St. Petersburg's and Moscow's old stations were built to show off superiority of communist state. That's where you can see lots of polished stone, sculptures, giant golden light fixtures, stained glass, etc. Focus was not on the people. Then starting around 1970s the stations were built with much more utilitarian design. Modern stations built in Moscow in last decade or so look very nice though.

NYC subway is just gross. I guess they are seriously underfunded to afford proper cleaning and renovation

Thanks!

Bookmarks and passwords are taken care of. And for the apps I'll try to get migrated to flatpaks as many as I can while still on original system.

I also see that full disk encryption is being recommended a lot, and I don't have any solid reasons to encrypt only /home.

I have not given much thought on Silverblue. Is it "flatpak-only"? If so I'll need to go through my apps to see if that could work. And my backup strategy will need to change - I use Duplicacy that is not available as a Flatpak

I'm using pi-hole + uBlock origin.

Adblock DNS, Pi-Hole, hBlock - these three do essentially same thing but at different layers - blocking DNS requests based on blacklists. I'm not familiar with hBlock, but I assume blacklists on each of these 3 are very similar. Using all three doesn't slow down your internet connection much, unless your pihole server is underpowered. You can drop pi-hole from the mix if you are not using it's other features (statistics, local DNS, etc). hBlock looks nice, and should add zero latency, but works only for local machine. So you still need network-wide blocker. Make sure you set your DNS on router, so all devices would get protection.

uBlock Origin is smarter than simple DNS blocking, but protects only your browser sessions.

Closest one for lower latency. However, the closest location happens to be in a major metro area and is banned by many financial organizations that I use, so usually I connect to the next closest.

Most recent Mastodon version allows users to opt-in for their posts be searchable

Here you go:

https://web.archive.org/web/20230902014018/https://www.wired.com/story/apple-csam-scanning-heat-initiative-letter/

This looks interesting. But the only pre-built hardware option they have on the list, Nano G1 Explorer, is way too big for a little kid. But I may get it for adult family members for emergency situations.

I'll check that one out, thanks!

First of all, thanks for setting up this instance!

I'd suggest to open some form of paid subscription right now, not waiting for the moment when we'll need to make hard choices. And don't bother with asking for single-time donations - it's not sustainable with so small number of users.