And straws. My plastic straw isn’t the problem.

If your don’t recycle your aluminum and other cans though, you’re a bad person and you should feel bad about it.

Oh no! Another DE to choose from? How awful!

It sounds really counter intuitive, but wake up slower. It’s really easy for me to startle awake just enough completely turn off my alarm, not just snooze, and fall back asleep hard. If I wake up to an alarm that slowly increases in volume from barely audible, then I tend to wake up much more gently and slower. That little bit of extra time means makes it much harder to fall back asleep and by the time I reach for my alarm to silence or even snooze it. I’m clear headed enough to not either actually snooze the alarm instead of turning it off or be awake enough to not fall back asleep at all. Going from awake straight to sitting up or standing is super stressful and just makes everything awful. Being mostly awake before my head even leaves the pillow is much less stressful.

1 kilobyte = 1024 bytes. This is a hill I’ll die on.

The byte isn’t even the base unit. Wanna talk about 1000 bits? Fine, that would be totally useless and confusing, but at least it would be consistent. Using decimal prefixes to describe binary numbers is just nonsensical. It’s like trying to round off calendar days to a decimal approximation. Is the metric year 300 days? Fuck no, that’s dumb,and so is saying a kilobyte is only 1000 bytes. The prefix is just a short hand, it’s obvious that its precise meaning can and should change based on the unit, especially when forcing a decimal number system fails to be useful.

And furthermore, what about radians? Both radians and kilobytes are basically just a grouping mechanism for counting something else. Nobody talks about radians in decimal terms, always multiples or fractions of Pi. Kilobytes aren’t really any different conceptually.

How do you think they got these metrics? People aren’t going down there to do science or tourism without being able to communicate back home. It is almost always just statistics from the identifying header information of web traffic. It’s not at all uncommon for web traffic from Linux programs to not identify the operating system. I know in my experience identifying as Linux in a browser would be more likely to cause problems than offer any benefit.

We’re talking about the history of racist voter disenfranchisement and this literacy test was a prime example of that from our recent past. Although national IDs exist they are VERY far from common and they are often relatively difficult, time consuming, and expensive to get.

Nope. Tried that. Tried DIR in a command window too. But I never specified even what version of Windows I was running, so I’m a little unclear why you’re trying to troubleshoot a problem I was experiencing on windows nearly a decade ago. I guess this is what be mansplained too feels like.

Yeah, it’s super weird. I once named a file with mixed case, but one of the letters was the wrong case. Renaming the file didn’t work at first. Renaming a file named PAscalCase.txt to PascalCase.txt resulted in no change to the filename. Windows continued to show it as PAscalCase.txt. I had to rename it to something totally different with different characters entirely, then rename it again to get it right.

Coffee is also a seed, not a bean.

I have setup and run what are basically HTPC’s for decades now. Kodi running on a Debian based Linux distribution or just Debian is a solid recommendation and has lots of support for infrared remotes, but kodi can be very fiddly to setup properly. It will work, but don’t expect it to work “out of the box”. You’ll probably still need a mouse and keyboard for anything outside Kodi. You’ll have to read a bunch of documentation and do some customizing to get the most out of Kodi. It’s still easier than most other setups, but it will feel very frustrating if it’s your introduction to Linux too.

I’ve moved to using my HTPC primarily as a server. Once you get comfortable with linux and docker, setting up new server services like Jellyfish, Plex, and and *ARR stack is relatively trivial. The advantage here being that you can serve your media to any device that can connect to your server. For me that means one library of media to share with any TV in my house, any mobile device I own, and any friends and family computer savvy enough to download the right apps and setup an account. If your network (and your Internet connection) isn’t reliable this kind of setup may not work very well for you at all. For example, Plex account authentication will fail is you don’t have Internet. Jellyfin and Kodi fair better when Internet is only available occasionally or is unreliable.

My least favorite part of using Kodi was setting up the remote. Even worse was trying to configure controllers for retro gaming. The situation is MUCH better than it was, but is still far from easy. I was kind of able to side step the remote problem because now I can just use the remote for the TV (if it supports the Plex or Jellyfin apps) or another streaming stick like fire stick, Nvidia shield, or Roku. My Nvidia shield can pair with any Bluetooth controller and runs RetroArch so that problem was side stepped too. ROMs can be copied via samba shares or loaded directly by a USB drive.

TLDR: Kodi has built-in support for IR, but streaming sticks are cheap, and in the long run I found setting up a server was more versatile, more reliable, and less stressful. I know, I also hate it when people ask for a specific solution and others recommend asking a different question. But in this case, my experience is that IR remotes suck, are flaky, and not worth it if there is any other option.

Do you mind sharing what brand retail UPS weren’t lasting a year?

I’m dealing with similar brownouts and also an area with lots of lightning. I got about 5 years out of my UPS batteries. Wondering if I’ve just been lucky.

Have you read “South of the Pumphouse” by Les Clay pool? It’s not non-fiction, but it was the first book I thought of when I saw NOFX in your comment.

Does “The Electric Kool aid Acid Test” count as non-fiction?

“Sensors” sounds like a magical solution that hasn’t been thought through, but the marketing guys already sold it and won’t listen to the engineers explaining how difficult it is to actually build such a thing.

Ok, but like half the time I say “Ow!” because I hurt myself, it didn’t really hurt that much and I was just surprised. Same reaction, reacting to the event and not the actual pain. If I really did actually hurt myself, it’s usually followed by either silence, obscenities, or a short silence followed by a very loud obscenity.

Likely more than just removed. I’m pretty sure that I left one too many scathing reviews of products that were defective by design or outright frauds, now I can’t leave any reviews.

Why bother telling retailers how to package them? Just hold the card companies financially responsible for the theft/scams and force them to honor what the customer paid for in the store. I’m sure the card companies will figure out on their own how to stop the thefts and scams, once they are actually responsible for the money.

I feel your pain.

I edit the URL to remove the first part of the URL and replace it with “http://old.reddit.com”. That still seems to work, last I checked, but I fully expect it to be killed any day now.

If they were really interested in fair competition, they’d have everyone compete in the nude as the greek Gods intended.

They’re not exactly high tech, but my wool blend socks have treated my feet just fine through many hot and often wet miles of wear. They’re pretty frictionless inside my boot, they keep my feet from feeling wet even when soaked with sweat, and I don’t think I’ve gotten a single blister since I made the switch. And only because you asked “where do I buy?”, the Kirkland brand wool blend ones are my favorite.

Yeah, that sounds less than ideal.