrite the data blocks. Or just running the camera for a long time (to make sure the freed blocks get re-used) might do it.

You could also stream to another phone or computer tucked away elsewhere in the car, unless you expect the whole car to be seized.

Dash cams do this continuously I thought. Good? Bad? IDK.

I hadn’t heard of that comment, which wasn’t as dumb as it sounds, though some obvious solutions were overlooked and the phrasing wasn’t great.

https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20250208204416.GL1130956@mit.edu/

I’ve used nextcloud for this but it’s not great. I’m sure there are better alternatives.

Command line mplayer has been plenty for me.

Usually you write the book with a text formatter and package the results in to an epub, so IDK if it’s common to edit the epub directly.

The epub is just a zip file containing a metadata file and a bunch of simplified HTML files (one per chapter). So if you’re comfortable editing HTML, or better yet writing scripts, you can probably slap together something simple that unpacks the epub, strips those images out of the pages, and re-packages the epub.

Github: Microsoft code hosting site that feeds all your code through AI training and tries to lock you in through their pull request and related machinery. Once used a motto like “social coding”, but let go of that when they realized Facebook for nerds didn’t sound that great. Software is mostly proprietary besides Git itself.

Gitlab: 1) a Github competitor (gitlab.com, code hosting site with somewhat similar features; 2) the software for that site, huge and bloaty and slow, written with Ruby on Rails. You can self host it if you want, but yecch.

Forgejo: Git front end software, fork of Gitea and/or Gogs. Small and fast and written in Go. Fewer features than Github or Gitlab. If you want to self-host, I’d use this or some variant. Quite easy to install and run.

Gitweb: comes with git, pretty rudimentary but has old school attractiveness at least for me. Really just a browsing interface. No pull requests or anything like that.

Git, just plain Git: if you are self-hosting a project for yourself and maybe a few friends/collaborators, it’s fine to just use git with no web stuff, and push/pull by ssh. You’d manually install account credentials for your friends. This is really the simplest, but NO fluffy UI or other creature comforts.

Fossil: amazingly small and fast alternative to all the above (fossil-scm.org) but uses its own VCS (Fossil) that doesn’t interoperate with Git. I think the author said he might convert it over sometime. It’s written in C! Uses sqlite as repo backend instead of the file system like git uses. Has built in wiki, bug tracking, documentation viewer, etc. and used about 2MB of ram last time I tried it, ridiculously small (Gogs used around 40MB and Gitlab uses gigabytes).

Sourceforge (sf.net), very old school code hosting site, not of much relevance any more. They released an old old version of the software a long time ago and that got forked to become Savannah.

Savannah (savannah.gnu.org) hosting site for GNU and related software. Also savannah.nongnu.org for non-GNU stuff in the same spirit. I don’t know the exact criteria for putting stuff on nongnu but I think it’s on a project-approval basis, rather than letting everyone upload whatever they want.

Darcs (darcs.net), another alternative to git, better in some ways, written in Haskell, lost most of its users after a self-inflicted footbullet around 5y ago. There was a hosting site (darcsweb?) for it but that looks to be gone now.

There are a few more of them too, none of much importance these days even though some were interesting.

I’m on a 4gb machine right now and it’s tolerable if I don’t do too many things at once, but Google Docs bogs in particular bogs it down.

Upgrade that box or repurpose it for something else. Web bloat has made 2gb machines useless for browsing and 4gb marginal, if the user needs Google docs, put in 8gb or more.

I’ve never understood the fuss about Mint, but I thought it was more of a tinkerer’s distro? I’ve been using Debian, which has its warts, but seems to want to minimize loose ends (not always successfully). Some more explanation of Mint’s benefits could be useful.