I had avoided it until late last year when I had to reinstall a friend’s borked install after it had somehow managed to shred its registry hives.

Holy shit. That installer is an embarrassment. First it couldn’t get past the first reboot until I found out that you can set it to use what looks like the Windows 7 installer for the first steps. Then I had to deal with a dog slow installer that needs half a dozen reboots for some unfathomable reason. Then an endless cavalcade of sales prompts, including one for an Office subscription where they try to hide the price from you. All to end in, well, Windows 11.

I simultaneously installed Fedora Kinoite on his old laptop. I don’t think the Fedora installer is one of the better ones but it was so much easier and faster to set up the machine that it was almost comical.

Seeing both systems side by side really drives home just how clunky Windows is. And how Microsoft installers are barely better than they were 15 years ago, but now they have ads.

More like “before easily available color photocopiers”. Most copiers could only do black and white copies, which this scheme was probably specifically designed to make useless.

Honestly, given that TV viewership is falling and people are increasingly using on-demand services instead of tuning in, I’d argue that 404 error pages and NXDOMAIN browser error pages are in the process of replacing the dead channel conceptually.

In the 80s the sky was the color of a dead TV channel and it was overcast.

In the 00s the sky was the color of a dead TV channel and it was clear.

Today nobody knows what a dead TV channel is supposed to look like.

Or double down on AI. Then double down even harder.

• Make the use of Copilot mandatory; simultaneously heavily monetize it to instantly turn the AI division into a profit center.
• To that end release the successor to Windows 11, a cloud-only offering that replaces the taskbar with a Copilot instance which launches programs for the user. Downplay any accusations that the new Windows Live 365 With Copilot is just a rental Windows 11 with the taskbar hastily hacked out.
• Don’t forget that Windows Live 365 With Copilot does not include a subscription for Copilot, which must be booked separately.
• Get all of your customers to switch by immediately dropping support for all previous Windows versions, “migrating” their support windows over to Windows Live 365 With Copilot. Corporate customers, which have gone all-in on Azure, will need years to migrate off the Windows ecosystem, which means excellent short-term revenue.
• Make sure that Windows Live 365 With Copilot can only save to OneDrive to make it maximally hard for those customers to get their data out.
• Hope that the current world order disintegrates before the massive exodus of customers ruins the company.
• Whether or not it does, turn off your business phone and spend the next five years doing massive amounts of cocaine on a private island in the South Pacific.

Garuda has fans. A bit much for me.

When you take away the garish KDE theme the gaming spin ships with it’s pretty much just an opinionated ready-to-go gaming Arch with a bunch of convenience tools. If that’s what you want then Garuda is pretty neat.

It has Kinect Star Wars. And… that’s basically it.

Trump dictates that other countries comply & submit to his bullying, ELSE US’s tarriffs will bludgeon their economies until they obey.

Which is why the EU is currently making trade agreements with just about everyone on the planet. The USA handing out tariffs like candy is a lot less relevant when you can pivot your trade elsewhere on fairly short order.

Such an agreement with Canada has been in the works for the last ten years. All that’s currently missing is for it to be ratified by all involved countries, which might go a bit quicker now given how the States are behaving.

I’m pretty sure that several members would say no if they tried to join. Accession requires (among other things) all member states to ratify the treaty of accession.

Agreed. Oddly enough, my Meshtastic contacts are much farther away than my farthest MeshCore contacts but MeshCore seems to be much livelier.

Note that what Gore said was that he “took the initiative to create the Internet”. That’s actually true; his lobby work for a civilian network were one of the most significant factors in commercializing ARPANET. He never claimed that he invented the thing.

I haven’t been on there a lot and due to time constraints I’m mostly just lurking. It seems that I can see more people on Tastic but Core seems to be more active in terms of messages.

Both are almost absurdly easy to set up, especially on an nRF5-based device where you can flash a firmware by just mounting the thing as an USB drive and copying a file over. You don’t really need to buy two devices to try out both unless you really want to use them simultaneously.

Meshtastic gives you three hops by default (and strongly advises against going beyond that, even if the maximum is seven). The furthest node I see right now is about 200 km away.

MeshCore gives you 64 hops. They can afford that because MeshCore devices send way less telemetry by default; Meshtastic assumes that you want to broadcast e.g. your GPS position regularly. The furthest node I see right now is about 50 km away.

By the way, while LoRaWAN is a thing, neither Meshtastic not MeshCore are really designed for data traffic. Owing to the low (and shared) bandwidth, they’re more like IRC over radio.

If you want a power efficient device with an enclosure, Seeed Studio make some decent stuff. I run a pair of Wio L1s (one on Meshtastic, the other on MeshCore), which cost around 40 € complete with antenna, battery, and enclosure.

Sure, more expensive than a bare V3 but more convenient for actually taking them somewhere.

There seems to be more traffic on MeshCore than on Meshtastic, probably due to its greater range. Also, the core library seems to be MIT-licensed.

Besides, given the goals of Meshtastic/MeshCore (low power long range text communication without a radio license), LoRa is a sensible choice: It operates in appropriate radio bands, is power-efficient, and hardware is readily available at reasonable prices.

Sure, something like DASH7 would be more open but it’s also much harder to find hardware for. The most ideologically pure stack in the world won’t do anything if there’s not enough users to actually form a mesh.

WiFi is useless when you’re trying to send messages over long distances without any infrastructure beyond “I tied a few battery-powered transceivers to trees along the way”. It has completely low range and high power draw.

Packet radio gets you a lot of range but may require a license for legal operation. It also has high power requirements; you’re not going to run your radio setup off a 1000 mAh battery for a week.

I think they’re talking about Planet Zoo, not Project Zomboid. After all, they’re talking about “expanding the zoo” and comparing it to Planet Coaster.

Neither do the lower ones. The wheels of an office chair typically don’t move when the seat spins around.

It’s a German laundry detergent brand.

I fully switched to Linux in 2024, my last desktop Linux experience before that being at least five years prior.

• Windows behaves a bit more gracefully then Linux when the VRAM is being exhausted. On Linux I can get graphics artifacts and sometimes Steam crashing. That mainly becomes relevant when doing GPGPU stuff, though; gaming works fine.
• Some apps use GTK4. Since GTK3, GNOME has been moving away from a “regular” desktop experience and towards this weird pseudo-mobile thing that goes against all established conventions. That might be nice if you really like their style and use nothing but GNOME, but it’s really annoying if you don’t. I long for the good old days where action buttons weren’t crammed into title bars.
• Occasionally having to manually fix package updates. Only an issue because my distro is Arch-based and that kind of stuff is to be expected there.
• I haven’t managed to get three-finger swipe mapped to PgUp/PgDn so far but I use the trackpad rarely enough that I haven’t bothered investing time into it yet.
• Occasionally the system just shits itself when rapidly switching between different users’ desktop sessions. Again, that happens so rarely that I haven’t bothered trying to deal with it yet.

On the other hand, I’m happier than expected with Wayland and PipeWire. They just work with little fuss. Sure, I’m a KDE user and Wayland is reportedly less fun outside the big DEs, but for me it just works.

We just signed an FTA with Mercosur. That’s a major trade bloc. I think we’re doing good on that front and it demonstrates that we have the capacity to just pivot trade home away from the States.

Still, I do agree that counter-tariffs don’t feel too great as a response, even with the new FTaa in place. It might really be time to bring out the anti-coercion instrument.