Pretty good: I finished reading Fauna which was wild. Spent the night in a nearby hotel with the family because of this hurricane: our house is surrounded by huge trees so we were worried.

Unless you think “from scratch” sounds nice.

Aww hell yeah that looks nice. Can’t wait to try it out.

I love getting years of good service from old computers, but I do want to add something: old laptop means old battery, and if they’re not producing the same form factor anymore, then even a replacement battery will probably be old stock that’s been degrading for years. Unfortunately I don’t know what company’s models have the best longevity here in terms of battery form factor.

That sucks, Internet friend. Want to talk about it?

I was in 6th grade and wanted to know more about computers. I thought being a computer programmer would be a cool job one day. I’d heard Linux was difficult to install and use and thought hey, that’ll help me learn. So I had my parents get me a copy of Mandrake 6. It was perfect because I had the free time to play with it and figure stuff out by making mistakes and fixing them without the pressure of having to do really important work.

I do preach the good word of FOSS, but only to those who are in a position to appreciate the suggestion and benefit from it.

Sure there are edge cases and whatnot, but just go ahead and move the drive over. If it doesn’t work I’ll buy you a beer.

Thank you for this explanation.

Stephen’s dad, is that you?

I had amazing luck getting Linux running nicely, way-back-when, with an Acer Aspire One. I’ve stayed with that product line for all my laptops and so far it’s paid off. But then there’s also options like System76 for nice machines with Linux pre-installed.

I’d love to share it. I’m not sure what the best way is. I’m still new to the Fediverse but I feel there must be a way to do it Fediversally.

Last night I grabbed a bunch of audio files for country songs that contain the phrase “ice cold beer,” then I edited them together so that all the "ice cold beer"s lined up amidst the cacophony of about 5 songs being played at the same time. I thought that would be funny but it just didn’t sound as good as I thought it would. Maybe if each song faded in one by one… I dunno.

Okay so, it’s common for people to talk about distant stars as appearing one way because the light takes (mi|bi)illions of years to get to us, and that makes perfect sense to me… But when they go on to say that, for instance, Betelgeuse has already gone supernova but we won’t see it until the light gets to us…

According to the principle of the relativity of simultaneity, since the speed of light is the speed of causality, wouldn’t it be a bit more accurate (though definitely more confusing to the public) to say that the stars actually are as we observe them, but that the star is far enough away that traveling to it, even instantly, would basically require significant time travel forward? I guess it would just be a different way to talk about “the present” in relativistic terms, which is only difficult because our languages never evolved to handle the concept.

What you think?

Pay billions for a userbase, then drive away the ones that aren’t Nazis or bots.

Pretty good. Last full week of summer break so I’m just wrapping up house projects and preparing some teaching materials for next year.

Okay but when speaking do we call it “dubs-get” or no?

I dunno. I like to have a fresh start sometimes. Take your documents, maybe just your fav config files, and plop them into a fresh install. Not everyone’s cup of tea but I like it.

I’ve got 3 main computers because I’m a tech hoarder. Ubuntu MATE, Linux Mint, and Pop!_OS with XFCE. I’ve also got a little craptop for distro hopping, currently it’s got Debian 12. My work provided a Windows laptop but I only have to bring it to meetings.

Where I work just switching into a TTY would be enough to keep anyone out.

Even worse, just making money isn’t enough: you also have to become a fucking global monopoly.