Random Dent

I think I posted this before in some other thread, but one time back when I used to use Ubuntu, I opened my laptop and the screen was upside-down. Everything worked perfectly, but just upside-down. I went through every display setting I could find, trawled through forums for hours (on a different, non upside-down computer) and got absolutely nowhere. It was at the point where I was thinking I’ll probably have to reformat and start over and this will forever be a mystery.

Then I accidentally solved it when my Playstation controller battery got low and I plugged it into the nearest USB port to charge, which was my laptop. As soon as I plugged it it, the screen flipped back the right way. As it turned out, Ubuntu was talking to the controller and had for some reason interpreted the gyroscope movement as ‘rotate screen’ the last time I charged it. After a couple of minutes of waving the controller around and watching the desktop spin while going “huh”, I just unplugged it when it the right way round and crisis averted!

Yeah my Kobo is great. Plays nicely with Calibre and DeDRM, reads pretty much every eBook format, and doesn’t seem to be sketchy about privacy as far as I can tell.

Well, 50% of young people asked were willing to admit to their piracy lol

UK here. We just switched to a Labour government a few months ago and it turns out that the previous Conservative government blew a £22 billion hole in the economy and didn’t tell anyone, so now the new government have to deal with it by raising taxes which is pissing everybody off.

In particular, they’re changing the way inheritance tax works which is screwing over farmers, so they’re now doing mass protests.

Yeah when I joined IIRC I just had to write a sentence about why I wanted to join. The communism thing made me laugh though!

I used to have complete anarchy in my Downloads folder, but I’ve since reformed my ways and now my Downloads folder is clean and my Videos and Documents folders are complete anarchy instead.

For me it’s Kingdom Come: Deliverance. I just gave up again after bouncing off it for like the third time. On paper it’s exactly the sort of thing I should be into, but that game just doesn’t respect your time.

I probably will end up with tons eventually, I haven’t been doing it for too long and I don’t sign up for many things lol

I use addy.io to create aliases for different things, and then set up filters in Thunderbird to mark them as they come in so, for example, if I make an account at xyz.com and then I get a bunch of unrelated spam marked as coming from xyz.com, then I know they’ve been selling my info.

I probably have about a dozen or so aliases currently, but they’re pretty loosely organized.

I think it could be good for something like an office, where it might be beneficial to have everyone on an identical setup that’s immutable so they can’t mess with it, and can (presumably) be duplicated by just copying a config file.

I assume the con would be that if something breaks in an update, it probably breaks for everyone. But by the same token, the solution should fix it for everyone too.

For me, the main blocker was just getting my head around the concept of it, as it seems like such a wild idea for a distro. I still don’t think I’m 100% there, but I have enough down now to cobble a working system together at least.

For anyone unfamliar:

TempleOS (formerly J Operating System, LoseThos, and SparrowOS) is a biblical-themed lightweight operating system (OS) designed to be the Third Temple prophesied in the Bible. It was created by American programmer Terry A. Davis, who developed it alone over the course of a decade after a series of manic episodes that he later described as a revelation from God.

Davis began developing TempleOS circa 2003. One of its early names was the “J Operating System” before renaming it to “LoseThos”, a reference to a scene from the 1986 film Platoon. In 2008, Davis wrote that LoseThos was “primarily for making video games. It has no networking or Internet support. As far as I’m concerned, that would be reinventing the wheel”. Another name he used was “SparrowOS” before settling on “TempleOS”. In mid-2013, his website announced: “God’s temple is finished. Now, God kills CIA until it spreads [sic].”

Davis died after being hit by a train on August 11, 2018.

TempleOS was written in a programming language developed by Davis as a middle ground between C and C++, originally called “C+” (C Plus), later renamed to “Holy C”, possibly a reference to the Holy See. It doubles as the shell language, enabling the writing and execution of entire applications from within the shell. The IDE that comes with TempleOS supports several features, such as embedding images in code. It uses a non-standard text format (known as DolDoc) which has support for hypertext links, images, and 3D meshes to be embedded into what are otherwise standard ASCII files; for example, a file can have a spinning 3D model of a tank as a comment in source code. Most code in the OS is JIT-compiled, and it is generally encouraged to use JIT compilation as opposed to creating binaries. Davis ultimately wrote over 100,000 lines of code for the OS.

From Wikipedia

Daily driving it is brave! I’ve been trying it out in a VM and found it to be pretty… temperamental so far lol. But obviously it’s a pre-alpha so that’s to be expected.

My single My Single Is Dropping is dropping

I had a boss at an animation company (so not exactly a hub of IT experts, but still) who I witnessed do the following:

• Boot up the computer on her desk, which was a Mac

• Once it had booted, she then launched Windows inside a VM inside the Mac

• Once booted into that, she then loaded Outlook inside the Windows VM and that was how she checked her email.

As far as I could ascertain, at some point she’d had a Windows PC with Outlook that was all set up how she liked it. The whole office then at some point switched over to Macs for whatever reason and some lunatic had come up with this as a solution so she wouldn’t have to learn a new email thing.

When I tried to gently enquire as to why she didn’t just install Outlook for Mac I was told I was being unhelpful so I just left it alone lol. But I still think about it sometimes.

In a similar vein, Project Pluto. Essentially a nuclear ramjet that could fly 150m off the ground at 3,700 km/h, was impossible to intercept at the time, could carry sixteen nuclear warheads and crop-dusted the earth with radiation everywhere it went. It was eventually cancelled for being “too provocative.” Which, coming from the US army, is quite a thing lol.

Cool under pressure maybe? I expect a lot of people would freak out upon meeting an alien which is probably pretty inefficient. And smart is presumably a benefit. That’s not really representative of most humans though lol

Someone on here told me earlier I wasn’t left enough when I posted a Karl Marx quote lol

Maybe yeast is the thing?

In which case, cake isn’t bread.

And also bread isn’t bread, it’s just a really thick beer.

But it doesn’t have alcohol, so you’d need to add sugar.

Then beer is cake.

Exactly! I assume that my little 4tb external drive full of movies will one day be the only usable relic discovered of our civilization, so I must plan accordingly lol