My current desktop came from a co-worker, but you can also put the word out to family and friends that you’re interested in their old machines. Most people are happy to give them away because otherwise it costs them money to dispose of electronics. If nothing else, you could post on Nextdoor or a local Facebook page that you’re looking for a Win10 machine that would otherwise be trashed.

Older machines also mean dirt-cheap upgrades. The desktop I have came with a Celeron cpu. I dropped in an i7 for $10 from ebay, and recently upgraded it to 24GB of ram with sticks I had pulled from other free systems. When you switch to Linux you’re not wasting horsepower on Microsoft spyware crap, so this machine does just fine for my needs (although I’m also not trying to play games).

Later that day, the Russian space agency Roscosmos confirmed that the lander had harmlessly impacted the Indian Ocean at 6:24 a.m. UTC west of Jakarta, Indonesia. The condition of the craft is unknown.

Someone trusts flying in these conditions? That’s insane.

The article makes it sound like they expected the US Dollar to get stronger after the tariff announcements. Why would anyone presume such a ridiculous thing? Trump’s tariffs were never going to do anything but drive away businesses and make other countries stop trading with us.

Especially Win10 computers :-)

This was played before sentencing. It doesn’t say it here, but the article I read earlier today stated that because of this video, the judge issued a sentence greater than the maximum recommended by the State. If true, then it really calls into question the sentence itself and how impartial the judge was.

Crepuscular rays: shafts of light which are seen just after the sun has set and which extend over the western sky radiating from the position of the sun below the horizon. They form only when the sun has set behind an irregularly shaped cloud or mountain which lets the rays of the sun pass through a cloud in bands.

In this case, I think the light is making it look like the cloud is dark bands, when in fact the entire cloud is probably all dark but being lit up by the rays. (And yes, this affect can be seen both at sunrise and sunset.)

What a very Russian thing to do…

Assume you meant 3 1/2" floppies? Seems like you’re confusing these with the 5 1/4" size.

Funny how Trump keeps claiming rising economies are always his doing, despite who is president, but failing economies are someone else’s fault even when he is the president who caused it.

And of course the great economies under other presidents are always “terrible” while the downward-spiraling economies under his own leadership are always “the best in the world”. The man simply has no concept of reality.

Haha ok, you got me there!

Where are these lower costs that Trump keeps hallucinating?

Since I’m 57 and have paid some attention to how I’ve changed over the years, perhaps I can add a little insight? Quite frankly, you get tired. I’ve been on the scene since the home computer revolution took off and I’ve seen so many things come and go. It’s not that we can’t learn new forms of communication, etc., but rather that after awhile you start asking yourself why bother when the “next big thing” is going to be another forgotten memory in 5-10 years. It’s not you who are being criticized for wasting items, it’s all the people like you over the years who have collectively wasted so much. Our brains remember all those things and they add up, causing us to fixate on the wrong info (although this last bit isn’t really something that comes with age).

Last night I re-watched The Fifth Element. Afterwards I was thinking about when it first came out in 1997. My god, that’s 28 years ago. I remember things from the 90’s. I remember things from the 80’s and from the 70’s. I remember that after 9/11 the 00’s were boring as fuck. But when you put all of that together, and start thinking about how much you’ve experience… holy hell that’s quite a lot to face squarely. And if I tell you something inappropriate about a co-worker… what? HR will pull me away from the monotony and have a talk with me? Experience tells us what we can get away with, and sometimes it’s fun just to see what people’s reactions are.

So yeah, I’ve observed these things, but I refuse to be pulled down into misery and monotony. Keep yourself busy doing things that you enjoy. Never be afraid to go down the rabbit hole and learn crazy new things. I’m working on assembling a couple swords from parts, looking into bluing some steel pieces I made. And just this week I learned about “rust bluing” which is a crazy concept but is easy to do at home. I learned something new and fun, and I refuse to ever stop learning. I may not care about Instagram or Facebook, but I installed Signal on my phone and I love being able to create my own 3D models and printing them out.

The future is always amazing. Age doesn’t make us care less about it, it just makes us more choosy in what parts are worth investing in. If you don’t want to become a listless old geezer, then don’t… all you need to do is keep enjoying the wonders of the world.

And Trump is probably dumb enough to believe that the characters “MS13” which were added to the photo are actually part of his tattoo.

As discussed elsewhere, the Proud Boys are cowards who hide their affiliation in symbology, while members of MS13 have always had direct and unmistakable tattoos. Since Trump is so deeply ingrained with the Proud Boys, it is believed they are the ones who offered up this laughable symbolic meaning of the tattoos with the theory that since they hide who they are, everyone else must do this also.

If you want to pretend like there’s any hidden symbology to the tattoos, why try so hard to make something that isn’t there? Let’s just stick with the first letter of each tat: MSCS, which could also stand for Master of Science in Computer Science – an aspiring goal for someone who is trying to make a better life for his family. The point is, anybody can make shit up out of nothing and come up with something that “verifies” the answer you wanted, but that interpretation is still meaningless.

Didn’t you see the Tesla ad on the Whitehouse front lawn?

This is the Mastodon link, but he is quoting a NYT article (from which I’ll quote the meat)…

https://tech.lgbt/@joshuajfriedman.com@bsky.brid.gy/114321303656287669

Immigration judges are employees of the executive branch, not the judiciary, and often approve the Homeland Security Department’s deportation efforts. It would be unusual for such a judge, serving the U.S. Attorney General, to grapple with the constitutional questions raised by Mr. Khalil’s case. She would also run the risk of being fired by an administration that has targeted dissenters.

“This court is without jurisdiction to entertain challenges to the validity of this law under the Constitution,” Judge Comans said as she delivered her ruling, apparently reading from a written statement.

I was just reading a comment on Mastodon that immigration judges are not actual judges but are employed by the Administration. Which means they can’t even rule on the constitutionality of the information provided – so they’re really nothing but puppets to make the process appear to be legal.

So the next question is… can the ruling be appealed before a real judge?

Ah that’s good. Disk space isn’t an issue here, I have around 105TB of storage, but my desktop is an older machine with only 24GB of memory so being lightweight is somewhat of a requirement.

Agreed on Debian stable. Long ago I tried running servers under Ubuntu… that was all fine until the morning I woke up to find all of the servers offline because a security update had destroyed the network card drivers. Debian has been rock-solid for me for years and buying “commercial support” basically means paying someone else to do google searches for you.

I don’t know if I’ve ever tried flatpaks, I thought they basically had the same problems as snaps?

I’m not sure about other distros, I’ve just heard a lot of complaints about snaps under Ubuntu. Cura was the snap I tried on my system that constantly crashed until I found a .deb package. Now it runs perfectly fine without sucking up a ton of system memory. Thunderbird is managed directly by debian, and firefox-esr is provided by a Mozilla repo so they all get installed directly instead of through 3rd-party software (although I think I tried upgrading Firefox to a snap version once and it was equally unstable). Now I just avoid anything that doesn’t have a direct installer.