u/GroomedHedgehog

I've been reading through LineageOS's developer documentation and I find myself confused: one of the build steps mentions extracting proprietary blobs from an existing LineageOS rom as a requirement.

Which begs the question: how is new device support added to LineageOS?

As much as I have searched, there seems to be no mention of a way to generate the list of required blobs in proprietary-files.txt.

Let's take a Xiaomi device for example: one can download a full firmware image and then use something like this to get the partitions contained therein.

What is one supposed to do next? From my understanding, on modern Android devices all binary blobs should be packed as kernel modules in the vendor_boot.

And yet there are a bunch of partitions with names like bluetooth, dspormodem`. Does Android look in those partitions too for binary blobs? If so, since they are not mentioned in Google's AOSP documentation and therefore the naming des not seem standardized, how does Android even know about these partitions?

I have a couple of AM4 PCs that I use for gaming and productivity (some C# development on Visual Studio, Docker and VMs from time to time, WSL consistently) and that I have upgraded piecemeal over the years.

I did not make the transition to AM5 when it first came out due to a combination of higher DDR5 prices (sigh) and the reliability/failure issues of the platform at the time.

Now with the insane component prices I’m afraid I’ll be stuck on AM4 for many more years.

How many more years will I be able to squeeze before I run into performance or support issues?

Specs are:

• Ryzen 5950x (5900x on the other system)
• 32 GB DDR4 3200
• 2TB WD Black PCIE 4 SSD
• 4TB SATA HDD for scratch storage
• Radeon 9070 (upgraded from 4070 for the extra 4GB VRAM last year when prices dipped)
• ITX Motherboard with 2.5Gbps NIC, WiFi+BT and one USB-C connector in the back
• 4K display with HDR and VRR support

I target 4K for gaming (single player story driven stuff mostly plus emulators) and specifically bought VRR displays to have some slack and be able to play at 40+ FPS without it feeling terrible.

I have PR and have been living in Japan for 11 years at this point, and I am lucky enough to have my parents (who have never been to Japan) offering to help me buying a house.

I would like to know how:

• that would trigger the gift tax
• whether there are ways to minimize the impact

Their accountant is of the opinion that they could transfer the money to my bank account in my country of origin in the EU, an act which is not taxed by local jurisdiction, and that I could then bring the money in my Japanese account tax free, since both accounts would be in my name.

I personally doubt it would be as simple as that.

Should it indeed not be that easy, are there other ways to avoid triggering the tax? Would it be possible to have my parents loan me the money instead?

Long story short, for years I have been doing weight lifting for general fitness and to prevent back pain: since recently, without me making changes in routine, it has felt less effective (and I would be happy to lose some bulk/gain some flexibility if I can keep the back pain away) I have been thinking of doing some yoga instead.

Thing is, all studios seem to only cater to women: I have four in my area, three of which are explicitly women only and the one which isn't (Hot Yoga Lava) still has promo materials that only show women anyways (I could only confirm guys are allowed in by the small print in the actual lesson schedule, which is pretty well hidden in the website).

Are there men friendly yoga studios in Tokyo, where one could attend classes and not be looked at weird? Or if not, what are some alternative activities to achieve similar fitness goals?

As someone who owns all Affinity v2 apps for mac and Windows, will signing up for a Canva account with the same email address as my current Affinity Store one mess with the licenses?

I do not trust the freemium model of v3 and like the old UI better, but I wonder if just signing up now as a hedge against Canva making the deal worse in the future for new users is a good idea - after all, one cannot buy the v2 suite anymore.

I love the game even though I am bad at it, which means I have been stuck in the first biome for a while and have been looking at its sky a fair bit.

The star looks like is absorbing gas, given how the clouds swirl around it, and I wonder:

• Is it absorbing Carcosa's own atmosphere? Pre-eclipse you can see the clouds are illuminated from above and that they seem part of the planetary weather system. If so, how does Carcosa still have an atmosphere at all, let alone viable oxygen and pressure for humans?
• Just how fast is the gas close to the star actually moving? From memory it seems to be completing an orbit in less than a minute. Some basic math assuming the star is sun-sized plus a 30% fudge factor says gas moving at the speed of light would take 20 seconds to complete an orbit. (695,508Km * 1.3 * 6.28 / 300,000 Km/s = 18.92s)
• If that speed is right, wouldn't it be similar to a black hole's accretion disk - which means Carcosa should have been scoured clean by radiation, if the planet itself survived somehow (the gas swirl looks circular, not elliptical, which means Carcosa's orbit would pass right through the jets perpendicular to the disc?

I'm only in the second biome right now, so maybe this actually gets explained later, but I am curious.

Monex and SBI securities started allowing passkey authentication and I have been happily using it since it was available.

Are there any Japanese banks that also allow using passkeys?

I'm in the process of moving my money out of SevenBank and then closing the account because they plan to require their app for using the service from August.

Especially when it comes to something as crucial as banking, I am not comfortable with a system that locks me out should I lose access to one device the way app based 2FA does.

Passkeys are just as - and likely more tbh - secure, based on interoperable standards and therefore allow one to have backups.

For the last two weeks my eyes have been killing me: went to 眼科 three times already and have six kinds of eyedrops (plus some pills) at home now.

Still, I go out and within 30 minutes my eyes get terribly itchy.

I legitimately do not remember it ever being this bad in over ten years I lived around Tokyo.

Years ago I used meetup.com to find local events and it was pretty effective.

I have returned to it after a long break and now it is:

• All around terrible to use - the upselling and nagging to subscribe/install the app is unbearable
• A ghost town, it feels like - one can no longer see attendee lists without premium and a lot of the events listed feel like duplicates (the throwaway AI images do not help)

What have people living in Tokyo moved to as alternative, if anything? I heard of luma.com but the amount of AI and crypto related stuff listed for Tokyo puts me off...

Kubernetes has a pretty damn steep learning curve: when I started out I was constantly wondering "who needs this" and "that feels so inefficient". After a while and especially if you want to treat multiple machines as a cluster, everything just clicks in place and it's so worth it.

To wit: copy.fail vulnerability is disclosed and my 3 node Kubernetes cluster was running on Ubuntu 25.04 - solution was to nuke each node one by one, clean install Ubuntu 26.04, reinstall k3s and join back in. Process over in less than two hours.

Longhorn took care of spinning up new replicas for the storage, new pods were created as needed and at no point did any of my services become unusable (I run the services themselves as non HA, so technically there must have been a min or so of downtime cumulatively).

Getting here took a lot of research and learning - I have a whole git repo built over months containing my infrastructure's Kubernetes/Ansible/Terraform config (the k3s nodes are VMs inside a Proxmox cluster that is managed in Terraform and are brought up with Ansible from clean install) - BUT if you have more than a single computer that you want to run stuff on it makes things so much easier to deal with.

It's a shame that most of the projects aimed at self-hosters do not really support Kubernetes/Helm charts - you may get a Docker image but no further integration than that.