My father switched to linux (Mint, I think) in his 70s. I was in another state so he did it solo. He had a few questions but otherwise it was smooth sailing.
Living offgrid in a campervan since 2018 w/ pibble+boxer Muffin.
LIKE dogs, books, thoughtful people of all flavors DISLIKE bullies, sh1tposters, partisans, noise
My father switched to linux (Mint, I think) in his 70s. I was in another state so he did it solo. He had a few questions but otherwise it was smooth sailing.
Traditionally I’ve been running lighter desktops like opebox, xfce, or lmde. Last couple of years I’ve been using MATE with good results.
In my country that would cost me 20 dollars
The first RAM I bought (SIPP for a 386-16 IIRC) was $50/MB. Jay-sus.
nowadays Mint is Ubuntu with sane default settings that will run out of the box
There’s also an official version of Mint based on Debian (LMDE)
Was it mainly a hobbyist thing at the time
Yes, I’d say so. Lots of tech geeks were playing with it but no Normals. Getting audio running was not always pleasant…
When I was in the army the S1 desk jockeys were using dedicated word processors with 8" floppies. Get off my lawn! :-)
Wireguard self hosting
I parsed this as Wireguard self-loathing and thought “that’s a little harsh”. :-)
warning: some non-linux included below
I do spin up other distros in a VM from time to time to see what’s what. Most recently NixOS since people won’t STFU about it. :-)
the stove over to induction next. I hate it when the batteries fill back up by 10am and I waste solar meanwhile I am still buying propane for the appliances.
It’s possible. For the 11 months I’ve been cooking from excess solar power (December is a little short). I still carry propane for heating and a few things that seem to work better over flame.
In the past I’ve aliased rm to a wrapper that showed PWD and the files to be affected, slept a couple seconds in case I wanted to abort, then shredded smaller files, rm’ed big files, or placed in a Trash dir for certain kinds of files (.conf, .cfg, etc).
I might try to find or rewrite it.
I have made countless mistakes since the 90s, mostly involving rm. The most recent one was yesterday when I was trying to rm files in a directory with lots of other unrelated files.
I don’t remember the exact failure, but I was shooting for something like rm *lng
and typo’ed rm *;ng
(those chars are next to each other on the kb). This happily rm’ed * (d’oh!) then errored on the nonexistance ng. :-(
“You’re not the boss of me” :-)
Agreed. I haven’t read the article yet, but my first thought was “how am I going to turn that off”
genmai cha, as is
ambient
Examples from Eno, the OG: 1/1, An Ending (Ascent)
What are everyone’s thoughts on bots like piped bot and tdlr bot
I don’t mind them. If I did I’d block them.
Closest I’ve come to Mad Scientist was probably yeast ranching to control costs in homebrewing.
It was a lot of fun and instead of one 5gal batch of beer from an exotic $20 yeast sample you could get as many as you wanted. In practice I usually did 5-10 cultures from each pure sample. Could do more than that but there was a limit to how much stuff I could sterilize in my “autoclave” at one time.
Edited to add: I successfully cultured yeast from hefeweizen, but since what’s in the bottle is typically for secondary/priming rather than primary it was only for fun. I had 100% failure trying to harvest wild yeast from the air or sampled from fruit skins. I couldn’t isolate the yeast from other critters.
I have driven and found joy in many cars: Pinto, beetle, 2CV, original 500s, 1940s Ford tractors, beater pickups including a 1949 International, HMMWV, etc. Mopeds (like 1970s Puch), ratty motorcycles. They all make me giggly.
I had to think a few minutes about one that was just terrible, no redeeming points I could find: first (north american) gen Hyunda Excel What a soul-sucking turd.
Can’t find it now, but someone once made a vi [gVim?} version with a Clippy-style helper: “I see you’ve pressed ESC. Would you like to…”
This should be a word. It would mean “trying yet another flavor because it might be The One”