I ended up making a rather large amount of purchases from GOG: the entire catalog for Prince of Persia, Crysis, Crysis Warhead, Vaporum, Hotline Miami 2, and Men of War: Assault Squad.

I hope you feel better soon Perfect Dark!

I’ve used some non-OEM expanded cell batteries back in the netbook days and they worked okay for about two years before drastically losing their ability to hold a charge. I’d recommend just sticking to OEM parts with proper electrical certifications just to help lower the chance of thermal runaways or things like that.

To be fair I kept buying models that cost $20 to $30 so maybe the higher end ones would last longer. That said, my Moondrops wired headphones cost the same but are way more reliable.

Step 2: Blow out your ear drums.

Same. I can’t find any Bluetooth headphones whose batteries don’t die in 4 or 5 months anyway. Meanwhile my Moondrop wired headphones have been going strong for almost 3 years.

No bugs to cuddle up with? Try snakes!

Looking for a new job is a good motivator to quit for a while.

The US really is different. In China, companies have to listen to the CCP lest it gets seized by the state and its owners disappeared. In the US the government listens to its corporate donors and now even rewards them with high ranking military positions.

Windows 7 was a beautifully simple yet versatile OS capable of running on some really weak hardware with little overhead. Windows 11 by comparison is a bloated monster that demands too many resources for mandatory background processes and wants to get its tentacles into every facet of your privacy.

Gaming, simple office tasks, and web browsing work really well in Linux for the common layman. The next big hurdle is to offer some more niche programs that are easy to work with.

I spent my whole weekend trying and failing to set up ZoneMinder, Motion, Shinobi, then finally ContaCam through WINE in an effort to make a simple air gapped security camera system in Linux Mint installed on a 13 year old laptop. I struggled through countless command lines trying very hard to understand what each one does, Time shifted a dozen times through installation failures, and I still couldn’t get it done. The best I could do was unintentionally turn on my webcam after somehow managing to install Motion without then being able to access its functionality through a solely console based interface.

I wanted to gift this laptop to my tech illiterate mom and give her peace of mind that no one was sneaking around in front of her house. Linux failed me on this if I couldn’t even set up the software on my own, let alone my mom if she’d have to learn how to use a terminal to make it work. I wanted it to work so bad but the learning curve and difficulty to figure out why a PPA command failed after following an old and likely out of date guide had no workaround since support is so scarce. Old YouTube video guides with a couple hundred views offered no hints when a line I followed verbatim didn’t work in my setup. As midnight was fast approaching I finally threw in the towel and set up Windows 7 with ContaCam running in less than 2 hours.

Devs for Linux need to do better. If they want their OS of choice to get more mainstream then they need to develop for more mainstream users. A lot of these nittty gritty setup configurations need to be moved to the background with greater reliability and cross distro functionality. I get that there are things like Software Center that offer flatpaks have at least some ease of use when it comes to installing software, but the point is lost when some of that software doesn’t actually run or even appear anywhere after installing, like ZoneMinder.

That’s me alright. Not from lack of trying mind you but I’ve had to reinstall my OS a couple of times this weekend to make an install boot properly on an old laptop. I’mma have to reinstall again because I messed up a console install.

This looks like Texas but it could be Wisconsin for all I know. Sad that most of this country just all looks vaguely the same in between cities.

Few words are dirtier to Republicans than “nationalize”. They must be torn between following their god-emperor’s hurt feelings and allowing Musk’s company to be taken over by the government. The best I see them doing is cancelling all contracts and subsidies with SpaceX/Tesla and passing them off to its competitors.

I was perma high around age 18. Burnout never happened to me and made physics and engineering classes fascinating. I was basically a high functioning pothead right out the gate.

I’m not saying other benefits aren’t there, it’s just that we know a lot of regulatory agencies are being severely cut so it’s gonna be less apparent soon enough. I’m in one of the higher tax brackets so aside from unemployment insurance, a lot of safety nets that require means testing are essentially inaccessible to me as well. Frankly it’s a miracle American society is still functioning even with so many tax cuts for corporations and the rich.

I pay roughly 30% of my gross income in th US. The only tangible benefit I get from it is the ability to drive on free roads on my way to work to earn more taxable income. I only wish my money didn’t go to subsidize the rich and make bombs to blow kids up on the other side of the planet.

Good. I never trusted those integrated apps and thought of them as spyware. Mozilla should go back to focusing on making a lean browser and whatever apps they want to offer should be optional instead of hard coded into their flagship product.

I can do it for the video card but some lights on the mobo are for status so that’s not easily doable.

What movie is this from?

Lit PC setups are nice and all until you try to go to sleep with them in the same room. I miss plain old PC cases that hide their components so I can seed overnight.