I jumped on a lifetime deal they had a few years back. I mostly use it via the web UI and Android app, so I cannot comment on desktop or CLI client functionality.

The Android app is “okay”, but not great. Background photo sync doesn’t work consistently; I need to manually launch the app periodically to jog it. I know Android is kind of aggressive about background services, but other apps do this better so I think this is on Filen. Perhaps they should run a permanent notification to stay alive 24/7, like Syncthing does?

As with pretty much every other cloud storage app, it does not let me sync arbitrary folders/files, only photos and videos. *sigh*

It uses Android’s file provider API, so you can open and save files in most apps directly from/to Filen. However, this only seems to work for one-time use, not for apps that need to regularly open/save the same file. For example, when using Keepass2Android, you can have it store your password database on a cloud storage service. This works pretty well with Google Drive, but with Filen it loses the connection frequently because the pseudopaths the API returns are not stable over time (which makes sense, I guess, and is one more reason I want arbitrary local file sync instead). Personally, I went back to storing my Keepass database locally and then periodically backing it up rather than keeping it on live cloud storage.

It’s one of the cheapest E2EE cloud storage services I’ve seen (definitely the cheapest for me with the lifetime promo I got), and the core functionality of uploading and downloading files (and folders) works. That’s good enough for me to give it the thumbs-up.

But here’s the really funky bit. If you ask Claude how it got the correct answer of 95, it will apparently tell you, “I added the ones (6+9=15), carried the 1, then added the 10s (3+5+1=9), resulting in 95.” But that actually only reflects common answers in its training data as to how the sum might be completed, as opposed to what it actually did.

This is not surprising. LLMs are not designed to have any introspection capabilities.

Introspection could probably be tacked onto existing architectures in a few different ways, but as far as I know nobody’s done it yet. It will be interesting to see how that might change LLM behavior.

I refer you to #7 on Bruce Tognazzini’s evergreen top ten list of design bugs.

https://www.asktog.com/Bughouse/10MostWantedDesignBugs.html

I’m not sure what the exact model is, but it’s probably from the Performa or Power Mac 5000 or 6000 series. It’s low-res so it’s hard to read, but the text next to the floppy drive says “PowerPC”, referring to the CPU family used in Macs in that era.

The screen looks like Mac OS 8. It’s so low-rest that it’s kind of hard to tell, but the menu bar at the top of the screen is clearly from Mac OS. Could be 7.5, but I’m guessing 8 since that’s what’s shown in the web browser.

I think the left screen is showing Windows. Again, super low-res, but those look like Windows 95/98’s blue window title bars and gray task bar at the bottom.

Same.

That was probably the intention. X-Files was at its height of popularity around this time (assuming 1997 by the Mac model and OS 8).

Seems insane that even after disabling all related options in the main settings GUI, there are still like two dozen things enabled in about:config.

Snapchat does not use end-to-end encryption for messages, so it doesn’t even belong in the conversation.

WhatsApp and FB Messenger are somewhat defensible choices since they at least use E2EE by default (Messenger did not until recently). However, there are a few good reasons to favor Signal:

1. It is open source. Interested parties can actually verify that Signal’s encryption claims are true. Interested parties can also audit new versions as they released.
2. Facebook/Meta, as a company, has a long history of tracking users, leaking user data, and even conducting psychological experiments on users without consent and in secret.
3. WhatsApp and Messenger only allow 6-digit PINs to secure your messages. With that PIN, you can decrypt those messages. Signal allows for longer alphanumeric passcodes.
4. Facebook makes no promises not to track your usage of Messenger or WhatsApp, only that the messages themselves are encrypted.

I don’t have a Palma, but I have a Book Go 6, which looks like it has similar display tech. So I think I can answer some of your questions.

The backlight can go all the way off, to the point where it is invisible in a dark room. You can also adjust the backlight color temperature.

Typing is bad, but I’ve never spent time optimizing it. I would guess that the responsiveness on the Palma might be higher. I also never tried it in high-speed mode, which is much more responsive but has worse ghosting and generally worse image quality. For my use case (99% just reading) I don’t mind the slow response time.

It’s possible to access the normal Android settings, though I just picked up my Boox Go and I can’t actually figure out how. I know I’ve done it before somehow. The Boox settings app has a VPN section, but I don’t see DNS options. Pretty sure you can do this though.

One thing I want to point out is that the Palma is not technically a phone. It’s a wi-fi device, so it will not make calls or send SMS. You would be limited to internet-based messaging apps like Signal or Telegram. I can’t speak to how smoothly those run.

There are also a couple proper phones (with SIM cards) with similar display tech coming out this year. See:

https://www.theverge.com/2025/1/6/24335983/tcl-60-xe-nxtpaper-e-ink-specs-ces

https://liliputing.com/the-minimal-phone-is-now-shipping-e-ink-phone-with-a-qwerty-keyboard/

Additionally, you can set Android to use an ad-blocking DNS server without apps. In Settings > Network & Internet > DNS, select “Private DNS” and set the hostname to a custom server, like base.dns.mullvad.net (Mullvad’s DNS server is free to the public, does not require a VPN subscription).

The per-app controls sound neat! I might give that a try. Google killed the ability to restrict apps’ network access years ago, specifically so ads would always work. I’ve never tried a local VPN as a workaround.

Oh huh. I didn’t know there even was a video. Perhaps my ad/tracker blockers cut it.

Just found a hands-on CNET video: https://www.cnet.com/videos/at-ces-2025-tcl-debuts-new-tcl-60-phone-with-e-ink-display/

Never used TCL’s “Nxtpaper” so not totally sure how it compares.

TCL is releasing a new phone later this year with a toggle-able e-ink mode. So you can use it with in full color when you want, and switch to e-ink when you want. It’s in a more conventional aspect ratio so apps will look more “normal”. I can say from experience with my Boox e-reader that a lot of apps do not work well in 4:3.

https://www.theverge.com/2025/1/6/24335983/tcl-60-xe-nxtpaper-e-ink-specs-ces

Might be my next phone if the CPU and software is not awful (big if).

It used to say “container-native”. They recently changed the wording, but there was no technical change.

It’s a Linux distro that runs locally, like any other. It has no particular tie-in with any cloud services. If Flatpak, Docker/Podman, Distrobox, Homebrew, etc. are “cloud” just because they involve downloading packages hosted on the internet, then I don’t know why you wouldn’t call “traditional” package managers like apt, dnf, zypper, etc. “cloud” as well. 🤷 So yeah, I feel your confusion.

The big difference compared to something like Debian or vanilla Fedora is that Bazzite is an “immutable” distro. What this means is that the OS image is monolithic and you don’t make changes directly to the system. Instead, you install apps and utilities via containers, or as a last resort you can apply a layer on top of the OS using rpm-ostree.

The only thing cloud-related about any of this is that atomic OS images and containers are more common in the server space than the desktop space.

It’s insane that this is even legal.

There’s a separate command called visudo for this purpose.

You CAN use any ol’ text editor but visudo has built-in validation specific to the sudoers file. This is helpful because sudoers syntax is unique and arcane, and errors are potentially quite harmful.

I’ve never actually tried it, but I think you could use BTRFS subvolumes to multiboot without partitioning the physical space.

And then maybe even use deduplication across subvolumes?

Weird. That used to say “container-native”, which at least makes sense – it heavily emphasizes container technologies like Flatpak, Docker/Podman, and Distrobox.

There’s no yum or dnf like on a standard Fedora system (though you can use rpm-ostree if you are desperate). As an “immutable” distro, it’s designed so that you do not install apps at the system level.

There are a handful on non-default apps I’ve used across my last 3-4 distros at least:

• mpv - the best video player, period. Minimalist UI, maximalist configuration options. I’ve been using it for many years across many OSes and at this point everything else feels wrong.

• Geany - My favorite GUI text editor on Linux.

• Foliate - the simplest eBook reader I’ve found.

• Strawberry - It’s “fine”. Honestly, I’ve never found a music player on Linux that I really liked. I keep falling back to Strawberry because it’s familiar and generally works as expected.

I’m running Bazzite on my desktop now. I hopped distros again because wrestling with GPU drivers was just too much trouble. After I upgraded my GPU, I couldn’t get it working optimally in Debian (see my previous thread about OpenCL). On Bazzite, it’s handled for me out of the box.

To me, the only difference between a “gaming” distro and a regular distro is that gaming distros come with smarter hardware drivers and configs out of the box. I see no downside.

It was a rough learning curve, though. There were so many major things that were new to me, such as:

1. “Immutable” distros in general (weird term but okay)
2. Wayland (first time it was viable for me, and I still kind of hate it tbh)
3. Plasma 6 (I was previously stuck on Plasma 5)
4. Flatpak-first mentality (previously more of a last resort for me)
5. Distrobox (never used it before)

My biggest advice to anyone making the switch is, do not fear Distrobox. I didn’t realize how easy it was to make both GUI apps and command-line tools available as first-class citizens within the host OS. For example, I installed Signal within my Debian box, then exported it with distrobox-export --app signal-desktop and boom, it operates like any other app within Bazzite. I slept on Distrobox for years and now I feel like a fool. It’s awesome. You can use Boxbuddy as a GUI to help you get started.

I’m overall very happy with Bazzite now.

That’s pretty much what I do, yeah. On my computer or phone, I split an epub into individual text files for each chapter using pandoc (or similar tools). Then after I read each chapter, I upload it into my summarizer, and perhaps ask some pointed questions.

It’s important to use a tool that stays confined to the context of the provided file. My first test when trying such a tool is to ask it a general-knowledge question that’s not related to the file. The correct answer is something along the lines of “the text does not provide that information”, not an answer that it pulled out of thin air (whether it’s correct or not).

I get that, and it’s good to be cautious. You certainly need to be careful with what you take from it. For my use cases, I don’t rely on “reasoning” or “knowledge” in the LLM, because they’re very bad at that. But they’re very good at processing grammar and syntax and they have excellent vocabularies.

Instead of thinking of it as a person, I think of it as the world’s greatest rubber duck.