I'm no expert, but I don't know if I agree with the premise that Linux desktop is secure via obscurity. Linux is probably the largest effort to create a secure OS, and the Linux desktop benefits greatly from that effort.

OpenBSD has an excellent security track record and is regularly updated, I'm not sure if I believe that its security is "outdated."

Happy anniversary!

Cake Wallet has made Monero accessible to so many more people and is my mobile wallet of choice. Your passion for Monero shows, hopefully Cake Wallet and Monero will keep improving and bring cheap, trust-less, private payments to even more people.

Spotify is horrible quality for 2023

To my surprise, even Spotify's standard (not high or very high) is extremely difficult, if not practically impossible for the average consumer to differentiate from lossless (on better than consumer grade hardware). Upon hearing this, me and several friends decided to test it for ourselves by taking lossless files for several songs and resampling them to the same codec and bitrates that Spotify's standard quality uses, then ABX testing the before and after with Foobar's ABX and exclusive mode plugins (also tried the popular comparison website, but that's apparently less accurate). One of my friends had access to a college studio, I have a dac and sennheiser, and the third had sony wxm4s. To our surprise, none of us could consistently differentiate the two. Its not perfect considering we didn't grab the outputs directly from the streaming platforms, but that would've added extra variables like volume normalizing (louder sounds better).

Our conclusion is that the quality "difference" is likely placebo and probably a waste of bandwidth.

I don't think anything is "needed." Monero is a currency, ideally it will be used for everything a currency is used for.

When I think of Bitcoin, I think of corporations. Bitcoin has chosen not to evolve in favor of companies that profit off of its weaknesses, and using the currency is almost completely surrounded by companies that have to listen to the government (ATM's, exchanges, etc.). I would bet that the large majority of people who "hold" Bitcoin do it for the money and don't care about everything I've mentioned.

As long as you restrict RPC on 18081 its fine to externally bind, 18089 is just an indicator that its intended for public use.

Edit: Looks like my monerod isnt letting me externally bind to 18081 like it is 18089, maybe you're right or I'm missing a command.

I agree with @shortwavesurfer@monero.town, what I need in a Monero wallet is good send/receive and maybe an optional fiat api. I feel like all the other online services might as well stay in Cake wallet with the "bloat" coins. I feel like most users that would rather use a Monero-only wallet over multi coin would agree with the sentiment.

Appreciate the work you do.

Yes, but nobody uses the alternate chains and the coins become effectively worthless.

Nice. In the rare chance that you haven't heard of GrapheneOS, now you have.

Did you get your phone from your carrier? In addition, some brands do that with cheaper phones. Can buy unlocked phones.

Maybe try Google Pixel or iPhones that have terms against pre-installing shit.

You're right about most things, and Linux/VR support is often a deal breaker for me so I rarely use Epic. But you really think its that unusable? I've heard mostly positive things from my friends. I don't care how or why they're giving out free games but its a huge plus. I just really don't understand all the hate.

What's so wrong with Epic? I prefer Steam but Epics client has a better UI, I haven't found any problems, and deals seem better than Steam, especially with free games.

Seems like they're building other things in rust, about time for the server? Seems like bloated servers are the biggest downside of matrix. Does anyone more educated on this topic know why it's not a thing?

Companies can choose who works there just as people can choose who to work for. If companies don't like what an employee is wearing then they can fire them, and if people don't like what a company isn't allowing them to wear they can quit.

Apparently the replacement parts for their phones are significantly cheaper than almost every other manufacturer. (I have just been hearing this so I don't know for sure if it's true, correct me if I'm wrong.)

Overall their phones seem to just be to a high standard. 5 years of support and other components that make them the choice for GrapheneOS (Privacy/Security focused rom that has greatly contributed to upstream Android)

I live in a US suburb, electricity is thankfully cheaper than most places. As detailed in my first post, I could've cut a lot more corners to cut down on costs.

I think electricity is a major factor though, roughly 1/4 of my earnings go to it. Many places have much pricier electric which will easily add years, if not making roi impossible.

Oh yeah, I wrote a service to change the LED colors based on system temperature so I could easily tell if xmrig crashed or something, but I think the breathing orange just looks better. I then had the idea to have the LEDs dim if CPU temps dropped but it was a lot more complicated that simply changing colors.

Let me know if you know openrgb-rs ig

Thanks!

Unfortunately I don't have a way of measuring it. The CPUs have a 65w tdp so each system is probably pulling a little more than that. I have gold PSUs.

Cool! Do you know how the performance compares to xmrig-proxy?

As others have said, check out the windows guide on gupax.io. Come back if you have any more questions

VPNs can be a tool for privacy but 99% of the time someone is tricked into thinking it's antivirus by a nordvpn ad

Waiting for Spotify lossless to ditch flacs, I really want to like Tidal but I've had major issues every time I try and stick with it.

YouTube sound quality is poor, and 99% of your bandwidth being devoted to video is wasteful. Just use SoundCloud or something. Better yet revanced patched YT music or xmanager Spotify.

Edit: or better yet vimusic

Personally, I don't want a huge hole in my phone and case that I'm never going to take advantage of. Wireless headphones with noise cancelling and such are far more convenient when outside than the open backs I use at my computer. The DAC in most desktops suck so I use a USB-C to 3.5mm anyways, makes it really easy to plug into my phone if I ever needed.

Just my opinion for my situation, but I would honestly rather buy the same phone without a headphone jack than one that did.

In my experience, Wayland has been the one that "just works." No disabling compositing, higher than 60 refresh rate on my monitors, screen share portals, and a few other things that annoyed me about x11. From what I hear, x11 is ancient and wasn't designed to be used as it is today. Waiting on a couple features but never had any stability issues, hopefully more app devs realize it's existence and switch from x11 like all it's devs did.

Printer support on Linux is honestly better than Windows.

This was a pretty popular meme a few years ago, there is no context it is just silly.

Would love for more Monero software to be written in Rust. Hopefully some good can come out of this despite the controversy.

I haven't used pcpp for a while, but it's still the only thing I hear about. Compatibility isn't very complicated thankfully.

They luckily don't pay for electric

You probably can skip spending money on cases and build your rigs in a wire shelf or milk crakes or cardboard boxes or something

3900(x)'s are typically the best value for mining monero, occasionally 3600(x)'s or 3950x. The rest of the system can be built for almost as cheap as you can get except for some exceptions. Good ram (samsung b-die is popular) can be worth searching ebay for, especially with the higher end cpus since it will impact a larger hashrate. Be careful going too cheap with the motherboard, some motherboards perform quite a bit worse or don't have quality components to support the high power cpu's and will break (speaking from several instances of experience). You may want to invest in more efficient power supplies like gold rated to save on electric. You can use a flash drive for storage as it doesn't impact hashrate.

If you want to generate heat, go for higher voltage overclocks (you will need larger coolers to disperse the heat).

Was into mining and saw Monero on the charts, but thought it was just some random coin until I saw videos about it (probably Mental Outlaw as well)

Sorry for the bad formatting, I was on mobile. But yeah, they all list reasons like "Crypto bullshit" or something so 🤷. Just interesting to see that so many instances have gone out of their way to block us.

Might as well use reddit if you cant see a little (if not a lot) of benefit to using something decentralized over its centralized counterpart.

The anonymous aspect and lack of fees/operation should be self explanatory.

I think you forgot that the alternative is to support a different douche-ey billionaire and subscribe yourself to 5x more expensive climate killing big oil?

Out of curiosity, what do you think LMG should do differently? I think the sponsor jokes are not appropriate but I'm curious what else people have issues with.

imo this is an extreme reaction when the story has barely matured and we dont know whats true. I feel like the reactions by people at lmg have been decent so far, but time will tell what becomes of it. hopefully for everyones sake they fix their problems like they seem to be on track to doing.

You'd save a lot of time and monero by switching to p2pool sooner rather than later, highly recommend