Yes, but that’s not possible.

"…Enemies foreign and domestic."

Yeah I have the world’s smallest astigmatism in my left eye and even that was annoying for me as a kid using it.

I set up Alpine to read my Gmail last summer, and while the nostalgia hit was nice, the browser version was more responsive and useful, cap I went back to that.

Those Vaios had a monumental amount of bloatware slowing them down too.

It wasn’t really fun, and I could never see properly in it.

I think there’s an Arthur Miller quote along the lines of man cannot appreciate sky without earth, nor heaven without hell.

Smart astrophysics people I’ve talked to are excited when we see gamma bursters further out in the universe than before, because that means that the universe is bigger than previously known.

That also does not matter. Spinozan Determinism can be summed up as:

“If it could have happened any other way, it would have.”

Tri-omni God problem. The God that we are told is worthy of worship is

1. Omniscient, and
2. Omnipresent, and
3. Omni-benevolent.

The presence of evil in the world demonstrates that no more than two out of those 3 can possibly be true at the same time. Thus if God does exist, he’s not all that and a bag of gummy bears.

That’s actually my favorite parasite! Toxo really wants to live inside a cat’s digestive tract, so much so that, when a rodent gets it in their blood, the baby toxos produce cysts in the brain (and liver and muscles) that hypnotize the rat into being attracted to cat poop. This leads to the rat hanging around where cats poop, and therefore getting eaten by the cat, and ending up happily back inside the cat’s GI tract.

In the old Star Wars Expanded Universe, there was mention of a Shawken Device which, if operable, could destroy the universe.

This has led me to conclude that the universe probably isn’t infinite.

In an infinite universe, all possible things should be happening at the same time. This would necessarily mean that someone invented a device/mechanism/reaction that could destroy the universe, and successfully activated it, thus ending the universe.

There are only two possible conclusions that I can draw from this thought experiment, which are not mutually exclusive:

1. The universe is not infinite, and/or
2. It is not possible to destroy the universe.

Whatever the most recent one at the moment is.

But seriously, my wife and I watched all of the Marvel movies in release order from Iron Man through Infinity War. I watched a sone of Endgame and turned it off after a bit. Sounds like we made the right choice.

We also stopped Game of Thrones after season 7 episode 4, which appears to be the ideal place to stop to maintain good memories of the show.

If you’re interested in something that doesn’t even exist, and should be more-or-less straightforward:

Music/podcast app that will accept VST plugins (there are many FOSS ones, as well as non-FOSS ones) so that we can compress/limit the sound range on podcasts while in the car. Or even a built-in compressor/limiter that’s based on FOSS compressors.

I was listening to a hysterical podcast episode between three people, but one of mics was way louder than the other two. I had to take it into Pro Tools and fix it myself before listening to it.

There are apps that allow EQ, but none that do actual compression, from what I can tell.

While I don’t have personal experience with this, I did find this from the bad website:

Install pipewire-jack and use JACK audio device in Reaper. Also, yes make sure that wireplumber is installed.

Link to post.

Gentoo. Not an Arch fork, and uses OpenRC by default. I use it and love it. Portage is the best package manager out there, imo.

You can still get binaries of the really annoying things to compile, like Firefox. Otherwise, it’s all source-based.

I’d advise installing it in a VM or on a spare computer first to get your hands around what it is.

In your case, you’ll want to specify the following flags in you makefile:

OpenRC, -systemd

You’ll add a bunch of others in there too depending on architecture and personal priorities.

Follow the handbook. https://www.gentoo.org/get-started/

There’s also Calculate Linux, which is basically Gentoo with a graphical front end, but I think it’s Intel only. CLI is more fun anyway.

Debian Stable or Testing. Runs on anything, and Stable - especially - will not let you down. Ubintu, Elementary and dozens of others are downstream of Debian. Bookworm is a great experience, so why not go to the source?

“Testing” is described as containing packages that are still in the queue to be accepted into Stable.

“Unstable” branch is all the newest stuff, whether it works or not.

If you’re in school for anything computer-related, once you’ve settled on a distro, you could also start playing with Gentoo.

Yup - vst is OS-agnostic.

I work in music and audio post, and everyone I work with would love to be able to use Reaper (or Logic, or Nuendo) instead of Pro Tools, if Pro Tools didn’t have the post industry completely captured in the US.

Reaper is a world-class product, and the team could easily charge 10x as much for the pro licenses, and get it. Stick with Reaper.

There are alternative drum triggers for Linux, I’m sure. Even SPL makes a drum exchanger. There’s got to be one out there.

VMR shouldn’t be a problem to run, I just don’t know what the install process would look like.

I’m pretty sure Airwindows plugs are Linux compatible, probably Audio Obsession too.

In any case, Reaper’s stock plugins are awesome. My only real complaint about them is the EQ cramping in the hi-end, which is typical for stock plugins.

Make the passing grade for a driving test 20% higher than it currently is, and make everyone take a driving test every five years. You get one re-test if you fail.

And once you hit 70, driving tests every year.

Anyone who fails under the new regulations would have been causing a lot of problems on the roads.