I guess it’s a question of how much hassle it’s worth. I did a messy data recovery of a crashed database for a work client once, but it involved a lot of trial and error and writing special purpose code, plus considerable luck that some things worked better than I had a right to expect. Cost of something like that would be in the multi kilobucks, maybe low 5 figures. We got almost all the data back, though not 100%.

Maybe just put that HDD aside and replace it with a new one, and deal slowly with recovering the data as you get the time to mess with it. Also don’t do any write operations on the old drive. Maybe copy it entirely to someplace and work on the copy. In fact better do that anyway, HD’s physically crash all the time.

Gristedes is an expensive yuppie supermarket chain like Whole Foods, in some rich areas. I don’t think they have to worry about some city-run stores in underserved neighborhoods. It’s just pouting.

I think of cloud storage as meaning automatic synchronization to a phone app and crap like that. If you just want plain storage, I’m happy with Hetzner Storage Box. The one I have is in EU so that adds some network latency. I don’t think they have it in the US yet.

You could also go on lowenspirit.com and look at storage offers. servarica.ca has some nice ones that are supposed to be good, but I haven’t tried them myself. They are in the Montreal area.

The Geotrust queries might be OCSP checks which is somewhat legitimate. OCSP is a scheme for checking (via a server query) that a TLS certificate is still valid (hasn’t been revoked) before accepting it. It is or was somewhat mandatory for EV (extended validation) certificates that were fashionable for entities like banks for a while. Without OCSP (like if you disabled it in your browser preferences), EV certificates worked like ordinary certificates instead of showing the company name on a highlighted green background.

Today, people are mostly ignoring that stuff in favor of shorter and shorter expiration periods for certificates.

Maybe nextcloud? IDK I just use Borg. But Nextcloud allows that type of syncing that you describe, I think. I run a small nextcloud server for other purposes and don’t use that feature.

California ID just has a thumb print and has had it for decades. Renewing mostly gives them reiteration of info that they already have.

I thought airplane mode or power-off disables that, but maybe on some newer phones, that is left running because of “find me”. Hmm. BLE shouldn’t be able to reach any cell towers though.

It will help stop the phone from broadcasting your location, but the danger is the private stuff on your phone getting copied if your phone is seized. Better to use a burner phone with nothing private (such as contacts) on it. Used that way you don’t need multiple burners. Just keep it powered off til you reach the protest. I’d be hesitant to keep it powered (such as for mapping) on the way there, unless you don’t mind GPS track potentially being retained on the phone. OTOH they will probably track you anyway, through license plate and face recognition.

BTW the cheapest place I know of to get phones with minutes is below, especially the basic flip phones that are probably better for this anyway.

https://www.qvc.com/electronics/phones/tracfone/_/N-mlt0Z1z1393y/c.html

Generally don’t install extensions unless you really need them and they are well regarded. Otherwise it’s like looking for new prescription drugs or medical procedures. The browser is a huge attack surface.

https://socket.dev/blog/the-growing-risk-of-malicious-browser-extensions

It’s more traditional to just print the key fingerprint.

What does it even mean? People can recompile the kernel to turn the crap off.

These days if the file is write protected, you get prompted for whether you really want to remove it. I don’t know when that change appeared or whether it’s universal.

€890, meh

Bought a Samsung mini laser printer and found that it is Windows only. I gave it to a neighbour.

Meh, I’m feeling like this whole concept is pretty flawed and it might be better by now to just run Graphene or Lineage out of the box. Maybe a niche Android phone manufacturer like Unihertz could find incentive to do something like that.

A fully FOSS dumbphone would possibly be of more interest than a smartphone, fwiw. Enough smartphone projects have failed that I’m unexcited about this latest one.

Someone posted this last week:

Caption: “I hope the NVidia driver doesn’t crash”.

Google gets lots of your email either way, since many of your correspondents will be on gmail. I’ve been getting domains mostly from porkbun.com which offers free whois privacy. namesilo.com has it too.

Don’t ever write any really private data to the SSD in cleartext. Use an encrypted file system. “Erase” by throwing away the key. That said, for modern fast SSD’s the performance overhead of the encryption might be a problem. For the old SATA SSD in my laptop, I don’t notice it.

“Why are we running from the police, Daddy?”

“Because we use Emacs, son. They use vim.”

–old Slashdot T-shirt