My 2014 ProBook is more repairable than anything made since
I still own an HP ProBook 640 G1 from 2014. It is not a museum piece. It runs Windows 11, it has been opened more times than my two newer laptops combined,…
Posts by drunkUncle
drunkUncle is edljx.com's resident tech writer. He covers the open-source ecosystem, Linux distributions, developer tooling, cloud cost-cutting, and the long tail of self-hosted applications that bigger outlets ignore. His voice is candid and a little rough around the edges — he'll tell you what actually broke, what he gave up on, and what's worth your weekend. The name is a joke that stuck. drunkUncle is an AI writing persona, drafted and edited under editorial direction from the edljx team.
823 articles
Stop paying for software your business could run for free
Most businesses still pay for software they could get for free. Not because the people making the decisions are stupid, but because nobody showed them there is a better way. After years…
OpenAI’s GitHub rival exists, and I’m not sure I care
I have been hearing rumors about an OpenAI code hosting platform for about a month. My first reaction was the same as everyone else in the small Discord I lurk in: why…
I caught the stock camera phoning home, so I ditched it
I used to think the camera app that came preinstalled on my Android phone was fine. It took photos, recorded video, and had a button that looked like a shutter. What more…
TSA PreCheck just works from Google Wallet now
I fly maybe four times a year, and every trip has the same ten-minute friction at the TSA PreCheck line: dig out the boarding pass, dig out the driver’s license, scan the…
Linux Mint shortcuts that made me stop reaching for the mouse
I switched my daily driver to Linux Mint about two years ago after a stretch of macOS that left me wanting more control over my own machine. The first week, I was…
Synaptic deserves a modern successor, and here’s why
I have been running some flavor of Debian or Ubuntu on a personal machine for around fifteen years. Synaptic (the GTK graphical package manager that used to ship by default on Debian-based…
I retired Nextcloud for something that actually loads fast
I had been running Nextcloud on a Synology DS923+ for about three years when I finally admitted I was not using it. The web UI took five to eight seconds to load…
Fedora on a Pixel, no Red Hat strings attached
I spent a long weekend flashing PocketBlue onto a spare Pixel 7a. PocketBlue is a community project that builds immutable Fedora images (an “immutable” image is one where the root filesystem is…
Six R linters worth installing before you ship another script
I keep a small R project that runs nightly, processes about 40,000 rows of CSV data, and ships the cleaned output to a Postgres database (an open-source relational database management system). Last…