The movies are one thing, but in the Clone Wars TV series Anakin was a reasonably competent general.

So FreeBSD is now fully exploitable by corporate leeches. Congratulations…?

I know, right?!

It doesn’t run, but I haven’t dug into it yet to figure out what’s actually wrong with it. (First world problems: we’ve already got a Kitchen Aid stand mixer, so getting it working isn’t particularly urgent. This bowl-lift one would be a slight upgrade from our Artisan, though.)

Still, I’m pretty sure these things are a holdover from back when things were designed for repairability instead of planned obsolescence, so I have little doubt that it’s fixable for a lot less than the cost to replace it.

• utility biking
• repairing stuff instead of throwing it out
• using stuff found on the curb that other people threw out (my wife rescued a $500 Kitchen Aid stand mixer the other day – it’s wild what people throw out around here!)
• DIY renovations with careful deconstruction so materials can be reused

Middle left.

Also, the fediverse is, in some ways, worse for privacy because of the types of information that need to be shared for federation to work.

I know exactly why I was banned: I reported a few instances of disinformation in r/conservative, and the admins suspended my account for “abusing the moderation system”.

Just to reiterate: the Reddit admins sided with the fascists to create a safe space for propaganda and lies, and kicked me off the site for attempting to report it.

If my joke doesn’t land that’s my fault, not yours.

On the one hand, yes, fully enforcing these things would be gross overpolicing.

On the other hand, the selective enforcement is, by design, a way to manufacture an excuse to harass and persecute minorities/undesirables.

The correct solution is to relax or abolish the laws themselves until they diminish to the point that fully enforcing them is reasonable.

It was meant to be a tongue-and-cheek confirmation that, yes, I was joking about the American south.

It didn’t land well.

Bless your heart. 😉

Did you complain directly to your local politicians? 'Cause they’re the Ines who really need to hear this.

I, too, am sick and tired of the government forcing me to contract with various third party commercial entities, BTW. We need more people to complain if we want it to change.

In the South you used to (and still do) have the following three meals a day:

Breakfast, lunch, dinner.

In the North, however…

Breakfast, dinner, tea.

In the South, we sometimes have “breakfast, dinner, supper” (especially in rural areas; city folks are more likely to have “breakfast, lunch, dinner”) and our tea definitely has ice and a fuckton of sugar in it.

LOL, America’s Hat doesn’t count as a real separate country, silly!

That wasn’t “an incident.” The notion of Windows breaking Linux’s bootloader has been a known thing for at least a decade.

I’m not sure who needs to hear this, but there were black people in ancient Greece IRL. It’s not even “woke,” just historically accurate!

I don’t remember having the choice of 15-bit. I only remember having the choice of “256” (8-bit indexed palette), “thousands” (16-bit “high color,” with 5:6:5 bits per channel for RGB respectively), or “millions” (24-bit, 8 bits per channel).

I actually remember the Solitaire card back images being dithered because I had the resolution turned up (and thus the color depth turned down).

I understand being intimidated. Under normal circumstances I’d say maybe try building a cheap computer for your first time, but there kinda aren’t any right now. That said, my first one was a reasonably high-end machine for the time, and it turned out fine.

I feel like the biggest sticking point is actually #2, not #1. I was the kind of kid who was obsessively reading tech magazines/websites/newspaper ad flyers and knew exactly what I wanted and where to get the best deal on it. So yeah, I definitely recommend doing your research first.

But good news: you’ve got it easy these days with YouTube showing you what to get and how to assemble it instead of having to read. The parts themselves are easier these days, too: no jumpers to set, and almost everything is keyed to only fit one way. Short of being really inept/careless and bending CPU pins or snapping the edge connector off a PCB or something, you’re not going to hurt anything.

The bottom line is, if you want to do it eventually you might as well do it now, because there really isn’t that much to it.

The only real reasons to get a Steam Machine are if:

1. You really want your computer to be a 6" cube
2. You really want HDMI CEC support
3. You really want to give your money to Valve instead of some other company

Otherwise, something else will be cheaper and/or faster, at the cost of being a more normal desktop size and shape.

I haven’t had a prebuilt desktop since I was 15, so I would definitely build my own. (In other words, if the thing stopping you is being nervous about screwing it up, don’t be because it isn’t actually hard.)

Otherwise, I don’t have any specific prebuilt brand recommendations for you, but I’ll echo the advice to get something with a Radeon 9060 XT (or better). Alternatively, if you think you might want to do AI things with it too instead of just gaming, consider a small-form-factor PC with a fast APU and a lot of unified memory (e.g. like the Framework Desktop or Minisforum MS-S1 Max) or a Radeon RX 7900 XTX (with 24GB RAM), but be aware that those would be a lot more expensive right now.

I understand wordp(l)ay, I swear! 😅

Unfortunately, theirs had a namespace collision with a separate actual product, so I decided to riff on that instead.