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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 21st, 2023

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  • My computer is basically the same computer my wife built around 12 years ago, as she did upgrades over the last decade or so I just saved her old components and eventually stuffed them into a new box. It was a beefy rig when she built it, and still runs most of what I throw at it with (what I think is) pretty acceptable performance and settings.

    So that old motherboard and processor aren’t windows 11 compliant and with the windows 10 end of life I decided it was time to make the switch. Don’t quite have the wiggle room in the budget for a major upgrade right now.

    And truth be told, even if I were to do a major upgrade, I probably was looking at Linux anyway. I don’t like the AI bullshit and a lot of the other dumb crap Microsoft has been pulling with 11. I want to get away from the corporate overlords in general. I’ve always been pretty big on FOSS, so really it was just gaming that’s been holding me back and I felt like proton and such the state of gaming on Linux has finally reached a place I can be happy with.

    And not for nothing, it’s free, and I’ve always felt like MS charges too much for windows. I’m a bit of a cheapskate, if I can save a buck I’m going to. The F in FOSS is a huge draw for me.

    And I’ve had half-baked plans to turn this current rig into a home server/NAS whenever I get around to building a new rig, so that meant Linux was in the cards for it at some point anyway, and I might as well start getting my hands dirty with that now in preparation.


  • I’m certainly no expert on Namibian history and culture, most of what I know comes from just now skimming the Wikipedia article

    But a couple things jumping out at me

    The area was at one point a German colony (and also at one point they carried out a genocide against the Herero people that some think may have been sort of a model for the Holocaust)

    They also had apartheid similar to South Africa.

    And to this day a whole lot of Africa doesn’t exactly have stellar access to education, the internet, etc. and even in some parts of the world that do have better access, there’s a lot of people in other parts of the world outside of Europe and the Americas who don’t quite grok* just how bad the Nazis were because it’s not something they cover so extensively in their history classes. I feel like every couple years I see some story come out of Asia somewhere where some business opens up with a Nazi theme and they don’t get why so many people in the West are mad about it.

    So kind of taking a couple stabs in the dark here

    It could be that his father named him after Hitler maybe trying to soften things up for him, like maybe the white people at the top of the apartheid heiarchy would be a little nicer if he was named after the biggest whitest racist he could think of.

    Or maybe they were in a bit of an information bubble where he just really didn’t fully understand how bad Hitler and the Nazis were and went with it because he thought it had a nice ring to it

    Maybe it was a way to give a giant middle finger to racists. Sort of a “haha, how do you like your leader’s name when it’s on a black kid? Suck it Nazis.”

    Or maybe it was something else. That’s just a couple thoughts off the top of my head.

    *fuck muskrat for trying to steal this word for his own bullshit.




  • As far as terminal tutorials, so far the best I’ve found is LabEx, but I feel like it’s lacking in a lot of ways.

    First of all it definitely feels designed to push you towards paying for a subscription. And while their pricing honestly isn’t too terrible, it’s more than I want to spend on this. Nothing against companies and people being paid for making a product but it feels a little against the FOSS spirit to me.

    Second I’ve mostly been trying to use it on my phone and that experience is just kind of shitty. Personally I kind of want to learn in short bursts here and there throughout the day when I have downtime at work or whatever. If I have time to sit down in front of my computer it’s probably because I want to be doing something fairly specific with it and it’s probably not to just practice my terminal use, so a better phone experience would be great.

    And finally, it just seems a bit over-engineered, at least for what I want to use it for. It seems like it’s spinning up a whole Linux VM with a desktop environment and such for me to interact with through my browser just for me to type stuff into a terminal and read their tutorial. It does have other courses and maybe all of that is more useful there, but it seems like a bit much for me.


  • Which kind of shows how easy it is to take certain things as “obvious.”

    I’m a new convert to Linux. I played around with it a bit probably about 15 years ago, but never did much seriously with it. Finally bit the bullet about a week ago between the windows 10 EOL and deciding that Linux gaming is finally in a place I can live with.

    I’m a reasonable tech-literate person, I’m no sys admin but I’m the family “guy who’s good with computers” I did a few semesters as a computer science student and was reasonably good at it before deciding to go in a different direction.

    And while things are working just fine for most of my general computing needs, I feel like I’m in a bit of a weird place right now, kind of like I’m back to being a kid with my family’s first Compaq in the 90s. I can play games and do my homework and make my computer do some cool things, but I know there’s more cool stuff I can make it do but I don’t know how yet.

    I have about 30 years of know-how and tips and tricks built up on how to make windows bend to my will, but I don’t have that for Linux yet, and it’s not exactly a great feeling.

    And I feel like there’s sort of a gap in the Linux community to help the slightly-above-average-computer-person Linux-convert like me to build up to where they were as a windows user.

    Like there’s a wealth of knowledge on choosing a distro and installing it, alternatives to common windows programs, etc.

    And then a big gap

    And then people who have a whole home computer lab, self-hosting everything, doing serious programming as a hobby, etc.

    And in the middle are a bunch of forum posts where someone asks a question, and some kind of computer sage emerges from the ether, tells you to transcribe a magic spell into your terminal, and all your problems will be solved, then vanishes in a puff of smoke.

    And don’t get me wrong, I’m glad those magical Linux wizards exist to fix my problems. But I have almost no idea what the hell what the magical commands they told me to run are actually doing.

    And I’m slowly piecing some of it together, googling things as I go, and that’s a fine way to learn things, but it is slow and I wish there was a better way to power through learning some of this stuff without needing to go take a whole actual course on it. I think my ideal would be sort of a Duolingo-type app for terminal commands.

    Also at the lower end of the spectrum, I feel like maybe there’s a need for sort of a basic tutorial program for the kind of people who are not computer people to learn the absolute basics. I feel like back in the 90s I encountered a few introduction-to-windows sort of programs that would walk you through “this is your start menu,” “here’s what click/double-check/right click/etc” means," “here’s how you turn your computer off” kind of stuff.

    And while that kind of thing is almost insultingly basic for anyone who’s going to install Linux for themselves, I think that kind of hand-holding might be needed for some other people we might try to convert.

    Also don’t get me wrong, I like doing stuff in the terminal and don’t want it to go anywhere, when I know what I’m doing it is really efficient, but that shit is straight-up intimidating for a lot of average and below-average computer people, not to mention how truly abysmal a lot of their typing skills are. I feel like a little less emphasis on the terminal and building out some more control panel -like GUI menus would go a long way to getting people to switch.

    Maybe these sorts of resources exist and I haven’t found them yet. If they do please point me towards them. If they actually don’t exist, maybe one of those wise Linux sages will see this and take up the task of building it.









  • I think I see a bit of steam escaping from the pan, so I think they tried to weigh it after cooking

    Which makes sense, there’s going to be some weight change after you cook it because of evaporation and such… hence the steam

    Before cooking you couldn’t really call it Jollof Rice, it would just be a big pot of the raw ingredients for Jollof Rice

    And they know the weight of the ingredients going in already, they’re quoted in the article, so that’s just simple addition to figure out.


  • Except for a few obvious spam posts, I’m pretty hard-pressed to think of any specific posts or comments I’ve seen that struck me as bots (although to be fair, I’m there may be some bias due to which communities I choose to follow)

    There are, however, plenty of idiots, people who don’t speak fluent English, trolls and other people whose motivations may not be purely good-faith discussion, people who probably have various types of neurodivergence and/or mental health issues

    And I could see some of those categories being very easily mistaken as a bot under a lot of circumstances.



  • You can go way down the rabbit hole here, you can blame Christian European colonial powers, but you can blame the pre-christian Roman empire for opening that door for Christianity to spread into Europe in the first place, you can blame Jews for being the religion that Christianity spun off of, you can blame various other religions and cultures that eventually morphed into Judaism

    You can do that all the way back to the first organism that evolved that had a hint of sapience if you really want to

    But that would be ridiculous.

    That’s all in the past, and while it’s important to understand how we ended up here, we can’t do a damn thing to change any of that.

    However here and now, we have groups like family watch international actively fanning the flames and funding this crap.

    They’re not the only ones, they’re not all American, but you have your head in the fucking sand if you think America isn’t the biggest piece of this puzzle.


  • It will of course depend on which place you go to.

    I’ve only noticed 2 at this place (but it’s pretty wild how quickly you stop noticing peoples bodies when everyone is naked, so there may have been more,), but one of them is an employee, and another was a performer they had for an event.

    The clientele is mostly (but not entirely) middle aged white people, and I’ve seen more than a few trump stickers on peoples vehicles there, but they do have rules about not discussing politics and religion and aren’t afraid to kick people out if they make an ass of themselves, so I haven’t witnessed anyone saying or doing anything transphobic. This place is also fairly popular with swingers and such (behind closed doors, nothing sexual allowed in public) and we’re all a little weird since we like going to nudist resorts, so I think everyone has adopted a pretty “live and let live” attitude towards people with lifestyles that are different than their own.

    No shortage of gay, lesbian, bi, pan, etc people though, and there are usually more than a few rainbow flags flying around the campground.

    So I can’t really imagine anyone making an issue of it at the place I’ve been going.

    There’s also a few nude/clothing-optional resorts out there that cater more specifically to LGBTQ people, so that’s potentially also an option.

    Also, weirdly, I feel like in a lot of cases, depending on the state of their transition, it may be harder than you think to tell someone is trans/gender non-conforming there. Can’t exactly base your assumptions about someone’s gender by the clothes they’re wearing after all. Not that people would necessarily assume the right gender, mind you.


  • It’s not everyone’s thing to be sure, but I started going to a nudist resort largely because of this. I really just wanted a place to go hang out that has a pool that’s not overrun with kids.

    It is technically a family resort, not too many people actually show up with kids, but there’s occasionally a few, and while I don’t particularly want to see naked kids (or honestly most of the adults either, nudists are rarely the kinds of people you’d want to see naked,) the parents are obviously keeping an eye on their kids there and keep them under control.


  • Not that I really support cops confiscating orbeez guns as a general rule

    But I work in 911 dispatch in a different area where orbeez guns aren’t illegal, and they’ve been kind of a problem this year.

    I think some of our local delinquents have taken to freezing the balls or modifying their guns to shoot faster or something, because we have had a few injuries and broken windows and such linked to orbeez guns this year.

    Even without that, they’re a pretty significant nuisance that have started a lot of fights because no one likes being pelted with orbeez.

    And of course there’s the problem that exists with all toy guns where if you paint them black or are running around with them in the dark it can be hard to tell them apart from a real gun which is asking for trouble.

    And the countless calls I’ve gotten from neighborhood karens who “don’t think it’s safe” or “that they shouldn’t be doing that here” is getting kind of old.

    And not for nothing, orbeez can be really slow to break down in the environment and I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re contributing to our microplastics problem.

    If there is a way to twist the interpretation of a law to say that orbeez guns are illegal, I’m not at all surprised to hear about cops doing just that. Not that I generally support that, but if you caught me on a bad day after I took a bunch of calls about kids with them, I might be tempted to sign a petition to get them banned.


  • As someone who has regularly carried a variety of knives and multi tools almost every day of my life, I also can’t say I’m a fan of their knife laws.

    That said, as-written, I don’t find them to be quite as bad as a lot of people make them out to be (how the police choose to interpret and enforce those laws is sort of a different matter)

    It’s not the sort of knife I normally choose to carry, but all of the reasons I normally carry and use a knife for can be done perfectly safely and effectively with something like a regular Swiss army knife with a 2.5inch non-locking blade which should generally be ok to carry for no particular reason.

    It should be noted that I do not carry a knife for any self-defense purposes. I feel very little need to defend myself, and even if I did a knife would be just about my last choice after pretty much any other object in arm’s reach. Even though where I am, I could pretty much walk around town carrying a halberd for self defense if I really wanted to and it would be legal, I actually do tend to choose my EDC knives to be pretty inoffensive-looking free of any unnecessary point/stabby bits and if possible.

    And cases that really require more knife than that aren’t exactly part of my usual everyday carry scenario, and the appropriate knives for those occasions should be covered under the lawful justification and reasonable use exemptions (again, how the police actually apply those laws can leave something to be desired, but that’s often a problem here too)

    Again, not a fan of their knife laws, but in the grand scheme, I’m not nearly as outraged by them as a lot of people are.