rollin with the homies

  • 3 Posts
  • 139 Comments
Joined 10 months ago
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Cake day: January 15th, 2024

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  • SiS 6326 with 8MB.

    It was 1999 but I had a very limited budget, around $400, for the entire system. This was my first AGP card.

    The Wikipedia article says that this was not supported well by Linux but that’s just not the case. It was the first card for Linux and FreeBSD that I had which let me view more than 256 colors. I ran KDE 1.x and then XFce.

    Something happened between then and 2001 where I got a GeForce 2 MX 400 which ran fine with FreeBSD for many years.







  • Yeah, I remember almost 20 years ago, an older dude telling me that jet fuel can’t melt steel beams, and giving me a copy of a movie called Zeitgeist on CD-R. That dude would be in his 60’s or late 50’s now.

    Before that, people like Art Bell made a living on AM radio late at night with things like the Taos Hum and UFO’s and paranormal stuff.

    Like, a lot of early US settlers got sent there because they were batshit crazy and a danger to society. The Puritans were kicked out of England, and then they were kicked out of the Netherlands of all places, how does that even happen, before they ran off to America and did a bunch of crazy shit. We think of the “Salem Witch Trials” with horror and then sing “Land of the Pilgrims’ Pride” without batting an eye, who do you even think the Pilgrims were?

    So a bunch of criminals and wackos settled the United States, and when they got too crazy for their village, they just moved west, killed the native men, fucked a bunch of children, and made another crazy village. Pocahantas was like 12. And then if someone got kicked out of that village for being crazy, rinse and repeat until you get shit like Mormonism in Utah and Branch Davidians in Waco Texas and bombing the Olympics and speaking in tongues and sponsoring genocide through Biblical Tourism of the Holy Land.

    America is a land of crazy people who have been rewarded for generations for being batshit crazy, and have an ability to not see things clearly in front of their face. This is really nothing new.


  • This was the first movie I ever took my kids to see at the cinema (out of two movies ever). I thought it was good but the re-watch-ability is low. It’s not a genre thing, it’s just that Disney hasn’t really put out anything good since Moana. Frozen 2 is a terrible movie. The one in Colombia was a terrible movie. Raya was insulting.

    There’s a reason that Iger was brought back.

    Also, mentioned many times, Disney doesn’t get to define or legitimize solarpunk any more than they get to define Southeast Asian culture with their generic “age of empires” music score.


  • Sisko was killed in TNG’s universe. Sisko survived in DS9’s universe due to the prophets saving him. The Trek universe diverged at Wolf 359.

    The Dominion War has drastically different outcomes. Existential crisis in one universe where Sisko does a lot of meddling; barely mentioned in the other.

    The biggest change to the cast is that Worf marries Jadzia Dax and becomes Ambassador to the Klingon Empire in one universe; in the other universe, he does a brief inconsequential stint at DS9 (without Sisko), never marries, then returns to the Enterprise E as pretty much the same character from TNG, and at some later point, he gets the Enterprise E destroyed.

    The Picard timeline is set in the universe where Sisko died at Wolf 359.






  • We used Linux a long time ago so it’s not that big of a deal. Linux made the throw away computer that I had (486) usable. We could not afford newer hardware, so my mom and siblings got used to the “penguin.” That was when I was in middle school.

    So I have always been able to just use older hardware that I know works with Linux.

    When my father was getting older and I was early in my career, I thanked him by building for him a new computer, a dual core i3 with 8GB of RAM. I put Kubuntu on it, but it was still in the KDE 4.x days and it ended up being unusable. Somehow he always found a way to crash the panel, or drag things to make the panel unusable. It was the worst thing ever, and I had to switch him from KDE because even when I locked the plasmoids in place, he would find a way to inadvertently drag something wrong and make it unusable. I ended up being tech support for him and it was as bad as fixing malware Windows ME installs back at the turn of the century. Even after KDE 5.x it was the devil and so I stopped supporting it and moved to something simpler.

    I installed Xubuntu and later Ubuntu MATE and both were fine for him for the few years before he faded.

    The kids have grown up on Gnome on Debian and understand it well. The only extension is Caffeine. It’s very simple and consistent and clean. Having the super key as a consistent way to get around is convenient for them. They started with Bam Bam and then moved to Tux Paint and GCompris. Now they are getting older and play Steam games. They have never used a Windows or Mac. They started with buster.

    I put my mom on Fedora Silverblue for her touchscreen laptop because the out of box Pinyin support was great and works everywhere (such a chore to set up in Debian). She also has an iPhone and that is what she uses mostly. I also put my youngest son on Silverblue because of the Pinyin support.

    My wife uses Pop!_OS because she likes tiling and hates dark mode that everything has trended towards. But Pop!_OS finds unique ways to break itself on updates and I’m finding I need to intervene more often than I like, so we are exploring a shift to Debian and a tiling plugin maybe next year when Trixie comes out with the newest Gnome.


  • Not specifically waiting on right to repair, but older electronics have four things going for them:

    1. Very well documented: or you can just ignore the pieces that aren’t documented after so many years. This means they tend to work forever with Debian / Slackware / OpenBSD.
    2. Cheap / easy to find parts: the esoteric stuff falls by the wayside over time.
    3. More reliable: by virtue of the stuff that was going to die due to defects, dying in the first 18 months of use; and
    4. Generally easier to work on.

    So all of my laptops all cost well over $1000 new (EDIT: I’ve never purchased a laptop new in 25 years of using laptops exclusively). But wait a couple of years and suddenly they’re the price of a couple nice meals. Wait a bit longer and you can do a curbside pickup. And when something breaks, I can fix it myself with cheap replacement parts instead of waiting on warranty repairs. Also, going back to the documented thing – used MacBooks used to be great for Linux, but then the butterfly keyboard and T2 chip became a thing and I know to avoid them because that keyboard was never solved and ended up being replaced after multiple class-action lawsuits.

    Time works to our advantage in many ways.