No one that works in the industry is going to drop Adobe, because there’s no other functional alternative that offers an even remotely similar feature set. A lot of the files I get from clients are .ai (Illustrator) or .indd (InDesign) files, and I have to use the appropriate programs to open them, and the most up-to-date versions of those programs, or else I end up missing parts of their files.

Users that are 100%, fully independent don’t have to worry about any of that. But those people are rare.

Deviant Olam is another good one for physical security. After seeing a few of his videos on gun “safes”, I looked into genuine gun safes (TRTL 30x6 or better, and/or DoD-approved weapons containers) with S&G mechanical locks, and the prices are eye watering. An S&G lock by itself ain’t too bad–about $600, IIRC–but the safe body itself was $15k+, easy. …Without shipping included, since there’s no fucking way I’m getting that into my basement myself. Most gun “safes” are not even UL-listed Residential Security Containers, and you get into $2000+ for one that meets that basic, very, very minimum level of protection. (Yes, I looked in the local gun stores that carry them.) The fact that most gun “safes” aren’t capable of resisting an 18" prybar that’s used continuously for 15 minutes is not a pleasant thought to think about.

Honestly, if I were in your shoes, I’d probably get an Apple device.

Sadly, I also don’t like spending money. :P You used to be able to make Hackintoshes, but Apple tends to break them with every software update.

I had been thinking about getting an IoT Enterprise LTSC release of Windows and manually adding the components that I needed. Might still do that with dual boot.

There are a lot of ways to get around that, such as:

I’m doing all of that except the last one already. As has been noted in many other places, Windows itself is now in the business of serving ads directly, and it looks like that’s getting harder and harder to disable. I managed to mostly lock down the Pro release of Win 10 that I’m on right now, but Win 11 will make that much, much harder. If it weren’t for security issues surrounding end of product life, I wouldn’t switch versions at all.

C’est la mort.

But yeah, I’ll def. look for a user-friendly version of Linux when I build my next system in a few months.

I have to use Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, and Acrobat Pro every day for my day job. I have to keep up-to-date with my versions, because clients send me files that use features in the latest releases, and not being up-to-date means that things don’t render correctly. (I’m super-pissed that I have to update since Adobe dropped all support for Pantone colors abut a year (?) ago.)

I use Corel Painter 2022 and a Wacom pen display for fun. My guess is that a pen display might get a little weird in Linux, but the one I have is not cutting edge at least.

Yeah, don’t use that for regular work, that’s an uber-paranoid distro that’s intentionally locked down, which means things are likely going to be more difficult to get working.

I know, I know, but I liked being functionally untrackable online, and not getting ads shoved down my throat (…despite working in advertising…) all the time. It’s neat, but almost everything online seems to have privacy-invading features so deeply embedded that the browser built into Tails just can’t use them at all.

Allow me to piggyback on this a bit, s’il vous plait.

Is there a Linux distribution that will run Adobe CC out of the box, games from Steam, and VR headsets? I need a new desktop badly, but I need to be able to use Adobe products as part of my job. (No, I can’t switch to GNU products, because I get files from clients, and I have to be able to work to industry standards.) I’ve used Tails before, which is not a user-friendly product, and it doesn’t play nicely with any other software.

Interesting. I’ve noticed that a lot of my text messages to my partner fail to send as well, and I also swear frequently and voluminously. I should test this and see if this is what is going on with my carrier.

Yearly bug and pest deterrent spraying around exteriors of buildings

I wanted to add to this because it might catch someone else.

I live in a cedar cabin in the mountains. The wood is untreated on the inside. Cedar is not usually attractive to insects that eat wood, but, well… Every year since we moved there, we’d get small amounts of frass (chewed-up bits of wood) from insects eating the exposed roof beams (!!!) of our house. I would spray the beams with permethrin, a bunch of dead ant-looking things would be on the floor the next few days, and that would be it for the year.

This year I called an exterminator, since it keeps happening. He said that it wasn’t termites (yay!), but thought that it was some kind of beetle. (Powder post beetles are a huge problem in our area.) He said we had two options: we could either fumigate the entire house (cost: about $10k, since the whole house would need to be tented), or we could paint all the woodwork in the hose with a 1:1 solution of Bora-Care and water. Bora-Care is a disodium octaborate tetrahydrate and glycerin solution, and should poison the wood for pests, without being toxic to people or animals once it’s dried. (I may also have to drill the beams in inject a similar product in order to get deep enough penetration.)

This should be a one-and-done process; I should not need to repeat it.

I moved to the south from the north. Everyone here wants to hug.

Please kill me.

The most?

Fire.

The best guesses right now is that our ability to use fire–and eventually create fire–allowed us to evolve the brains that we have now, because cooking food significantly decreases the energy needed to process it, which allows more energy to be used by your brain. And our brain burns a lot of calories. Cooking food is essentially a preliminary digestion process. Without our brain, the modern world as we know it never exists. Hell, we never even evolve past troops of apes.

Sure. It would make planning for retirement a lot easier; I’d have a pretty good idea of how much I needed to save and invest.

No.

Yes, I wish it was more socially acceptable, but I still wouldn’t be physically affectionate. Because autism.

When you look at large-scale studies of OTC vitamins, you quickly realize that the absorption on most of them is very poor; they don’t really move the needle very much. In most cases, you will be better off if you address vitamin and micronutrient deficiencies through diet rather than attempting supplementation.

Amphetamines both reduce appetite and increase how much energy you expend. Oh, and they’re also super addictive. So, yeah, don’t use those. I was definitely thinner when I was a smoker, but I had much worse health.

Not Old Yeller, or Where The Red Fern Grows?

Honestly, the only people I know that use 2, 4-dinitrophenol (DNP) regularly are body builders, and they use incredibly dangerous drugs on the reg anyways, so a diet pill that can kill you if you fuck up is just par for the course. There ain’t many old bodybuilders…

Here’s just a brief overview of people that have died from it. Since dose is dependent on weight–2-10mg/kg of bodyweight per day, depending on a lot of factors–you can’t safely buy pills as a one-dose-fits-all; you would have make your own capsules, and probably have a pretty solid understanding of geometric dilution.

So, yeah. It works. But it’s Russian roulette.

Any [emphasis added] weight loss pill

Nope. There’s one that actually works really well. It’s called 2,4-dinitrophenol. It works by fucking up the way that your body makes/uses ATP; instead of being available for cellular respiration, it gets wasted as heat. It’s like constantly doing cardio; you’re burning tons of calories without doing anything. Users have reported losing up to seven pounds of fat–not water–in a week. The downside is that this heat can lead to hyperthermia if you take too much, and since the half-life is quite long, by the time you start seeing the negative side effects from OD’ing–about a week after you OD–it’s way to late, and your brain cooks. Oh, and you’re gonna sweat like a watermelon at a Baptist barbecue the whole time.

It was thought that it also caused cataracts, but that seems to have been incorrect.

It’s been banned since the 40s, I think, as a diet pill, because people had a tendency to take too much and die. If you know where to look, you can still find it. I wouldn’t recommend it for the overwhelming majority of people though.

Yearly bug and pest deterrent spraying around exteriors of buildings

No, this actually does something.

I live in an all-wood house. (Literally a log cabin.) I’ve had issues with carpenter ants. Spraying permethrin around the house, and on their trails when I see them, has largely eliminated the issue. It’s a pretty concentrated solution, about 10:1, and has to be reapplied every few months (it does wash off, eventually), but it def. does the job.

You can get a less concentrated treatment for clothing if you’re going to be in areas with extremely high levels of mosquitos and ticks.

Any product peddled by a megachurch (see the Baker bucket for a great example)

Some megachurches have sold freeze-dried prepper food. It’s not a grift per se, because it’s perfectly edible freeze dried food, but it’s overpriced for what you’re getting.

I’m D deficient. I took D supplements for a long time; m D levels never significantly increased.

one of those all-in-one $2,000+ fancy machines that mounts on your wall.

Actually about $4000 to start, plus the cost of the weight plates, bars (I prefer Ivanko), Iron Grip dumbbell sets, and so on.

In almost all cases, it’s cheaper to have a gym membership at a decent hardcore gym.

There are a lot of things you simply can’t do with bodyweight alone. And you can’t do it with just a couple kettlebells and adjustable dumbbells either. Having a lot of strength and muscle mass when you’re young is a very strong predictor of health in old age, since past the age of about 40, people just start losing mass and strength; the more you have before that, the better off you are.