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

Yeah as a non-American I honestly just don’t have the energy to be worried/outraged about what’s going on in the US anymore. I’ve essentially been fretting about America since George W. Bush took office, and it just keeps getting worse. Now they’ve handed the presidency, house, senate, supreme court and the popular vote to Trump I just… don’t have it in me to engage in four more years of people endlessly tweeting about the horrible shit Trump is doing, while nobody does anything about it. Not to mention the decades afterwards it’ll take to clean this all up, if that’s even possible.

Sorry to all the Americans who didn’t vote for this. Good luck.

There is still an older version of Scrivener available for free, from when they were beta testing it on Linux. It still worked well last time I checked. The Windows version also runs really well in WIne, although it takes a bit of setting up initially.

Yeah they make their own distro (Pop! OS) and all their laptops ship with Linux pre-installed so they’re definitely a safe choice.

I’ve always had good luck with Lenovos as well. I’ve had an NVIDIA and an AMD one and they’ve both run really well with Linux.

Several of them are on the KDE store now too!

Fly-Pie is a good one! Also the same person makes modern versions of Burn My Windows, Desktop Cube and other such things.

There’s also dotacat written in Rust for people who find lolcat too slow.

Personally I don’t really hate Ubuntu, but I tend to find that everything it does, there’s something else that does it slightly better.

For example, it’s supposed to be a good ‘beginner’ distro or good for something that ‘just works’, but IMO things like Mint or Pop!OS do it a little better these days. Snap is supposed to be a nice simple way to manage packages without worrying about dependencies, but Flatpak does it better and so on.

So yeah I don’t hate it, I just don’t see any particular reason to really use it. Opinions may vary though of course.

TBH I dislike Appimage purely because I can’t be bothered to go and check them all individually for new versions all the time, it feels like being on Windows again. I don’t mind a little bloat for the sake of convenience. But that’s just personal preference of course.

I think the A031 Tumbleweed logo is actually my favourite there. But the winner’s not bad either.

Also, I’d say install Windows first, then Linux. Windows assumes it’s the only OS in the universe and tends to steamroll over the whole boot setup, so I’ve found it much easier to just let Windows do whatever it wants first, then fix it with Linux afterwards.

I haven’t found anything I like as much as Latte Dock yet, but it refuses to work on my system these days and it doesn’t seem like anyone wants to fork it and fix it up so I’m just back to the built-in KDE docks & panels these days TBH.

IMO the one thing they can’t escape is themselves. I saw an illustration of one of these survival bunkers, which went ten floors down, with the bottom floor being a huge armory. My first thought was, so it’s going to be nine storeys packed to the brim with entitled sociopaths, sitting on a massive pile of guns?

I’m pretty sure I’ll last longer outside with the cannibals lol

Mullvad I think is very good for this. They have an extensive description of their no-logs policy on their site, and have also been raided by the police before, who apparently were unable to find any customer information.

Shenanigans are always possible of course so you shouldn’t 100% blindly trust anyone, but all the available evidence seems to point to them being pretty legit IMO.

Microsoft has been trying to make me hate computers since the 90s lol

Nothing TBH. I find Windows too stressful, Macs are too boring, and I can’t use TempleOS because I don’t have schizophrenia.

You don’t choose to run it, God appears to you in a vision and commands it and then you have no choice.

There’s actually quite a lot of the supplemental stuff (Tardisodes etc.) just hanging around on YouTube, many of them sorted into helpful playlists, which I’m not sure if I’m allowed to link to.

Also for the newer show, I recommend grabbing the torrents from a user called QxR. They’re good quality and most have a folder of featurettes that includes Confidential and various behind the scenes stuff that I was having a hard time finding. I definitely can’t link directly to that but they should be easy enough to track down.

For the older show, there used to be a BIG torrent (like ~250Gb IIRC) with all the existing old episodes in it, but I don’t remember where that came from right now. However, a lot of the old episodes are on the Internet Archive so that might be a good place to start.