I learned so much at school, hacking crappy computers because I was bored. Boot disks in my backpack, hex editing the typing lesson saves, packing emulators and ROMs in one floppy at time and merging them back together (I even wrote a BASIC program for this because I didn’t know that tools existed to compress and chunk large files). And just exploratory hacking for fun, writing scripts and tools and stuff just to see if I could.

Chromebooks are the opposite of that, we bought our daughter a Chromebook and on realizing that it was only a tablet with a keyboard it went back to the store. She has my old Linux desktop now and knows a lot more than her friends

This is a pretty good idea, my wife dual boots and I’ll suggest it to her as Windows keeps trashing the EFI partition.

This would work but assumes the primary use of the machine is Windows and derates your performance under Linux significantly due to USB speeds. Even if you’re storing your data on the Windows HDD, NTFS drivers are dog slow compared to EXT4 and other *nix filesystems.

Also some BIOSes are a pain to get to boot off removable drives reliably so it really depends on what your machine is.

I’ve used Linux as a primary dev system for well over a decade now, and with the current state of Windows I’d really recommend just taking the leap, keep your Windows box if you need Windows software and build a dedicated Linux workstation.

You’re missing one:

• dedicated, air-gapped Windows box used for legacy industrial software

Aside from “lightweight apps in VM” this is the only solution I use now. (Unless you count Proton, but having Steam games Just Work barely feels like a “solution” as it requires zero effort on my part)

I don’t even trust Windows to dual boot off a separate disk without trying to break something anymore.

Great to hear this story of success. That plus

$266.99 per probe for the original proprietary one

Reminds me of Schneider’s stupid proprietary dongle for programming their PLCs. It’s just a CH341 in a funny shaped case that fits into the funny shaped slot on the PLC, where it plugs onto an ordinary 0.1" pin header to talk logic level serial.

Plus it has a custom USB ID of course. Probably costs $2 to manufacture, sells for almost $300 as well.

He just said “hairy ass”, well after hearing that I hope it’s “he” anyways for his own sake

Oops my apologies, lol I checked and I must have installed the upstream NewPipe repo so long ago that I forgot that I even had it in my sources list. Literally my only repo other than Fdroid main.

No reason not to use it, though, it’s the official NewPipe repo:

https://archive.newpipe.net/fdroid/repo?fingerprint=e2402c78f9b97c6c89e97db914a2751fda1d02fe2039cc0897a462bdb57e7501

Refresh your repos, I literally just downloaded and installed it

Out on Fdroid now and working

Digital ownership, not storage. As in DRM, GaaS licensing and always-online launchers.

A ROM cartridge was physical ownership, if you had the cartridge, you could play.

A CD-key was also a form of physical ownership, install the game and type in the key from the case, you could play.

There’s a divide though in “alien believers”.

I absolutely believe that other life exists in our vast universe. This is a pretty common opinion among scientific thinkers, space enthusiasts etc. that the universe is simply too huge for us to be all alone.

I also believe that due to that vastness, we’ll never meet any aliens, unless we punch into Europa someday and there happen to be some fish down there.

UFO enthusiasts, on the other hand, have a position that is much less supported by science.

99% of audience dozing off, 1% fascinated by the mystical art of antennas and radio waves. I know the science behind it, but I still don’t know how you guys came up with some of those designs.

As I said,

C/++ with renewed appreciation

No such thing as eval in non-interpreted languages. Unless you’re crazy enough to invoke the compiler and exec() the result.

I used eval too in my Perl days which is why I specifically called it out. IMO any time you see eval used there should be another, more proper way to do it.

I love the term “write-only code”, it’s perfect. I used to love Perl as it felt like it flowed straight from my brain into the keyboard. What a free and magical language.

So it turned out I had ADHD. Took meds, went back to C/++ with renewed appreciation, haven’t touched Perl since as it horrifies me to look at it. What a nightmare of dangling references and questionable typing. Any language that allows you to cast a string to a function and call it really needs to sit down and think about what it’s doing.

You finally described a reason for these otherwise frustrating cables to exist! Though I like the other suggested method better, a charge-only adapter that you apply to the end of a full featured cable.

But then someone else will end up with these bunk cables. They really should have demanded mandatory identification on the cable ends.

True survivalist/libertarian types have always loved solar power.

I don’t know how solar lost its space age coolness, though, aside from active lobbying from the fossil fuel industry to try to kill it. For awhile solar was undoubtedly the power source of the future, the same thing that was on our space probes and satellites.

I have old oil-crisis era books and magazines on my shelf which absolutely loved solar power and billed it as the cheap energy solution for the common man. Somewhere we went wrong, and I think it was Reagan (in many ways…)

Diverting attention from other nerdy/niche groups who don’t seem weird at all in comparison?

Check it out, it’s the bone from Jesus’s boner! Totally legit! My guy found it back there beside the boulder.

Man, I don’t think there are real bones inside boners. You’re full of shit. Besides, didn’t the dude get reincarnated? What, did he forget that bone?

Yeah well, go fuck yourself. I’m gonna go show this to someone who knows about this sort of thing.

2000 years later, the plaque on a gilded chest reads “The Sacred Bone of the Boner”

Boner bone? Pfft, everyone knows that boners don’t have actual bones inside them.

Dude it says it right there on the plaque, who are you gonna believe, some dumb old science teacher or the Pope

Even just for reporting issues, anyone who is capable of identifying a bug is likely to have a GitHub account. Not so for Gitlab or others.

Then you’ve got seamless integration with Vscode as a bonus, it’s more like why would you not use GitHub unless you have a specific problem with them.