Captain Aggravated

It is amazing to me how often I’ll be presented with some old PC, some Optiplex or Ideapad or some other corporate/consumer sludge box that handles Windows 10 or 11 the way the human digestive system handles wet concrete, put Linux Mint on it and now it feels like my $2000 gaming PC until you really load it.

I don’t want to spend time with my kids. That’s why I didn’t have any.

Follow for more top gear top tips.

I mean, for most people, we hit the level of “does more than you could ever want” in the DDR2 era. For the average Instagram normie, what do they need from a Windows 11 PC that a Windows 7 machine couldn’t do?

Who cares? Nintendo is as backwards as the rest of Japan. If you buy their products, you have no one to blame but yourself.

calling it an e-CVT is almost certainly a marketing mistake, because of how bad CVTs are in automotive service.

My favorite is it says I “might” live in the town in my shipping address. They’re not sure.

This is probably going to be unpopular on Lemmy, The Nuanceless Platform, but IF the data collection is confined to what they show me here, I’m okay. Because I bought some solder, a pair of calipers, and some computer parts from Amazon, they think I “build electronics.” Amazon has a reason to know this about me as a customer, especially if I can see and even manually delete/change it. As humorous as it may be that they apparently think a customer has a flat ass, that’s relevant information if you buy clothing from them, they’ll steer you away from the bubble butt shorts that you’ll almost certainly return.

The problem is when they want to start installing apps on my phone, new devices in my house, with microphones and radars that are always collecting data about what I do, what I say, where I am. THAT’S the part we need to be dismembering executives over.

Mine is pretty straightforward, “builds electronics” “has precision tools” “likely has a french press” (I do, I bought it on Amazon), “prioritizes high-speed data transfer”, “Probably has a computer system with internal expansion” (I bought an NVMe SSD from Amazon once), “Likely lives in (the town in my saved shipping address)”

So surveillance. Much sleuthing.

I’ve had women actually gasp when told I used to shop at Wal-Mart at 2AM so I can’t tell if you’re being serious or not.

I was about to say “I know! That’s the beauty of it!” but didn’t they integrate Copilot into Notepad?

use Vim.

See?

How FUCKING hard is it to use like, notepad?

I could start with an empty tank, fill it in 5 minutes or less, drive to empty, fill it again in 5 minutes or less, and still spend less than half the time refueling as an EV. And I can much more accurately predict the range of said vehicle because ambient temperature especially cold doesn’t significantly effect range.

But by the almighty power of not listening, that can’t matter. So manufacturers can continue to not listen to customers, customers will continue to not buy their products, and dick all gets accomplished.

It’s a dumb take on the face of it; splash n dash trips are extremely common, that’s why they put points of sale on the pump stands. It’s common enough for people to want to pay at the pump rather than ever walk into the store. Extremely common weekly errand.

Now, with an EV, likely charged at home every night thus starting most trips with a full battery, that should sharply reduce routine visits to gas stations. That leaves refueling on longer journeys. Which varies.

Me personally traveling alone, I’ll still do quick splash n dash stops on medium length journeys, say 200 miles or so? At interstate speeds that’s about 3 hours of traveling, I’ll use the restroom before setting out and one 5 minute fuel stop will do the distance.

Now, if there is a planned stop, say on a 400 mile trip, I’m gonna stop, bathroom, grab a snack and a drink, and fuel the car. That’s maybe a 15-20 minute stop to use the bathroom, grab a gatorade and a bag of funyuns from the convenience store, pay the clerk, walk back outside, then stand there at the pump while the car fills.

I will grant you, you can plug in your EV and have it charging while you’re in the store, but none are going to charge in 15 minutes. So you’re going to end up just standing there, or sitting there, while it finishes charging. With nothing at all to do. Even simulating the same behavior as with a gas car, stand there next to the charging cable staring at the price going up for ~5 minutes, the car’s not going to have taken on enough power.

I have refueled my car at night at unattended gas stations. Sitting there for a couple hours while a car charges enough to reach the next station sounds real fun.

I don’t know what you mean by “Nothing” but, I have often failed to have any luck with the automatic partitioning, and I end up doing the partitioning manually. Especially since I almost always separate / and /home onto different physical drives. And doing that, you have to lay out a /boot/efi partition. Without doing that it’ll go through the motions but you won’t get a bootable system.

what’s it actually capable of nowadays?

I’ve got a Borg Backup server running on a Pi 2. I’m starting to play with Home Assistant on a Pi 4.

That Pi 4 has had a few lives so far. It served as a rather mediocre desktop running Ubuntu MATE for awhile. At the time I found RPi’s “Pixel” desktop to be pretty unlivable, almost everything they’d done to LXDE to make Pixel was an exercise in breaking LXDE. MATE was reasonably functional. Building a Ryzen 3600 machine was of course a vast improvement.

I then transitioned that Pi 4 to an HTPC running OSMC (basically Debian Kodi). I had a couple of problems with it: 1. to put audio out the built-in audio jack, you had to edit some config file to enable the option in the menu. Because this is Linux, a Linux developer can’t make his microdick hard enough to penetrate the layer of crust sealing the anus of his pinhole punctured blow-up doll if he ships a GUI that’s good enough. 2. That entry in that config file kept either undoing itself, or what the system was looking for changed. I swear I’d put that line in, it would work for awhile, something would happen, and then I’d have to go in and change the line that’s still in there to some other syntax to get it working again. 3. Driving a 4k60 display was another problem that kept unsolving itself. Sometimes it could do it through one HDMI port but not the other, oh no wait it’s max 4k30, oh wait it can do 1080p60 though, oh but it’s still driving the monitor at 4k30 in such a way that trying to play back 1080p60 gets out of sync with the audio, pauses for several seconds, then resumes. If you’ve got a 720p television and you intend to use its internal speakers maybe it’ll work.

Seems to run Home Assistant okay though the SD card is probably doomed.

Never forget what made sites like Reddit popular in the first place.

you mean r/jailbait?

Reminds me of Robin Williams mocking Dubya. “A lot of our imports come from other countries.”

I have a better question: at least some of those “driverless” cars are at least some of the time remote controlled by people in Southeast Asia or Pacifica. Do they have valid US driving licenses?

A slim majority, about 300 out of 535, figuring the date of creation of email at 1971.

For additional context, you know that infamous clip of Katie Couric being utterly baffled about how an email address works before asking her producer “Could you explain what ‘internet’ is?” That aired on January 24, 1994. Which, I can understand, the world wide web was switched on in August of 1991, not 3 years prior, so there wasn’t a lot of demand for internet connectivity among the masses yet. It was about the time for TV personalities to learn about email live on air.

That was 32 years ago, when email was already 23 years old.