Same question, on vanilla android.

Huh it hasn’t forced itself onto my computer yet, if its a work laptop it could be a policy set by your sysadmin.

Yeah heliboard is the only one I’ve found that is actually usable on a day to day. Just wish the autocorrect was better, other than that no complaints.

Designed in the US, fabbed at TSMC in Taiwan. TSMC is opening some n-1 fabs in Arizona soon so some could be fabbed in the US in the future.

Obsidian is not FOSS, but you can switch to it for now because the whole idea is that it’s just a folder of markdown files. I recommend shopping around by pointing each app at the same markdown folder, so you can see your same notes without having to worry about complex migration. Being able to look at all your notes gives you a better idea of what will suit you.

Also, I recommend Pandoc for translating between document formats. It’s not not absolutely perfect, but it is wildly good at dealing with the complex problem of translating.

The simplest thing you can use, IMO, is Marktext. It’s basically Notepad for markdown – no file manager, no special features on top of the markdown syntax, etc. Beyond that you start getting into what features you want on top, at which point you really do just have to test them out for your use case.

As far as options go, you have basically two options as far as systems go:

• A built-in sync in the program between the desktop and phone version of the same app (i.e. obsidian, Joplin)
• Use a tool like syncthing for sync between devices, which allows you to use any app you want for actual note-taking, and allows you to use different apps on phone vs. desktop. I do the latter, and use Zettlr on desktop (more document than note-centric) and Markor on android. The issue with the former is that a great desktop app might not have the best phone version. Also, the apps that do sync typically use an internal database that you can export as a folder of markdown files (i.e. Joplin), and don’t actually just look at a folder of files. This makes testing out different editors kinda hard, unfortunately.

The other wierd variable is that some apps are literally just a WYSIWYG markdown editor (Marktext, etc.), whereas most of them are markdown editors with Other Stuff On Top™ (Obsidian, Zettlr, LogSeq, etc.). Not all apps implement the same flavor of markdown (which can be maddening, but you can use pandoc to change markdown flavor), but if you rely on a specific app’s special flavor of garnish on top of markdown, it becomes harder to switch to another app in the future if you prefer its functionality or UI. Just something to keep in mind.

For me personally, one of the make or break traits is a good table creator. Making tables by hand in Markdown is a maddening, so having a GUI way to do it makes a huge difference if you end up needing to make a lot of tables. That is really hard to find because it is hard to automate Markdown table formatting in a foolproof way. As far as I know, the table plugin in Obsidian is the best way to do that by far at the moment. The Zettlr devs are working hard on rewriting theirs from scratch to be way more robust, but that is WIP.

tl;dr Just pick a Markdown editor, and you can shop from there as long as they store their files in a simple folder.

Neat, wasn’t familiar with cover your tracks, super useful!

Oh I understood wikifunctions primarily as a way to operate on wikidata data, I don’t know if that’s right. And you’re right it is publically available, I guess I meant more that few few folks know about it.

Wikidata is so cool, but not really public-exposed. I imagine it’s an incredible research tool though.

Seconded. Newsflash does everything I need and looks pretty smooth.

Yeah, 80-100 Wh with a Lunar Lake or any modern AMD CPU. 35 Wh with meteor lake of all things is a joke.

Nope! Lithium polymer batteries are substantially different from lithium ion. Each generation of lithium batteries is a pretty unique chemistry, the only thing that stays constant is the use of lithium as the cathode. Electrolyte, anode, and interface chemistry actually progresses pretty quickly.

Also, for drastically different battery chemistries which have been commercialized, see sodium ion batteries, and to a lesser extent NaS/ZEBRA batteries.

**edit: typo

Can you imagine having a 31 Wh battery for a meteor lake part?

Also it may be light, but it isnt thin – it says it has a whole RJ-45 port! But other than that the IO is unusably limited.

Is that true? I thought that pairs of USB-A ports shared the same PCIe lanes, and USB-C each got their own set?

Edit: thinking about it a bit more, I suppose it could depend on how the SOC/chipset allocates those lanes, but in my experience when writing a single USB I’m usually limited by the thermals of the USB, and writing well below the speed of the port. I suppose if you were writing many at once (or if your USBs were nice) that could bottleneck on the port speed.

I mean you can do HTML -> TeX -> PDF with Pandoc, or to any other format pretty much. I would say writing markdown and passing it to TeX or directly to PDF is the most practical.

No worries, it’s pretty hard to keep track when their naming scheme is “it has a K in it”…

Okular is pretty great, I can’t find a package that does good annotation of PDFs built on GTK.

I assumed that Linux was not really under the control of the US, but I guess the Foundation is incoporated in the US as a 501©(6) and the kernel org itself is a 501©(3), so that does give Congress more levers on the kernel than I expected.

Not to mention that most (all?) of the major corporate funders of the kernel are US-based…

I really hope the kernel doesnt get (geo)politicized.

Edit: based on @RobotToaster’s link, yeah it looks like every major “employer” contributor to the kernel other than Huawei, Linaro, Arm, and Suse are American. Arm is probably working mostly on support for its architecture, so I guess it’s Linaro (UK) and Suse(DE).

That’s not to downplay the role of independent contributors, but it seems like a good indicator of the “power of the purse strings”.

Edit 2: here’s a more recent set of development statistics from LWN. Looks like the ordering has changed quite a bit since 2022, or it varies a lot with each kernel version

Yeah that was my reaction…chip design is the “easy” part of the creation of a new chip, and the fact that it the CPU was of course fabbed in Taiwan is a sign of just how much ground Chinese fabs still have to cover. And relying entirely on SK Hynix NAND and memory says a lot.

Deeply confused by what the hell this is

I’m getting that with Gmail and 2 google sheets open (just as an example workload), my system says Zen uses 899 MB of memory, while Firefox uses 1261 MB. However, the way they split tasks into different processes (or at least the way my system monitor groups them) seems to be different, so I’m not sure how much of that difference is real.

Looking at the browsers task manager, they report about the same amount of memory by the browser itself, and for tab handling FF seems to grab more memory when opened, then decrease over time, whereas Zen seems to have a more consistent memory consumption. Sheets tabs use equivalent memory in both, and Gmail uses about 20% more memory in Zen. Both use an insignificant amount of CPU, of course.

Zen does feel more responsive, but it’s not a dealbreaker. Good to know the customizations aren’t causing catastrophic resource usage though.

Edit: My only other thing I find wierd is that its kinda hard to close tabs. You have to use the right-click menu – even using the ‘c’ keyboard shortcut only selects it, and hitting it again moves to another option!