The most important things are that they happen on a regular basis, at least biweekly, and that it’s possible to have a conversation while doing them or that there are at least enough breaks to have them. So, here’s a list of examples:

• Table top RPGs
• Fiber arts circle
• Hiking group
• Choir/music ensemble
• Ballroom/swing dancing
• Soup kitchen volunteer
• Shibari practice
• Martial arts
• Recreational team sports
• Community theater
• Fraternal organizations e.g. Elks, Kiwanis, etc

Ubuntu is good, actually. It has basically the widest out of the box hardware and software support of any distribution, a decent default UI and an easy installer. Its downsides are that it has a reputation as baby’s first Linux so you don’t get any hipster cred and some people don’t like that it uses snap as a package format for some things, including Firefox.

If we could do it in a peaceful and democratic way that doesn’t lead to an immediate second civil war, yeah, I’d probably vote for it. It seems to have worked out well enough for Czechia and Slovakia.

Eh, California is mostly water independent. Most of the water that is “imported” comes from the Colorado River and is used for the least productive and least necessary agriculture in the state. Yeah, figuring out how to handle however much water would be lost if California were to secede would be an issue, but it wouldn’t be an impossible situation.

I’m pretty certain the first computer I installed Linux on was a Pentium 75 with 4MB of RAM. I know I ran it on some 486s booting off floppys at work. We were at 10,000 feet and couldn’t trust the lifespan of spinning rust.

Every three months for about 30 minutes I’m forced to use windows in a VM. It’s so awful dealing with the pop up’s, forced updates, and background bullshit that I feel the need for a shower after.

USB-3 over USB-A upstream sockets often put out 2.4GHz noise which will interfere with many wireless dongles, including those commonly used for wireless mice and keyboards. The solution is to get a USB2 extension cable or hub for your dongles.

Intel knew this would be a problem, but ignored it.

As is typical for the US, 1/3 are deeply aware, 1/3 are in full “patriotic” support, and 1/3 are too distracted by the latest TikTok dance to notice.

Thanks, I hate it.

I remember playing Mortal Kombat at my friends house on Saturday mornings on one of those. And of course we knew the blood kode.

I’ve had small Debian servers such as a RaspPi or a NUC that I’ve never updated after the initial setup and they were still working perfectly when I finally turned them off to move. If you don’t want to update a Linux system, don’t. Maybe setup auto security updates if it’s going to be exposed to the raw internet and running some open servers.

I understood several of those words.

I recently rewatched all three, and they all hold up as I remember. The first one is great, the second could be great if there was a bit more editing to trim down some overly long monologues, and the third one is a bit meh.

In The Matrix 2, Trinity uses nmap to check for an ssh exploit, then cracks it using a cli tool, all from Linux.

Edit: The ssh exploit was a real, known vulnerability at the time.

As a point of reference, I built a 32TB Synology last year. I took me an afternoon to get it done, plus set up Plex media server, all the arrs and friends, a backup server and a couple other things. Since then maintenance has consisted of remembering to hit the “update containers” button once a month or so. I should probably automate that part but just haven’t bothered yet.

A lot of NAS are capable of hosting containerized services. The Synology DS series, for example, can run everything you’ve mentioned and so much more. For a relatively gentle into check out https://mariushosting.com/

Thanks! I’ll see if I can find a windows machine and give it a try. I can’t pass it through to the windows VM I keep around, since it doesn’t show up as a USB device at all.

The bluetooth connection definitly works:

$ bluetoothctl info F4:6A:D7:9A:42:3A
Device F4:6A:D7:9A:42:3A (public)
	Name: Xbox Wireless Controller
	Alias: Xbox Wireless Controller
	Appearance: 0x03c4 (964)
	Icon: input-gaming
	Paired: yes
	Bonded: yes
	Trusted: yes
	Blocked: no
	Connected: yes
	LegacyPairing: no
	UUID: Vendor specific           (00000001-5f60-4c4f-9c83-a7953298d40d)
	UUID: Generic Access Profile    (00001800-0000-1000-8000-00805f9b34fb)
	UUID: Generic Attribute Profile (00001801-0000-1000-8000-00805f9b34fb)
	UUID: Device Information        (0000180a-0000-1000-8000-00805f9b34fb)
	UUID: Battery Service           (0000180f-0000-1000-8000-00805f9b34fb)
	UUID: Human Interface Device    (00001812-0000-1000-8000-00805f9b34fb)
	Modalias: usb:v045Ep0B13d0501
	Battery Percentage: 0x64 (100)

I don’t have another device to plug the USB port into, but it can at least get power from it.

Exact same story here. I had lost evenings before I got mine, now I can enjoy a couple hours to myself after the kids are down.

Huh. Thief 1&2, System Shock 1&2 and Deus Ex make up half of my top 10 games list. But multiplayer? I donno, maybe if there is also a good single player campaign I’ll be interested. I’d be happy with a modern Thief 1&2 remaster. NewDark and TheDarkMod are great, but I’d love to have full raytracing in Thief.