Last time I donated to the FSF, they sent me an assortment of stickers. I dunno if they still do that. If not, you can also just buy stickers directly from them: https://shop.fsf.org/collection/stickers

If you (or your parents) like to cook, you could get some choice steaks (or other high-end ingredients) and make a nice meal that the whole family can enjoy.

Could also get a nice game controller if you’re into video games. Most first-party controllers seem to cost about $70-$80 these days.

I dunno what the “smart” thing to do with $75 would be; $75 isn’t a whole lot of money in the grand scheme of things so investing it wouldn’t exactly pay dividends any time soon. Maybe buy 1GB of DDR5 RAM and in a year it might be worth $75,000 if the market continues its current trend.

I’m not familiar with this app, but have you tried running it under Linux with WINE instead of in a Windows VM?

A quick search led me here, which looks like what OP is using based on the screenshots: https://controller.dl.playstation.net/controller/lang/en/2100004.html

Could try hosting a Multi-User Dungeon (MUD). I tried to host an Evennia server last year but could never get it to work properly. Wasn’t a big deal though cause it’s not like I had any friends who wanted to play, lol.

Could build a wheelchair ramp on the side of the tub so you can just roll on in

I watched Game Grumps play this game a while back and found it very funny. Certainly a labor of love

A license obtained in the USA (issued by the FCC) only permits transmission on regulated frequencies within the USA. Other nations will have different regulatory bodies you’ll need to comply with instead. You can probably just do a web search for “<your country here> amateur radio license” and go from there.

Space RF communication protocols and best-use technologies - I need to read about it more

You can get a decent primer on this topic here and here. If you aren’t already a licensed ham, you can look into getting your Technician license (a lofty goal, given the exam comprises thirty whole multiple-choice questions, assuming you’re in the U.S.) and get familiar with transmitting/receiving across long distances.

One fun experiment you can tackle early on before even getting licensed to transmit is to just receive signals from satellites that are already in orbit and can be reliably tracked. For example: you can easily track the International Space Station and know when it will be passing over your location and set up a receiver to listen on the right frequency. It’s not uncommon for them to be broadcasting some kind of signal on a regular basis. Sometimes they even broadcast SSTV signals that you can receive and decode. Once you’ve done this a couple of times, you oughta be pretty comfortable with at least receiving signals from satellites in orbit. Good preliminary proof of concept.

A couple of handy web apps I’ve used to track satellites before:

• https://in-the-sky.org/satmap_radar.php
• https://www.n2yo.com/satellites/?c=18
• https://www.heavens-above.com/

You used to be able to track the ISS through a NASA web app, but they recently retired it in favor of their first-party app 🙄. Admittedly, it’s a pretty great app in my experience. But I wish the old web app were still online. That said, the apps I linked above should also be able to track the ISS as well.

You could use PiVPN (you don’t need to install it specifically on a Raspberry Pi – this is just a handy all-in-one software solution). It supports both OpenVPN and Wireguard standards. Forward the relevant port in your router configuration, set up a single user for yourself in the VPN settings, and then connect via whichever client you prefer (OpenVPN if you use OVPN, or Wireguard if you use Wireguard).

I’ve used it before to access locally-hosted services from outside my home network and it gets the job done with fairly minimal setup.

I had this same error a few months ago when a drive was failing to mount because (unbeknownst to me) it was overheating. I turned the system off for a few hours before troubleshooting (I had errands to run). When I came back, the system booted without issue.

If you’re looking for an easy troubleshooting step, have you tried turning off the system for several minutes (and unplugging it) and then powering it back on?

It’s impressive, just not particularly useful,

I will have to disagree with this. I have found LLMs to be remarkably useful in a variety of circumstances because they are pretty good at regurgitating API documentation and man pages in a relatively small context (effectively making them a very efficient google search).

For example, last week I accidentally deleted a partition from a USB drive. I asked an LLM how I might recover my data using GNU/Linux tools and it pointed me in the direction of ddrescue (and subsequently, gddrescue) and showed me how I could use the recovered disk image to recover my lost files.

I was already aware of ‘dd’ as a tool for disk management, but was wholly ignorant of ddrescue or gddrescue because I haven’t had a data recovery use case in over 15 years. It was a fairly simple affair, and it was much easier than asking StackOverflow.

I dunno if I’d say I’m “unimpressed” with AI. I certainly find the technology itself fascinating. I worked with machine learning for years before consumer generative AI became mainstream and it’s profoundly impressive what decades of research and development have yielded. I genuinely do admire the painstaking work that underappreciated computer scientists have put in to make such things possible.

That said, “AI” is the new “blockchain” insofar as virtually every company on the S&P 500 has decided this is the new be-all-end-all feature that must be integrated into every aspect of every project. I don’t need AI to be part of my OS. I will open a new tab in my web browser if I decide I have a task for it. Granted, I am not a representative sample of a typical computer user (I use GNU/Linux btw).

To say nothing of the unethical manner in which these models are trained, using works produced by actual writers, artists, programmers, etc. Obviously profiting from their works while offering zero compensation (and actively taking work away from them by offering AI as an alternative to their craft).

Can you define “god” in this context? Does “god” imply a creator of human existence, or merely a being with abilities not understood or quantified by humans (think Q from Star Trek).

The latter isn’t necessarily a belief system in and of itself. It’s just the acknowledgement that “higher”, ascendent beings can exist because humans are not, necesssarily, the be-all-end-all sapient beings of the universe.

Problem: Receiving antennas can be geolocated using signal interference.

I’m not sure that’s what the wikipedia article says. It only seems to refer to this method being able to locate transmitting antennas (or “radio sources”). Something like an FM, AM, or shortwave radio antenna would not be able to be located by that radio simply listening to the airwaves passing through it; reception on those media is passive and doesn’t require the radio to broadcast any kind of signal.

Not an expert, but I am a licensed ham radio tech.

I just discovered WarioWare, Inc in the Switch’s Game Boy Advance collection. I didn’t expect to get sucked into these little minigames so quickly. The rapid-fire back-to-back format is really engaging some hyper-focus-y part of my brain.

Kinda frustrating at times, though, lol. Some of the games are really obtuse. It took me dozens of attempts at one of the trampoline games before I realized I’m controlling the trampoline, not the guy jumping on it.

Since when did porch monkey suddenly become a racial slur?

Kudos to Germany for pulling it off. Was also happy to see them mention

Last year […] the government began rolling out LibreOffice as the default office suite to replace Microsoft Office.

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About 10 years ago, I read “Creativity, Inc” by Edwin Catmull, co-founder of Pixar. It detailed the ideas and events that lead up to the advent of feature 3D animation and filmmaking. I found it to be an inspiring story that mixed a passion for computer science with the desire for compelling storytelling. I was independently studying animation at the time, and it definitely lit a fire in me, as it was written by and for computer nerds who would like to make art.

I’ve always been more technically-oriented than artistic, so it was nice to see a book written from a similar perspective. I spent most of my young adulthood working on my technical skills so I could get a decent job, but around the time I read this book, I actually started putting time into creative endeavours in my free time as well.