Linux gamer, retired aviator, profanity enthusiast

  • 6 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 20th, 2023

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  • Businesses are greedy. They’re going to squeeze the turnip from every angle they can think of to get every drop of blood out they can.

    Consumers are rock chewing stupid. They will choose fancy branding and ease of setup every single time because most of them are allergic to learning how the things in their houses work. People will sign their rights away in EULAs they don’t even bother to read because it’s too boring, they’re not going to stop watching Longmire or Stranger Things just because they added commercials.

    We live in a world where fascism is on the rise. The Republicans want to jail or kill women who have abortions or miscarriages. Here in the smart phone age, women often use apps to track, record and predict their periods. These apps upload this data to a server somewhere and store it in a database. Wouldn’t the Republicans love to get their hands on that database to see if they can find women they can jail or kill? The solution: Get on Tumblr and ask men to download these apps and start uploading junk data to them, because getting women to switch to FOSS software that doesn’t upload their data to devices they don’t control is considered too much to ask. They won’t learn how to manage their own software and data to literally save their lives. They’re absolutely not giving up Netflix.









  • I have persuaded The Sims to run on Linux; though if the game wasn’t purchased through Steam it can take some doing. No experience with Cities Skylines. Stardew Valley runs very well, I think ConcernedApe releases Linux native versions. My understanding is Roblox deliberately prevents itself from running on Linux. Minecraft Java edition runs on Linux and you’ll find launchers for it in most package managers. An open source alternative called Minetest or recently changed to Luanti exists, but I know it’s not the one his friends play and that’s mostly the point. Can’t say for Stellaris or Slime Rancher.










  • Young people want to live their own lives, and part of that is choosing their furniture. You finally get a home of your own and the freedom to furnish it how you want and…oh I’m supposed to have all this old crap I don’t really like.

    Then your dad starts up with his shit. “Don’t throw out that ratty yellowed old doily. I remember that from when I was a kid.” “Okay, you take it.” Here’s a cabinet of gramma’s china. They bought it for her out of a mail order catalog in the 30’s so it’s more sacred than god’s glans.

    We’re also entering the era when the grandparents who are dying and leaving behind their furniture bought all their furniture from Sears and it’s not much better than stuff you can get at Ikea, 40 years out of date, and seen 40 years of tobacco tar, cat piss and grampa farts.

    I mean, you don’t ask yourself why the heirs don’t wear their grandparents’ old clothes.


  • My understanding of things like the IME is that its reason for being is mostly benign, it lets enterprise-level IT departments do things like boot computers from across the network and stuff like that. It has no real use to home customers on their private PCs, but it’s included on all systems to simplify engineering; it handles a lot of the early boot process. And it’s always running. The privacy enthusiasts out there who carry a copy of TAILS on their keychains just in case aren’t fond of the fact that there’s a proprietary OS with unrestricted access to memory and networking just sitting there with no way of auditing or monitoring what it was doing.

    This has been a thing for AWHILE now, and the whole coreboot thing…Intel, board manufacturers etc. keep their data so locked up that it’s a challenge to build anything that works, so it’s a miracle we have things like Coreboot at all. They largely concentrate on laptops IIRC, and it’s rare to see full fat desktop motherboards that work with Coreboot.