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Cake day: April 13th, 2024

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  • I did that once, when the Nexus phones weren’t available in Switzerland but they were in Germany. I ordered it to a location close to the border that specifically offers a postal address as a service and went to pick it up.

    The correct thing to do would have been to go to the border agents, get a confirmation that I’m bringing the merchandise out of the country and pay the Swiss VAT. With the confirmation I could theoretically get the VAT back from the seller I paid it to. Except that was Google and they weren’t intending to sell it for export, so I doubt they would have helped with that.

    What I did was unpack the phone, throw away the packaging, put my old phone in one jeans pocket and my new one in the other, and drive back over the boarder. Having two phones isn’t that weird, so I thought I could get away with claiming them as personal items if I was asked. But I wasn’t even stopped (they only do sampling at the crossing) so it was easy. But it was technically smuggling. Anything over 300 CHF needs to be declared and VAT paid, the phone was around 400 €.

    My mom once went clothes shopping to Austria and didn’t declare them. The border guard asked what she bought. She claimed clothes, but not over the limit. He was like no way, I know that brand, they must be worth more, checked the stuff, and discovered it was worth too much. She had to pay VAT plus a pretty decent fine.

    I only crossed the US Canadian border once in each direction, but to me it seemed like they were way more strict and thorough than here in Europe within Schengen. So I’d be scared I think. But overall I still think your plan could work if you’re careful with it. Maybe gaming laptop would be suspicious if you went for a one day trip, would be better if it was longer. But a phone not really.




  • I wanted a mainstream option but not Ubuntu, and one that was preferably offered with KDE Plasma pre-packaged.

    So I ended up deciding between Debian and Fedora, and what tipped me to Fedora was thinking: Well SELinux sounds neat, quite close to what I learned about Mandatory Access Control in the lectures, and besides, maybe it will be useful in my work knowing one that is close to RHEL.

    Now I work in a network team that has been using Debian for 30 years, lol. Kind of ironic, but I don’t regret it, now I just know both.

    And fighting SELinux was kind of fun too. I modified my local policies so that systemd can run screen because I wanted to create a Minecraft service to which I could connect as admin, even if it was started by systemd.


    1. Ah that makes sense then. I was confused why you would wipe your ESP over and over when it was shared.

    I don’t know why it comes off as hostile, it wasn’t intended that way. Sorry for not expressing it better!

    If the last sentence came across badly, that was more meant to be incredulous that people accept all these workaround instead. There are other comments in here that go to ridiculous lengths to enforce separation, like using the UEFI boot menu to select a disk manually. To me even having two ESPs seems overly cautious, and against the design philosophy. Sharing one ESP is really not an issue (at least as long as you know you’re doing it, as you unfortunately found out the hard way).


  • First of all: You don’t have to reinstall Windows to get it’s bootmgr EFI and supporting files back into the ESP. Installing those from the CLI in from a booted install media is possible, I did it before. You can even install all of Windows manually if you ever need to, it’s just annoying to do with the windows command line tools.

    Secondly: I’m not familiar with all distro installers, but surely you can just not format the ESP? Worst case scenario you’d have to use manual disk formatting I guess, but it’s not that difficult.

    Thirdly: You said Grub doesn’t show the disk. If you mean the Grub command interface didn’t show the disk, then the issue is deeper, at a UEFI or hardware level. If you mean there are no boot entries for a Windows install to be selected, then it could be that they were not generated because the Windows bootmgr EFI was not found when Grub got installed. Sometimes just booting back into Linux and running os-prober again might be enough, if the Windows bootmgr EFI is still around. On my distro the os-proper is automatically run when I run grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg

    I’ve always used a shared ESP for my dual boot systems and I certainly don’t reinstall one OS as the result of a change with the other.










  • 9 years and 4 months ago I bought an Acer laptop with a 4 core Intel Skylake with hyperthreading (i7-6700HQ) and a Nvidia GTX 960M, because the laptop I had was slow for compiling in my classes at Uni, and I wanted a discrete GPU for the occasional game when away from my Desktop PC (winter break and such (still use it for that btw)). I regretted that three times:

    • First when I wanted to install Linux instead of just using VMs. In early 2016 the kernels on live system ISOs didn’t properly support Skylake yet, so I fucked around with Arch a bunch, but didn’t end up keeping it installed. Don’t remember why, probably got busy with schoolwork.

    • Then a while later, after I had installed Ubuntu or Fedora at some point, the next issue was that cooperative mode of Bluetooth and Wifi on the included Intel wireless chip wasn’t well supported (even found an Intel Bluetooth dev saying as much on a mailing list), and it hung sometimes, so I had to make a script to turn the chip off and then rescan the PCI bus, that worked as a workaround but was still annoying.

    • Finally when we had Machine Learning classes I thought I might be able to use CUDA locally, so I tried installing the proprietary Nvidia driver and was greeted by a black screen on the next boot. Had to boot from a live system and chroot in to remove the proprietary crap again.

    On my Desktop PC I have used AMD GPUs for quite a while and dual booting Windows and Linux has always been a breeze.