Each time I tell this story, I try to make it shorter and more terse.

Circa 2012 or 2013 I bought a Raspberry Pi as part of my ham radio hobby. With that I learned a little bit of Python and Bash, learned to type sudo etc, and kinda liked what I saw. Meanwhile, my Win 7 laptop died right as I was going back to school, so I bought a new laptop. This new laptop had two problems: 1. it came with Windows 8.1 and 2. it was a lemon. For most of the first semester going back to school I had no reliable laptop. The only modern supported computer I had was that Raspberry Pi. And for most of a semester that’s what I did school assignments and email on until I finally bullied Dell into replacing that lemon Inspiron they sold me outright.

So by the time I got a reliable x86 laptop in hand, Linux felt more normal to me than Win 8.1 did. So I fully switched.

That was 10 years ago now, and for the last decade I’ve heard Windows users do nothing but piss and moan about the new holes Microsoft has found to fuck them in.

No, APT is the past 20 years.

Yeah I referenced Clickspring, when oxidizing a part for decorative purposes he would put the part in a brass tray full of brass shavings apparently to function as a thermal mass so that the color comes out evenly.

To expand on this, the rainbow of colors which start at a straw then turn yellow, red, brown and then that vivid blue, are caused by refraction. The oxide layer on the surface is transparent or translucent, and the thickness of the layer determines what wavelength of light it scatters. The hotter it gets, the thicker the oxide layer forms, so you can fairly reliably tell the temperature the metal has been heated to by eye, and you might use different amounts of heating to achieve hard-but-brittle or soft-but-tough.

I’ve even seen it done by Chris of Youtube channel Clickspring for decorative purposes. It’s how he made the steel hardware of his brass clock blue.

Exactly how you temper something the size of a sword using a forge is a bit outside my understanding; I’ve done it with relatively small bits of drill rod to make lathe tools with a gas torch, but that’s about it.

I spent enough time in aviation to know how much drilling it actually takes to teach people emergency procedures. If it’s different than what they usually do, it takes hours of practice. Even something as simple as finding and pulling a different door latch. If you’re stressed, even as stressed as “the doors won’t open the way I’m used to them otherwise everything is okay” your brain will just fail to pivot to the alternate procedures.

Cars got so simple to use in the 90’s. Sure they were simpler machines in the 60’s but fuel injection eliminated chokes and other carburetor issues, automatic transmissions became ubiquitous, children can handle vehicles of this complexity. And now we’re making them more complicated for no actual reason, with electric door latches with manual backups and such, and it’s causing problems.

At least one door should open via a mechanical key and mechanical handle from the outside, and I firmly believe the internal door handles should all function mechanically as well. There shouldn’t be “usually you use a button but in an emergency this thing that looks like a bit of trim is the actual mechanical handle” that shouldn’t be allowable by code.

Can anyone name me one that is a normal fucking car? With a little dial that tells you how fast you’re going that isn’t an LCD display that can’t be read in direct sunlight connected to an internet connected computer that will never get OS updates? With a gear shift lever that moves forward and back or up and down to select park, reverse and drive, not a nipple in the glove box to lick for “Forward,” a knob on the ceiling labeled “H” and to put it in reverse you honk the word REVERSE on the horn? Where the doors have handles that you pull on to open that look like door handles, and locks that have cylinders that accept keys?

Could you imagine the litter box that thing needs?

Yeah I don’t know why people do that.

I’ve said it before, I think Cinnamon is a middle ground between Gnome amd KDE. If you almost like both, go for Cinnamon.

Remember the game people used to play that was something like “type my girlfriend is and then let your phone keyboards auto suggestion take it from there?” LLMs are that.

My S10 is a “light truck.” A Silverado 3500 is not.

Yeah they tried to teach me to touch type in middle school, but it was MSN messenger and using an internet-connected computer as a tool for socializing that got me to actually practice typing.

A lot of those typing things start you off with “here’s the home row. Now type several strings of meaningless text. Okay, now we’ll let you type g and h in addition.” and then add one or two letters at a time to slowly build up typing skills. I’m the third fastest touch typist I know and I got that way hitting on coeds.

Let 'em kill each other.

I wrote a thing about this earlier: Fedora has apparently been infected with an advertising department. Their website has a lot of branding and buzzwords and wanketeering and very few technical details. It never says the word Gnome anywhere. You just have to know “Workstation” and “Silverblue” mean Gnome.

Note to self: Buy stock in deadly neurotoxin manufacturers.

Based on my experience migrating from Mint to Pop!_OS, the next step is migrate back to Mint.

GIMP has a well deserved reputation for responding to “this is not nice to use” with “Good!” There are lots of ways to design image editors, sure. Many of those ways are awful.

Blender used to suck, too. Then they made a decision to improve. Which GIMP is bound and determined not to do. So it needs to go in the box with HURD and someone needs to do better from scratch.

GIMP literally sucks on purpose. Anyone waiting around for GIMP to do what Blender did and suddenly become usable has missed the point.

It is my understanding a lot of people maintain their unhealthy relationship with Windows as a prerequisite for keeping their unhealthy relationship with Adobe.

To be fair, the FOSS community in this area has categorically failed. GIMP’s mission statement is 1. be hateful to use and 2. be capable of editing photographs I guess. Inkscape can’t support CMYK colorspaces so just forget it if there’s an outside chance if it’s going to be printed, Krita can’t draw a circle, Pinta crashes every other thing…hell I wonder if Adobe pays the GIMP team to keep it unusable.