Yep. Exactly this. I'm white and my wife is black. We live in one of the states where our relationship was a crime just 55 years ago.
Her grandfather has stories about what happened to people who crossed the race barrier (of course the law only punished minorities for it, not the white partner). We're not far removed from those horrors and lunatics are already trying to drag us back.
Thank you for these links. I'm looking over them. Hopefully I can implement some and see what happens.
And I'm very aware she wouldn't know better. It's just difficult to get her to recognize boundaries. She always wants to play or get in your business. And I understand. She's curious and I'm a lot more interesting than her toys.
But my issue is that while we're teaching her those boundaries, I have pretty much nowhere to go in the apartment to escape in the meantime. Just like she wants places to hide when she wants to be alone, I need that too. I get home from shouting matches with angry people in my industry to be pounced on for a while. I don't often have it in me to engage. I just want to be alone for a bit to recharge.
On the relationship front: probably not the place for it, but other than the cat situation, things are very good. I think we're both too stubborn for our own good sometimes, and that's part of what happened here.
I've never been a primary caretaker for a cat, so my experience is limited. That was a big part of why I was worried about getting a kitten. I've only been around adult cats, and most of them are chill.
Our apartment explicitly forbids the kind of advanced catifying I see online. She has scratching posts with perches, several repurposed cardboard boxes, and a bed we made out of a box and blankets. She uses all of them, and we made sure they were connected to give her an improvised play area/home base. I hope it's enough, or at least a start.
She was separated young, I believe. She was a stray at 8 weeks old, and was possibly separated several days before being found. I don't doubt that's playing a role. She's very needy. I mean, when she isn't being hyper, she demands pets for 45 minutes or more at a time, and she'll nip your hands if you don't provide them. She used to jump on my face to wake me up at night for more attention. Only me though, not my partner.
I'm going to talk to my therapist next month before I consider all my options. It's just been a struggle lately. It's like having an autodestructive toddler with claws.
Cat tax:
Yeah, I really wanted to get an adult or senior cat if we were going to get one. I've had limited exposure to caring for cats, and kittens are challenging.
She actually tolerates her carrier, but our apartment doesn't have enough space for a large dog crate so we could put food and water in there with her if she needs it.
I'm going to mull over whether or not I can hang on that long. I'm not optimistic considering how tough 3 months was. That said, we're going to make sure she goes to a good home no matter what. She's a good cat and someone with more experience and a better environment would no doubt love her.
Cat Advice: Rehoming a recent stray?
My fiance and I took in a stray female kitten about 3 months ago. She was 2 months old at the time, so 5 months now. She showed up at my fiance's coworker's door and once my partner saw the pictures, she wanted her.
I'm going to be honest and say that I didn't want to take her in. My fiance must have asked over 30 times in 2 weeks. She was in tears pleading before I finally caved. And I regret it. I regret it a lot.
We are not equipped to handle her. We live in a loft style apartment with only one door (to the bathroom). She doesn't have enough space to be a cat, and we're gone an average of 9-10 hours a day for work.
Our cat can be really sweet when she's calm, but that's increasingly rare as she gets more bored with the lack of human companionship. She's even losing interest in her toys and I just don't think this environment is good for her.
Beyond that, I just need space from her. My job is stressful (as is my partner's) and I don't have the mental or physical energy to give this kitten attention, and nowhere to go to get a break. It's reached a point where I dread coming home and I enjoy work more.
This cat is just an unrelenting ball of energy. She's destructive, she doesn't know what boundaries are, etc. And while none of that is her fault, I'm just not ready for it. I have too much on my plate already. I even started therapy just to try to find ways to cope, but I'm frequently the target of our cat's play aggression and none of the therapy exercises help me deal with that.
I am stuck doing most of the cat duties because, despite her repeated assurances, my fiance will not step up and do much to care for her.
But at the same time, I worry about what her life will be like if we send her to a shelter. Where should I even begin? The vet we got her fixed at just said "well, what did you expect? She's a kitten." Which is true, but not very helpful.
I know I'm late to the party, but don't do you think Aeon is ready to be a daily driver?
I currently run Debian stable, but I'm interested in Aeon as an alternative.
I've used OnlyOffice (FOSS, really modern) and Softmaker Office, which is a proprietary German alternative with native Linux support. It also has the best docx compatibility of the Microsoft alternatives.
Yes, it's not only possible, but fairly easy to do! Depending on which registrar you purchased your domain through, you may be able to have them host your email. That may be the easiest option, but your registrar could suck so I can't recommend that off-hand.
Third party providers, like mailbox.org, mailfence, proton, tuta, runbox, zoho and others can all host your email. You just need DNS records and proof it's your domain.
Below is a link to mailbox.org's guide on hosting with them.
I read a few different guides and it seemed like the most comprehensive. The steps should be fairly similar for every potential email host.
https://kb.mailbox.org/en/private/e-mail-article/using-e-mail-addresses-of-your-domain/
Depends a lot on what you're looking for. If you just want email, then you have a lot of options. Mailbox.org, Posteo, tuta, mailfence, fastmail, and runbox all come to mind. If you want a full gsuite replacement, ala proton unlimited, then your options are limited.
If you self host? Absolutely. That's a nightmare. Paying a provider (like proton, for instance) to manage your custom domain email is easy. I haven't run into any issues having my email accepted, even by hotmail addresses.
You might run into issues with some newer TLDs, but that is slowly being fixed. Also .xyz domains get sent to spam a lot because they're usually used for malware.
If you're willing, I strongly recommend people get their own domains. That way, you'll always be able to change email providers without changing your address.
I've been using them for my domain and email for almost a year now and I have no complaints. I had to talk to customer support twice to fix a couple things that came up and they got back to me right away. Can't say the same for the last service I used lol
I think it's fair to point out they're not designed around encryption like proton is. It's not a factor in my threat model because I treat email as non-private communication, but it's something you should know if you're wanting proton for that reason.
kDrive is a heavily customized Nextcloud/OnlyOffice implementation with a pretty new and well-regarded file sync algorithm they implemented last year. I would recommend cryptomator to client side encrypt anything you want to protect. It's at rest encrypted, but not end-to-end because there's nothing client side.Here's a list of WebDAV urls from the Cryptomator community to help you set it up. KDrive is on there.
Anyway, hope it works out for you!
I ended up settling on Infomaniak's kSuite after looking around. They're a mid-sized registrar and hosting company.
They're partially employee owned (and I believe in the process of becoming fully owned by employees). I'll grant their privacy policy is just standard EU/Swiss boilerplate, though (stuff like no sharing your data, etc., that you always find in EU paid services like this). GDPR compliance was all I was looking for.
The web client looks nice and kDrive is affordably priced if you need a Google docs/photos/drive alternative.
Edits: clarity and me refreshing my memory on their privacy policy
Self hosted email is its own can of worms. I wouldn't recommend it to anyone outside of experienced IT people. You'll end up blacklisted before you send your first email if you do anything wrong (and there's a lot that can go wrong), and it doesn't solve any security problems email has.
Anything sent over email just isn't private. That goes for Proton customers when they send or receive anything from a non-Proton address too. The one thing privacy email providers can actually do is keep your inbox from being scanned by LLMs and advertisers. That doesn't prevent the inboxes and outboxes of your contacts from being scanned, though.
If you use email, the best thing you can do is be mindful of what kinds of information you send through it. Use aliases via services like simple login or anonaddy when possible. Having a leaked email is a security vulnerability. Once bad actors have your email, they now have half of what they need to breach multiple accounts.
I'm also sick of hearing about Swiss privacy laws. Their intelligence service got busted covering for a US and German spy front operation in Switzerland. If it happened once, I promise it has happened before and since.
Edit for those who can't click: a front company in Switzerland sold fake encrypted communications services around the world for years, possibly decades, with the assistance of Swiss intelligence agencies.
On the Nintendo page for it, it says the motion controlled games require a joycon, but those games are disabled for online play. Maybe there will be an option to disable them for local play too?
They aren't burning fossil fuels. They're burning CHOOH2, which is the product of a genetically engineered plant.
Everything else has already been addressed by others. It's a dystopia. Public transit exists in universe, but it's very dangerous (as is the rest of the city). The corporate solution is to upsell you cars.
Yeah, I was thinking about changing over, because while I like PopOS, it has some issues on my rig. It wasn't as troublesome as Fedora, but laggy animations, Pop Shop crashing, and its very outdated version of GNOME were starting to frustrate me.
I'm actually testing EndeavorOS in a live environment right now to get a feel for it! I've always been hesitant to try Arch in any form because my main Linux buddy warned me it was a quick way to ruin your system.
I use this PC a lot, so I have no problem updating it several times a week or more. So fingers crossed I don't screw it up lol.
Moving to Arch/EndeavorOS from PopOS?
I've been using PopOS for a few months now, and I'm interested in Arch, but I'm worried about whether or not I have enough experience to do that successfully. Also, I have an Nvidia GPU until I start a new build in the next year or so. I don't know if that'll be a problem in Arch. It was a major issue with Fedora for me.
I'm willing to learn the terminal, but right now I'm still pretty dependent on tutorials to do more than basic things, like installing software. Most of those are catered to Ubuntu-based distros, so I'm concerned I won't have the luxury of guides to more complex terminal stuff.
Am I overthinking this? Or should I wait longer (maybe even until I build a new PC)?
How difficult is the transition from Ubuntu-based to Arch?
I thought I was going insane with Fedora. Literally every flatpack I tried had major issues. Went back to an ubuntu-based distro after a month of fix attempts.
Thanks man, and thanks for hosting this instance.
It's got updates from earlier this year. It appears to be updated periodically since it was first written. Some sections are old, while others are fairly new.
An exhaustive guide to Gmail alternatives
This guy can be pretty harsh at times, but he's clearly very knowledgeable..
However, not all providers have a recent review, and his priorities are skewed heavily to the "paranoid" side of the tech world. For example, he considers being able to mail cash to a provider a significant pro. The overwhelming majority of users aren't mailing cash to pay for their email.
Overall, it's good info that's worth sharing.