methodicalaspect

Alive & vertical.

Nice! I started it 3 or 4 times but got distracted. Having a much easier time staying focused now, so I’m playing through Ultimate Edition. I don’t plan on doing the rest, though - will go to Baldur’s Gate 3 after this one.

Dragon Age: Origins. Never got around to finishing it before.

With UHC, this is not unrealistic in the slightest.

I had a follow-up appointment with a specialist I’ve been seeing last Friday. My lab results didn’t show the progress we were expecting, so we decided to attack the issue with a particular medication. This medication is injectable, not a pill like the ones I’ve been taking that have proven to be ineffective, and it’s sold under three names; we discussed all three, and before I left the office, he submitted the prior authorization request.

Given that I’m insured by UHC, the prior authorization was denied. Not only was it denied, they robo-called me to say so, sent a letter via mail, and put a copy of the letter in PDF form on my account, before I got home from the doctor’s office.

Not only that, but the section of the letter where they’re supposed to recommend alternate drugs was blank. So basically, “we’re not going to cover that, you can keep suffering, go fuck yourself” in less than 15 minutes.

UHC is exceedingly efficient at not giving a shit.

Look into commercial monitors like the Samsung BET-H series. I bought a 43” one years ago, plugged an Apple TV into it, and haven’t really thought about the screen ever since.

According to the specs it runs Tizen, but I haven’t had to look at a menu since I got the settings dialed in, i.e. years, so I completely forgot. Don’t even know where the OEM remote is, it works with the HDMI-CEC commands sent by the Apple TV.

Nightly rsync to two NAS boxes in the house (TrueNAS Scale and a Synology). Docs go in NextCloud, hosted on a VM in my basement, which is also backed up to the Synology by Proxmox. Also backing up my main machine (Pop!_OS) and my wife’s laptop (ThinkPad E595, also Pop!_OS) using Spideroak One.

If you’re using Debian as a daily driver you can always use a Flatpak if you need a newer version than what’s available in the repos. The foundation is solid, though, and that’s what matters - it’s one of the things that keeps bringing me back to Debian for office workstation use.

Powerwash Simulator.

Absolutely, and it’s usually up to the organization disposing of the drives to set and document the standard by which they abide.

Somewhere, an ISO27001 auditor’s jimmies started rustling.

So the Hygon Dhyana CPUs ended up not being different enough from the Zen 1 Epycs to make the list, then? Interesting.

+1 … been using PVE in my homelab for ages and just deployed a small, self-contained (i.e. non-SAN-connected) PVE cluster at the office in light of Broadcom’s shenanigans. I had no idea just how fantastically well Proxmox ran on higher-end hardware with Ceph installed. It’s glorious.

Same…but with Ungoogled Chromium as Flatpak because it made me feel the least dirty.

Pi-Hole’s great. Got my primary instance on a Pi 4 and three secondaries (one per vlan) on LXCs. Works so well it feels weird seeing ads when I’m not at home, I’m actually considering using Tailscale to route all my queries through my home connection.

I’ll second the Pop!_OS recommendation that others have been posting. Don’t get me wrong, Linux Mint is great, though I personally prefer Linux Mint Debian Edition over the Ubuntu-based one, but I think Pop!_OS is just as easy to use while presenting a different look & feel. Pop tends to support newer hardware as well: despite being stuck on an Ubuntu 22.04 LTS base until Cosmic is finished, System76 releases new kernels to support the hardware they sell. They’re currently running kernel version 6.6.6, as opposed to Ubuntu’s 6.2.0 (I think – that’s what server’s on, at least).

I gave my wife, who “hates computers,” a laptop running Pop!_OS when her Windows 10 one failed and, apart from the standard new PC complaints, I haven’t heard anything Linux-specific. She runs two businesses on the thing; the only changes I made to the standard Pop!_OS software were to replace LibreOffice with OnlyOffice, and to replace Geary with Thunderbird.

It may very well be, especially if the basket your eggs are in is full of holes. I always figure, as long as it isn’t a pad of paper on a desk, or a company that regularly makes headlines due to security breaches, I should be okay.

Need to pay for a subscription for TOTP. It’s like $10/year for the personal plan.

I don’t necessarily think this is brand new. Cold War era thinking was nutty, basically “hey let’s shove a reactor into everything.” We had the SLAM program and Project Pluto in the US during the 50s and 60s, I’m sure the USSR had something similar then too; probably a case of dusting off 60-70 year old plans and seeing if they still carry weight.

How recently did calling become supported? About a month ago I was still unable to even log in using Firefox unless I used a user agent switcher, and even then only text-based messaging worked.

I graduated a few years before you, also in Illinois, and can confirm that.

I can also confirm that I have not resisted the devil’s lettuce.