Actors are creative people too. Several of Harrison Ford’s most iconic moments were ad libs. Famously, in Raiders of the Lost Ark he was supposed to have a whip vs sword fight during the Marian is kidnapped sequence. But he wasn’t feeling well, so he pulled his pistol and shot the swordsman instead, and then they rebuilt the scene around that. Also, Han Solo’s “I love you!” “I know.” moment was Ford.

“The writer writes, the director directs, the actor acts” is how you get the sludge Hollywood makes today.

So, do you remember back in like, 2004, when “feature phones” like the LG EnV or the Sidekick came out? It had a little more OS to it than a typical flip phone, they often had full keyboards, integration with intant messengers at the time, web browsers, etc? Some were more media focused and had mp3 oriented features, some were social machines for emailing and texting, some were more camera oriented, some more game oriented, you could get a phone that fit your interests.

Microsoft intended to shoulder into that market circa 2008. The year after the iPhone launched. It then took them two years and a billion dollars to develop. Through in-fighting with development of their OTHER mobile product, Windows Phone. And finally in 2010, the era of the iPhone 4, they released the Kin.

The Kin did not perform well, it was very mediocre hardware.

It had no app store or software library at all.

It couldn’t access several instant messengers that were popular at the time.

The few people who did buy one returned them.

It wasn’t Verizon’s fault that Microsoft pulled a Microsoft and poured tons of money into arriving at a trend too late to compete with an overpriced mediocre product.

I am gonna try this.

Mine too. war stories of 16k of RAM and 20MB hard disk drives the size of washing machines.

It’s not compatible with newer motherboards. Anybody with the last couple generations of computers can’t use it.

Scoundrel! I cast Last Season Of Your Favorite Show Never Gets Made.

I’m not so sure. Like I say, we saw several studios say “Well since Proton works so well, we’re going to stop supporting a separate Linux version. Linux users are to install the Windows version under Proton, and we’ll only support that.” Because almost all player communities are mostly Windows. As much as us Linux nerds hate it, we’re a small (but rapidly growing!) minority, and developers would rather support the thing most people use and just ladle what everyone else is drinking into a sippy cup for the special kids than have to make a whole separate jug of kool aid. I don’t think we’ll see a reversal in that until Linux-based platforms represent an actual majority of the install base and do so for awhile. Nothing is more permanent than a bodge job that works for now. Not to call Proton a “bodge job” but you know what I mean.

ARM is yet another leap, possibly a farther one, than Linux.

Cinnamon is the second of five attempts to defuckulate Gnome that I’m aware of, and my personal favorite.

A big barrier to Linux adoption is lack of software, and immutable distros locking you out of the traditional package managers like APT or DNF or Pacman and limiting you to what is provided on Flatpak, I think might trip some folks.

I learned how to Linux on a Raspberry Pi. That is, in fact, what they’re for. I’ve got one (a Pi 2) that sits on my LAN with a hard drive attached as one part of my backup solution.

Okay chat, today we’re playing Dress Slacks, we’re going for the hemmed cuffs%

So, when Proton came out, and Windows games Just Worked on Linux, a lot of developers gave up making or maintaining native Linux versions of games, and the way you make games for Linux is make them for Windows and run them in Proton.

Are we now going to make games for Windows x86 and run them in Proton, on ARM? And are we going to get to a point where we start actually making games for the hardware and OS we play them on, or are we just stuck with compatibility lasagna?

The real problem is the hardware. Somebody needs to make a handset that has any chance of actually working out of an SoC that the manufacturer isn’t actively trying to stop people from using for anything other than mass mind rape. Once you’ve got that made, some neckbeard will have Debian running on it by sundown.

Possibly for this reason, Mint is a great choice for “keep my PC going so I can get to the google and the email and the facebook without having to buy another $1000 machine.” Mint is my go-to to keep a Pre-TPM computer on the road.

If you’ve got actual work to do, don’t.

I’ve got Bazzite on my TV PC, and it’s pretty cromulent for that, but Flatpak alone doesn’t have everything I need to do actual work.

I can burp. But not during a swallow. Esophagus is half-duplex.

I’ve always had it with soda, and I thought I had swallowed in such a way that the CO2 was all trying to fizz out at once. Feels like you’ve stubbed your esophagus.

The experience of managing a consumer-grade LAN appliance:

Open web browser

Start typing 192.168.0.1

It auto-inserts 192.168.0.12 because that’s the IP address of your NAS, and you’ve logged into it to adjust something at some point in the last six months. You register it has done this as you’re releasing the Enter key.

click Back.

Type the IP address again, this time carefully deleting the 2 it oh so helpfully inserted.

Wait 3 to 5 business weeks while the 16-bit ARM microcontroller they put in these things serves a web page like old people fuck. It loads to a completely useless stats page that has no information that anyone has ever needed to know.

Click LAN Setup.

Wait 3 to 5 business weeks while the 16-bit ARM microcontroller they put in these things serves a web page like old people fuck.

Parse the wall of acronyms before you, click the link that says DHCP.

Wait 3 to 5 business weeks while the 16-bit ARM microcontroller they put in these things serves a web page like old people fuck.

It continues in that fashion until you get what you need done or your network stops working and you have to get a pen and press the Reset button on the back of the device.

So far, the For Dummies version is "turn NFS on for the shared folder in your NAS, then go to nfs://your-nas.local/path/to/shared/folder in your file manager.

You know that fat British guy that someone is posting shorts of on Youtube/Tiktok? “I was working for a company and their main product wasn’t selling. They asked me if they should lower the price, I told them ‘no, make your entry level product more shit.’ So they took their entry level product and added roofing nails to the seat cushions. Overnight, sales of their main product skyrocketed because no one was buying their entry level anymore.” That guy? He said he likes Samsung’s folding phone because “I’m old and my vision is failing, so I like the larger screen of the Fold. But you can’t sell that, because it’s not cool to sell products for the old and infirm.”