BuoyantCitrus

Now that I have to file my T2 electronically I went looking for the most affordable way to do that and found T2Express. Not only was it the cheapest at ~$40 but it actually has had a native Linux version since 2020!

I wish I'd found this sooner because they also have a version for doing personal taxes called "myTaxExpress". The main reason I keep a Windows VM kicking around is to file our personal taxes every year with StudioTax and I'd way rather have something I could just run directly and not have to bother with that.

Their T2 software worked well enough for my purposes but a nil return is pretty straightforward. Anyone used their stuff to do their personal taxes and have an opinion on it? Are there any other options out there for Linux native software for filing a T1?

Two parts that stuck out for me were:

"There's no hiding from it. They can turn your phone into a camera. They can turn it into a microphone. You can turn the power off, they can still use the device. It's the most intrusive thing that exists in the world today."

and

He also learned from the April 2023 affidavit that the RCMP had ordered an ODIT on his union phone during the time he was engaged in collective bargaining conversations that year. He says this breached not only his privacy, but the privacy of some 19,000 union members.

It's concerning what a few billionaires are doing but there are way more of us so if everyone is doing small things it can add up.

One easy one is noticing where businesses you deal with get their boxes. My favourite coffee roastery used to use Uline boxes but is switching suppliers after they learned the back story on those guys: https://www.propublica.org/article/uline-uihlein-election-denial

What are some other small ways you've found to push back on the attempted coup of our southern neighbour?

Language matters.

The President is empowered by a Congress controlled by a narrow majority. Rather than the individual they have chosen, I am pissed at the Republican party. And disappointed in the American people. The guy? He was always that way and would have continued to be so at a safe distance from the levers of power without his enablers.

It is the American and especially Republican relationship with Canada that is important in this situation. Those are what endure, that person is only momentarily significant. So, where we can choose the narrative, I think that's important to focus on.

Plus I suspect he likes the sound of his own name.

I've blithely assumed that backups / snapshots of my home dir (including my Thunderbird profile) were covering my email. But it occurs to me it may be more difficult than expected.

I have message synchronization on for any folders I care about ("for offline use"). What I was assuming this meant was that if my mail host disappeared or mysteriously deleted an important folder, I would still be able to switch to a backup, start TB in offline mode (via a commandline parameter), and copy those folders to a local folder at which point I could reconnect and drag them back to my new host, a local imapd I use as an archive, or wherever.

But ...would that actually work? Anyone recover email from offline folders? How'd that go?

Edit:

Well, there can never be too many reminders to verify our backups and I'm all for that but that's less what I was after. I was specifically thinking about the scenario when an IMAP host somehow loses an important folder or disappears entirely. How would it go to recover from a sync'd folder in tb? What caveats would there be? Would attachments show up?

But ya, this post was silly, it's easy enough to try. Yes it works, yes the attachments come with. No major issues in my limited test.

However, I did learn one annoying thing: there is no command line option to start Thunderbird in offline mode. So in the case where the folder was deleted on IMAP I'd either have to:

• disconnect from the network before running the app
• quickly toggle offline before it finishes connecting and deleting the folder
• use the pref to prompt if you want to go online every time you start

I think for as rare a scenario as this is it's fine to just disconnect but I'm a bit surprised it really doesn't seem to have a flag for it.

I know it's my fault for believing what my neglected laptop told me about its battery but I went ahead an did a kernel update anyway and wound up needing to repair my system.

After a quick search I wound up on https://wiki.debian.org/GrubEFIReinstallOnLUKS per usual.

The biggest hassle of this is having to type out the longish for loop to bind the various vfs to the chroot environment. It was bad enough when it was proc/sys/dev but it's worse these days:

for i in /dev /dev/pts /proc /sys /sys/firmware/efi/efivars /run; do sudo mount -B $i /mnt$i; done

I realise there are various things that'd automate that if I connected the rescue image to the internet and added a package but that's also hassles as I've really just booted it with the express purpose of reinstalling grub.

But maybe there is already some form of shortcut for this in the system that I've missed? Or some existing ticket/effort to enact one I could +1?

My Keychron Q11 showed up recently and I've been super happy with it. Main reason was that my Noppoo Choc Mini finally lost a switch and I don't have any on hand (nor a soldering iron ...yet) but it turns out I actually really wanted the pair of rotary encoders on this and didn't even realise.

Specifically, I've got it bound to Ctrl-PgUp/PgDown so I can scroll through my tabs with it and close them with a click binding to Ctrl-W and that's working out really well.

Anyone else use the knobs like that? I've got the other one set to volume and the vendor had zoom as a suggestion but I wonder what else people do with these?

Bonus newb Q: On the product page they demonstrate binding Ctrl-+ zooming to the encoder via a macro but neither macro13 nor the {KC_LCTL,KC-W} type syntax would let me click "Confirm" when trying to associate it to the knob in Via (eg. it wouldn't let me follow their example). Luckily it was happy with the alternative of LCTL(KC_W) that I stumbled on somewhere but now I wonder how to properly associate a macro to a knob?

Last time I needed to add rf to a desktop, Intel AX200 seemed like the chipset to get. But now there are various new standards and the BE200 apparently has issues with AMD systems? So is there something newish from Qualcomm or others that I should be aiming for or would I probably be better off just picking up an AX210?

Since the card might be kicking around a while I'm curious what has the best overall Linux support with as many significant 802.11 standards and Bluetooth codecs as possible for general future-proof-ness. Would also be nice if it had good support for AP mode as that's sometimes handy or I might repurpose it into a router at some point.

Apparently, while it's closed for new donations, liberapay is still going to renew existing ones.