I feel sad for all the youthful Linux nerd who were excited about the year of the Linux desktop who died of old age. They were only many years too soon.

Happy 2026 Linux everybody!

I take deliberate breaks from stuff like Lemmy and the news. I only came back here after a multi-month break this month. It works.

I spend a lot of time in /tmp sending temporary output to files and testing commands when building shell scripts. It’s appropriate that a long-haired fluffer butt lives there because that’s been most of my cats through the years.

Sounds like you have people you can call? If so, ask someone to go do something physical together where conversation doesn’t have to be center-stage, like hiking. If you live in a place where there’s good hiking spots with challenging terrain, such as steep hills (hopefully accompanied by beautiful views), you might be too out of breath for the absence of conversation to be unnatural.

Good thinking. High risk. Impressed that you thought ahead to avoid the risk. I like the home entertainment suggestion, but you could also use the extra cycles to run containers or VMs in the background. I know you said you already have a server, so I’m trying to think what else would provide utility. Nice find, hope you come up with some fun projects.

Search for github repos of dotfiles and read through people’s shell profiles, aliases, and functions. You’ll learn a lot.

Smoking. Quit for seven years and picked it back up. Worst decision of my life. Was cutting back on vaping to quit when the pan happened. Allowed myself the vice for stress. Don’t plan on trying a third time. Too much effort.

I ripped 298 Blu-Rays and a smaller number of DVDs with MakeMKV. Twice because I lost the whole collection due to my own bs the first time (make sure you have excellent backups, folks). I would not go through the process a third time, but that has nothing to do with the software.

I feel pretty comfortable asking questions IRL because over many years I’ve had two friends who are openly Trans. But I want to show some support for the community, so here we go:

A train leaves the station at 9pm… 😆

Love and Respect.

I’ll stop contributing if this happens.

We have some platform-specific tooling. I might attempt it if they didn’t let me have a Mac at work (I remote into Win for the couple of proprietary things anyway). There’s that saying, you miss all the shots you don’t take. Go for it and see.

Aha, I see. My friends lived in North Hollywood at the time. I really don’t know the layout or anything beyond that. But the county being huge sounds familiar and would make sense if this varies a lot.

I guess things changed since two decades ago? What happened to give you guys safe water? In 2002, my friends in LA bought jugs of bottled water at the store because by the time it was piped down, all kinds of nasty shit had leached into it.

You and I are lucky to have quality tap water. I live in the Bay Area and our water is awesome. Go down to LA and it’s poison.

Further, the studios saw how Apple cornered the market selling songs for a dollar and didn’t want any one company (Netflix) to have that kind of control again. And it happened the same way: the record industry didn’t take the iTunes Store as anything that could be a huge success and gave Apple a sweetheart deal that they later regretted for leaving money on the table.

The lesson they didn’t learn is that it takes competitive pricing to wipe out (most of) piracy. The desire to squeeze every last drop of profit leads to its resurgence.

Good riddance to studios opening a bajillion streaming services. Sail the high seas and be merry.

They chose to kill the golden goose by jacking up prices over and over and over. I don’t feel bad for greedy corporations who did this to themselves.

Not at all during my lifetime.

I relied on Syncthing for a few years until my laptop became so powerful that a desktop was no longer needed (I do pro-audio work in Logic with lots of plugins; but I’m also just a nerd power-user). This has me thinking about getting back into using it to sync a much smaller amount of data, such as my Bash profile and custom functions, as well as some custom binaries that I keep in ~/bin. But I’ll wait until a few releases into the 2.x cycle before I install while others help find the rough edges.

Hooray for development of awesome tools. Hats off to all the devs involved.

Yes, exactly. Phones and tablets have resulted in intro to comp sci instructors having to teach young people how a filesystem works.

People who convince themselves they “just aren’t good with computers.”

In the early 2000s, it was widely thought that everyone who grew up with them would be reasonably competent with them. We now have 20-30 year olds who are still stumped with basic computing concepts like how to reset a forgotten password. I literally ran into this a couple of months ago: Really? You haven’t had to do this a dozen times in your life by now? How did you finish college (this person was highly educated)?