This can also be practical in places where the police can force you to unlock your phone with biometrics but not with the PIN.

Ever since I’ve seen the police here force people to delete the videos of them abusing citizens, I have been very wary of biometric identification.

So far my ‘emergency’ procedure would be to restart my phone, as it’s asking for a PIN after a reboot.

Meh. I have a cabin in the countryside 130 km away from my apartment and I can cycle the whole way, or take a coach with a foldable bike and pedal the 30 km left.

It’s actually in the region where I grew up so I have to get there frequently to see my family. It’s a hassle sometimes but it’s only because my government can’t adequately fund and maintain a decent transit network.

I also bike to national parks nearby, and sometimes haul my inflatable kayak with a bike trailer.

People overestimate distances and think the country side justifies a car but it’s usually just excuses. I did move in a big city eventually but I lived in small towns and cities for a decade before that. I still hated cars and didn’t have one.

For example, my mother lives on a rural road outside a village of less than 2000 people. And she works in the next town that is 7 km away. Meanwhile I live in a city and work in the same city but I have to bike 9 km to get to work.

So sometimes distances are shorter in smaller cities and towns but people still insist they need a car. People will give any excuse to use their car. It’s like cocain.

Also, here Uber is only available in major cities where it’s competing with public transit anyway. AFAIK you can’t take an Uber to a small town or a rural road.

EDIT: Also, most people DO live in a city anyway. And they still have excuses to use a car.

Today, some 56% of the world’s population – 4.4 billion inhabitants – live in cities.

I prefer to be compared to Diogenes of Sinope, thank you.

Jokes on them, I hate cars, don’t have one, and would never take an Uber.

I work in a call center where we are all speaking English as a second language. At one point we had a pharmaceutical company as a client. They had employees in different countries but the American employees whined that we didn’t speak English correctly or made bad comments about my coworkers. Eventually we lost the contract and they went with an all American call center for their American employees, because apparently they didn’t like our English.

I never noticed any latency when I’m not using bluetooth. And no, the devices do not speak to each other. For PA/pipewire, this is just an audio sink as any other.

There is latency when using bluetooth but this is pretty standard. It just doesn’t increase (or not noticeably) when streamed to another computer.

Let’s now wait until they learn about shrimps and hermaphroditism in animals.

Northern shrimp, also commonly known as northern prawn, are a sequential hermaphrodite. This is a term used for animals that start their life as one sex and change to the other later in life. In the case of northern shrimp, they are born as males and become females at around four or five years of age.

In a group of anemonefish, a strict dominance hierarchy exists. The largest and most aggressive female is found at the top. Anemonefish are protandrous sequential hermaphrodites, meaning they develop into males first, and when they mature, they become females. If the female anemonefish is removed from the group, such as by death, one of the largest and most dominant males becomes a female.

The local grocery owmed by Loblaws is not taking bottle and can refund tickets/coupons at cash registers from their own machines now. You have to go to the customer service counter with the damn ticket and they refund you in POCKET CHANGE right away so THEN you can give it back to them in a few minutes while paying for groceries. But you can’t use the ticket from the machine!

They refuse to honor and refund their own tickets/coupons from their own machines at cash registers because apparently, there’s been too much fraud. It’s such BS.

Bah. I’ve been using Linux for 25 years, started with a derivative of Slackware, then used Slackware for about a decade, and switched to Debian. I used 5.25" floppies and manually set IRQs so I’m quite comfortable with Debian and tinkering in general.

For friends and family I prefer LMDE. Snap packages can go to hell.

Audio over the network is a feature of pulseaudio/pipewire from a module aptly named “module-simple-protocol”, and as simple as it is to make it work on Linux (when it works), it’s unfortunately not as easy on other platforms. Technically speaking, it’s possible to do that on Android with an app called “Simple Protocol Player” but it’s apparently very glitchy and you’re going to need some patience for the setup. It’s from someone that wanted to stream audio from an HTPC with Ubuntu to an Android phone, but the author states that it’s pretty buggy. Here’s the link to their blog: https://kaytat.com/blog/?page_id=301

So the short answer is unfortunately “no”, unless you want to practice your patience on a project.

Hehe, I knew that if I wanted stability I had to stay on Slackware! That’s the price we have to pay to use a bleeding edge distro like Debian where everything is fast paced. 😏

When it works (!), it’s one of the reasons I brag to my tech friends about Linux, and why I switched to Linux many many years ago. In fact, it was when Esound was a thing. But once in a while it stops working after an upgrade or a dist-upgrade, and I have to spend time trying to fix it.

I like to joke around with tech minded friends that Windows keeps breaking with every updates, but then I have to spend an hour finding out why my sinks disappeared after an upgrade, and I’m forced to realize that… sigh… these things happen with Linux too.

Mainly because of bluetooth headphones with multiple computers. That way they are paired to only one computer and I can use them with other computers at the same time. Just right click on paprefs system tray icon, change the sink and the audio is sent somewhere else. I know it’s now possible to have bluetooth headphones that have multiple connections but it wasn’t the case a few years ago and I still find it much more useful this way.

But it’s also useful when I have my laptop near my main computer and want to use its much better speakers instead of the crappy ones on the laptop. Right click, select another sink, and that’s it.

It’s just nice to have the option to send the audio from one computer to another. It’s a shame that it’s apparently a niche thing.

Alternatively,

How should I be fixing it?

I’ve already written an email to the CRTC about this. Should I also write to my provincial MP?

What’s the “correct” way to decide if I want my phone to randomly blast an end-of-the-world alarm or not?

And for anybody finding this, uninstalling the cellbroadcastreceiver package via adb finally worked for me. If successful, the emergency alerts menu on your phone should crash, and no more end-of-the-world alarms.

Good opportunity to test if my phone will now ignore those alerts, after the modifications I had to do using adb because it’s not permitted to disable those annoying alarms on my own devices.

I don’t have much faith since none of the modifications I tried ever worked and the alarms kept blasting, without me wanting to, but maybe one day I’ll find THE thing that finally disables those.

Otherwise I’m thinking of ditching phones completely, since I can’t control when it’s gonna blast an end of the world alarm for a silver alert about an old person 100 km away from me. So far my only solution is to keep my phone muted al all time. I’m missing calls but at least my phone is not hurling a nuclear type alarm whenever the government feels like it.

I’d like to slap the person that decided to send everything in Canada as presidential alerts, even for silver alerts. Or is it just a Quebec thing?!

My bash scripts. They are saving me lots of time at work, performing screen scraping, filling reports and monitoring old servers.

At home they are making backups and automating repetitive tasks.

I just love shell scripting in general. I should probably own a shirt that says “go away or I will replace you with a very small shell script”.

That’s excellent for their clients. I’m guessing it set a precedent and the industry stopped trying anything else.

I didn’t follow the most recent developments here in Canada but AFAIK, a decade ago the industry tried to sue individuals that were “pirating”, and lost because they couldn’t proof that an IP could be associated with a single person, or something like that. Then the industry pretty much stopped trying to sue individuals from that point. They still send the threatening letters, but they don’t do anything else because past experiences with our courts didn’t go well for them.

Of course, there is a very very slim chance that the industry will try to sue a few individuals to scare others and create a new precedent, but it’s going to be a civil suit because it’s not even criminal here.

Meh. I don’t know about OP but where I live ISPs are forced to relay the legal notice, but nothing more happens. There is no prosecution and nobody will knock on my door.

I have been torrenting on and off since the protocol exists and never once hid my IP. My ISP relays me the threats from the industry, I ignore them, and continue what I was doing before. Same for everyone in my country. Those that end up paying for a VPN and hiding their IP are just intimidated onto doing so, because of the threats. But again, aside from getting that threatening email, nobody will knock on your door for torrenting here.

Have you already tried to use VIA Rail to go somewhere once in a while? It’s absolutely not a commuter service. Tickets have to be booked days in advance, and the cheapest ones are non-refundable and non-changeable. So a person commuting to and fro would need two very specific tickets every day, or pay more to have “flexible” ones that can be used with any departure. Otherwise if a person has a cheap ticket and misses their train, that ticket is now useless.

The argument of living in a suburb where housing is cheaper can be understood if there are real commuter services, like trains from GO or Exo, but otherwise, commuting regularly with VIA Rail sounds like a real nightmare. They are rarely on time, there are even fewer departures than commuter trains, and their ticketing system is totally inappropriate for every day users.

I had to make a similar choice many years ago, with a job in Montreal and me living 60 km away. There were commuter buses in the suburb but it was taking nearly 2 hours to go to work, and 2 hours to come back. To each their own but I most certainly prefer paying more to live closer to work, than having to deal with commuting with Exo or heavens forbid, VIA Rail.

Seriously, I want to reiterate/ask again, do you use VIA Rail often? Because as someone that has to use it a few times a year, the idea of commuting with them, even just a few times a month, is horrifying.