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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 17th, 2023

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  • I went to college in 93, and they ran a Unix mainframe with thin clients connected to it in the computer labs.

    I didn’t really know much about any computers then, but I learned quick and had nerdy friends teach me a lot. Home computers ran DOS, but this fancy thing called Linux had entered the scene and nerds played with it.

    I remember it being a bear. My comp sci roommate did most of the work, but he’d dole out mini projects to me to help him out. You had to edit text files with your exact hardware parameters or else it wouldn’t work. Like resolutions, refresh rates, IRQs, mouse shit, printer shit - it was maddening. And then you’d compile that all for hours. And it always failed. Many hardware things just weren’t ever going to work.

    Eventually we got most things working and it was cool as beans. But it took weeks - seriously. We were able to act as a thin client to the mainframe and run programs right from our apartment instead of hauling ourselves to the computer lab. Interestingly, on Linux, that was the first time I had ever gotten a modem and a mouse working together. It was either/or before that.

    It was both simultaneously horrific and fantastic at the same time. By the time windows 95 rolled out, the Unix mainframe seemed old and archaic. All the cool kids were playing Warcraft 2 and duke nukem 3D.



  • I’m not sure I’d go that far to be honest. 1) windows behaves much better when it has its own drive to install on and 2) linux boot loaders become less important because if you break it, you can use your bios to force boot windows and it’ll still boot.

    IMHO, two drives is the way to go with dual boot. Set the Linux drive in the bios as the primary boot drive, and configure the bootloader to add the windows drive to the menu. While you’re learning that, you can boot windows through the bios, once you get it, you’re always presented with a menu upon boot to pick which one you want.

    One final word of advice, buy different drives. Either manufacturer or size. It’ll be easier to tell them apart when you’re doing disk operations.

    Good luck!



  • Listen, I’m far from a Trump fan. And I don’t think he personally did anything productive ever personally. But facts are facts - his administration DID do a lot to help (or at least that was my personal experience). As one single example of many, I personally got help from warp speed White House / military folks to get me critical parts from the other side of the world in a little over a day. Asia to my doorstep, Friday end of day to Sunday morning. I thought I’d have to go to the port and pick it up - nope right to my damn hands. That one simple act literally got that vaccine into people about 2-3 weeks earlier.

    It’s baffling - they did good things. Not all the good things, but good things nonetheless. And he was in a position to take credit for the whole thing, deserved or not and put a big feather in his cap. And then, all of a sudden, “vaccines are bad”. It’s like you can’t make this shit up. If he was smart he’d take that one thing and rile up his base with how amazing he is, and then get away with murder behind their backs. But instead he punches the gift horse in the mouth.

    That’s how I know he’s not very smart.



  • Kongar@lemmy.dbzer0.comtoAsk Lemmy@lemmy.worldSeriously, where do I go?
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    9 days ago

    You really can’t get bluer than mass ri conn and vt

    Southern nh and southern me are basically Boston suburbs. As you go north it gets more red. But not like sc (I have family in sc and outside of the blue cities - ya they are pretty maga stupid). They are more “leave me alone red” as opposed to “my pastor said abortion is bad and I like to make fun of the gays”

    I mean there’s maga idiots everywhere-but honestly things might even tip a little too blue in southern New England.




  • I just finished the first trilogy which starts with “Red Rising”. It was really entertaining, and I highly recommend it. I’ll start the follow up series soon.

    Right now I’m reading both Salem’s Lot by King and The Catcher in the Rye. I like to throw in classics that I missed in high school - I didn’t appreciate them then, but I’ve found a few as an adult that I’ve absolutely loved. Both books are pretty good so far - we’ll see how they end.



  • I went to this train and automobile museum place in Maine. Podunk little place, but pretty cool and they really did have a lot of old cars to look at.

    What shocked me was the size of the cars. Like huge ford expedition max trunk bigger than a pickup’s bed size.

    Then I thought about the cars of the 70s and 80s. My old man’s Cutlass Supreme could easily fit 6 and had a huge trunk. God help you if your auntie drove a station wagon - there might have been a dozen kids piled into that sucker going to the beach.

    Then I look at current suvs. They are pretty small comparatively speaking. I can’t get 5 into my grand Cherokee comfortably. Ya there are some huge suvs, but they aren’t the norm. The mini suvs are more common.

    My unpopular opinion - the new “car” is an suv. And they have gotten smaller over the years, not bigger.


  • Kongar@lemmy.dbzer0.comtoApple@lemmy.worldGood AdBlock for Safari?
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    10 days ago

    *puts on his flame retardant suit

    For android or pc, it’s Firefox and ublock origin all day long.

    For iOS it’s trickier. Generally the ad blockers don’t work like you expect, and many aren’t free.

    But I have found a solution that’s worked for years, but people are going to flame me.

    Brave browser for iOS. It just works. Even for YouTube videos. You hear how they are a shady company-they are probably selling my firstborn son right from under my nose. But I’ll be damned if I’ve ever seen an ad come through.



  • Excellent, that makes sense. I’ll try that command tonight at home, see what it does, and report back. I kind of want to know what it’s doing just because I’m curious.

    I say a relay, but I agree with you - I couldn’t imagine a relay being used. But whatever it is on my desktop, it sounds just like a traditional ice cube relay clicking - and it’s quite loud. But I have no idea what it is. I’m not sure I’ve ever had a computer that made that noise before. My laptop makes no such noise obviously.


  • I did some more digging on this last night. I’m more confused now than I was before, and I don’t know what it’s doing.

    The arch wiki defines three states, suspend to ram (sleep), suspend to disk(hibernate), and a hybrid suspend(presumably what my steam deck does).

    First there is the “turn off the display” behavior. Doing anything brings the monitor back alive and I’m presented with the Lock Screen.

    Second is what I believe to be sleep. This happens when I select “suspend” from the menu or leave it alone for a very long time. This mode doesn’t happen soon (maybe at all) if the computer is doing stuff. It appears to be in a lower power state-but I can’t say why I think that (maybe it’s just because the fans aren’t running? I dunno). Wiggling the mouse or doing anything wakes it back up.

    Third is another state. It’s just like the above state, except it will not wake up with mouse movement, or clicking keys on a Bluetooth keyboard. I must push a key on the keyboard, the power button, or open the lid. It’s weird because it responds to things other than the power button.

    Interestingly, my desktop behaves exactly the same way. But what’s interesting on the desktop is that I can hear a power relay clicking on from this third state. It’s distinctly different than the 2nd state - exhibiting power cutoff, but still responding to the keyboard.

    Neither computer enters any other state even after days of being left alone.

    So I dunno. Are modes 2 and 3 like two versions of sleep, and hibernate never activates? Or is state three hibernation but it responds to things it shouldn’t?

    I have no idea. But now that I’ve played with it some more - I don’t want to say hibernate is working because I don’t know what it’s doing. All I know is that it has the above three behaviors which are consistent with my desktop machine.




  • Kongar@lemmy.dbzer0.comOPtoLinux@lemmy.mlLinux really has come a long way
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    25 days ago

    It was a couple hours. Just like on my desktop, wiggling the mouse wakes it from sleep, but not so in whatever that second state is when it’s left for longer. It definitely was something other than sleep. What it was - I’ll let you guys decide. Whether it behaves long term with fans in a laptop bag, that I don’t know - I haven’t had enough run time with it.

    I’m just sharing a positive experience. If I see it misbehave I’ll be sure to update the thread with reality. But so far, it really is behaving much better than I expected.