Please send your old Kindle to me. I just use them with a USB cable to transfer ebooks. I’ll gladly set them up with a few thousand public domain books and give them to kids or local schools.

These stupid vehicles and ones that are noisy for the sake of being noisy have one root element: attention. They’re designed to force you to pay attention to the owner. Admittedly it’s for negative attention, but still it’s a cry for help.

Too many people grow up where the only attention they can get is negative. Since humans crave any attention, they’ll seek it any way they know how. We’d rather get positive attention, but if you don’t have a source or tools to get it you’ll go negative in desperation.

I hate that these vehicles are designed to hurt people and they’re often on the road because the owner doesn’t know how to get attention any other way.

If he buys a longer truck, then maybe his dad will hug him just once.

Why does he keep coming back?

As the old joke goes: Emacs is great if you want to learn another OS.

I’m a barbarian vim user. Whenever I watch a real Emacs user operate a full dev environment inside of Emacs I’m always left stunned. It’s a whole universe of functionality, not just a refined line editor like vim.

That’s what I was taught at my first tech internship. It’s all they had on the UNIX system running the webserver in 1998.

I did write some web pages the pulled live data from the backend. I had the pleasure of writing them in C. I got the data binding to some kind of CORBA system using extern variables that were bound at compile time. All of the html (no js or css yet) was hand built and generated from the C code.

vi was the only editor on the system and there was no way to use arrow keys (the UNIX system didn’t have them on the keyboard at all).

I also had the displeasure of building a backup system on a floppy where I had to write a bat script that could manually load a token ring driver, bind a SMB share, load Ghost backup software and backup the local hard drive at under 2mb (yay coax thicknet). The tool used to query and write through the hostname for the backup? Copycon. Fucking copycon in DOS. That showed me how a terrible (but working) tool could be to work with.

Unless an editor can do reasonable vim emulation, I can’t take it seriously. You’re welcome to use it, but I won’t be able to get anything done in it quickly. The vi keys are too ground into my reflexes.

Can German be any less confusing, please?

We have started into various forms of past tense sentence structure and the rules… Oh the rules.

Add in how written German is different in places then spoken…

I’ll make it, I know I can.

Still reading B1 books. Classes are helping a ton on structure and rules. Listening is getting better.

I’ve managed several good interactions in stores, shops, and museums entirely in German. Many people are very understanding when I ask to at least try since I’m learning.

Wir wohnen in Deutschland. Ich muss Deutsch sprechen!

I’ve started a real German course with in person classes. Hopefully it’ll help with smoothing out the conversational parts and basic grammar that I’ve never truly internalized.

My reading keeps improving. The speaking, oh the speaking…

Use what works for you.

Develop what scratches your itch.

Don’t tell OSS devs who are volunteering unpaid labor what they should do for you.

If you want a solution that’s non-systemd go for it. If it doesn’t exist make it or pay someone to do so. Write from scratch or fork a project and get to work. That’s the way of the Bazaar.

I’ll be in my unenlightened “things work for me good enough” Linux world using what works. Systemd is fine and rarely gives me problems. Actually, I’m not even sure I can remember any.

Huge thank you’s to the devs who make this all possible. You rock!

I thought NASA has mostly removed Microslop from places like the ISS after they had the microslop windows laptop infect those systems on the ISS? Why go back to this garbage on important facilities?

I got my first full B1 German reading book. I’m a few chapters in.

I’ve managed more spoken interactions, but it’s still small and short kinds of statements. We have been doing more German at work for discussions.

My German classes start this week. They’re B1.2 level. It’ll be a bit of a stretch, but it’ll be great to spend more time focused on listening and speech.

I did try out a few of the Telc B1 tests. I scored about 75%, which isn’t good enough for going right into the exam, but I’m getting closer than I thought to B1.

Why the every living FUCK would a serious agency rely on Microslop for any technical component anywhere? Haven’t they learned from the last 40 years of terrible products?

I’m still running the last release of Hannah Montana Linux. Just waiting for something better to come out.

No. Full stop NO.

It’s my computer and my family. Stop trying to justify yet more tracking us in our own homes and on our own devices. Get fucked.

I would sometimes shake things up and go mostly staff with a sling. The sling is hilariously entertaining on many fronts. It’s not really a big damage weapon, but with called shots life gets fun. Headshots? Yup. Knocking out guards? Indeed. Breaking that vial of potion to release the spell/fog/acid? Bingo.

Sneaking a ranged weapon into town? Have fun with that heavy crossbow, I’m just wrapping the sling around as a belt. Ammo? Sling stones are fabricated, but any old rock can improvise.

While the longbow / longsword ranger is just classicly awesome, a sling / (something) is worth giving a try.

Next up: atlatl barbarian!

I visited a museum today. They had audio guides available. I found they had a guide in a “easy” version of German.

I am so happy they had the easy (leicht Sprache) guide. I managed to understand about half of the sentences and got some nice in-context listening practice.

I also started listening to some B1 German YouTube conversational videos and I’m doing okay at times.

I’ve also got a Scratch Programming book in German. It’s written to elementary school level and it’s great for simple technical language, which is a speciality that I’m going to need soon. Very nice stuff to work with.

OP is also complaining because he is trying to pirate the game. The process of stripping the DRM is better documented on Windows than on Linux, and somehow it’s the fault of the Linux ecosystem.

Currently reading my A2/B1 middle difficulty German story book.

I read some kids Easter books this week.

We travelled on trains and I managed asking some questions as well as ordering food in German.

I’m rereading some Dragonball books.

I’ve spoken with some more neighbors, but not nearly enough.

The big motivator is that I’ve applied for a huge opportunity that would require much better German speaking in about 12 months. If I get the job it’ll be do or die time. Machen oder toten zeit!

I don’t feel this push for locking us out of control over our own systems under the cover of “protecting the children with age verification” is anything more than a continued effort to secure a DRM-based hardware system for the MSFT OS and media companies. This smells just like their pushes in the past to steal control over hardware through legal channels. It’s the same war we’ve been fighting for 30 years now.

Read up on the Clipper Chip from the 90’s. What’s old is new again.

The big news is that I took a placement course and it suggested I should be in the first level of a CEFR B1.1 course! Last fall I was going to be placed in a A2.2, so apparently something is sinking in.

I finished another manga book (VizBig style Ranma 1/2 #1) in German. It’s very interesting how the different authors of the different series would use vocabulary. Getting a more diverse set of words was great for the vocab.

I’m applying for a job that would start April 2027 and would require significant German language skills by then. The clock is ticking!

Gotta have my B1 by May 2027 for residency. I’ve got about 68 weeks until I qualify. Continuing the countdown.