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[Bumber]

Spoiler: Did a half marathon.  No biggie, might feel like doing another one later (click to show/hide)

No, help me I'm in so much pain

What my brain read:

Congratulations, this activity is your longest run on Sativia!

Fusko means "cheat-o" in Swedish. Secret admission?

pisskop was Chester Cheetah all along?

[LordBaal]

Pisskop, as suspected, is incredibly handsome.

[pisskop]

Cheat-o!  I worked hard to run that.  By the end people were smirking at my running stance.  lmao

Also, yes, thank you, I try to stay clean-cut

[martinuzz]

To put an end to private investors buying houses to rent them out at exorbitant prices, or just keep them unoccupied specualting on prices rising further, the city of Rotterdam has decided that it is no longer allowed to buy a house in the city districts with mostly social rental housing, unless the buyer will actually move in and live there.

About time. Housing prices are going through the roof over here, and housing shortages are insane. 12-15 years waiting time to rent an appartment in the affordable sector isn't exceptional. Children are sometimes forced to keep living with their parents until they're well over 30 years old.

Let's hope more cities follow the example.

Take that, Blackstone, and keep your filthy paws off our social housing.

[Kagus]

Just had an absolutely ridiculous run of luck today in Diablo 2. Was slowly moving my sorceress through act 3 Hell, making my way through the durance, when I cracked open a chest and a Lo rune fell out.

I immediately snagged it and shoved it into the stash, and briefly considered saving and exiting right there just to make sure it'd register properly in case of a sudden reset/connection drop or something, but I ended up pushing onwards.

...at which point I bumped into a unique boom skelly who first killed my mercenary, but then made amends by dropping a Harlequin Crest.

Finishing off the durance, Mephisto decided to drop the Gavel of Pain and Verdungo's at the same time. Having wrapped up act 3 and sorted out all the loot, I decided to finally go for it and use the Vex rune my buddy and I had traded for in order to make a HOTO (my first ever), rather than trying to use it in another trade.

Perfect 40 res.


I don't know why exactly, but RNGesus has been incredibly generous with me.

[methylatedspirit]

So, I now have a working x86 Linux box. One that's not total shit, for once, and with me being far better at Linux than I was even a year ago. It's a recovered computer; older bro dropped off his old i5-4590/GTX 960/8 GB DDR3-1600 system (I thought it was a Ryzen earlier, hence why it looks like I'm contradicting myself). Perfect candidate for Linux: not horrendously old, but still not new enough for Windows 11. Bought an SSD and a replacement PSU (old one is reportedly explosive), and I was ready to go.

Of course, I have training from my time using a Raspberry Pi, I've read enough Eric S. Raymond to become a zealot of open-source (go read The Cathedral and The Bazaar!), I know enough command-linese to not start running the other direction screaming, yadayadayada. It feels like all my previous knowledge is converging into my current experience with Linux. I can do the things I want to do when it works, I know enough to diagnose and fix problems by Googling them when things do inevitably go wrong.

I went with Kubuntu, 'cause I like the general pace of updates, how it's faster than Debian's "once every ~2 years" update model, but slower than Arch's rolling-release model. It's fast enough that I can assume that the software I get off the repos is recent-ish, but not so fast that blindly updating would fuck something up. Had an Arch-using friend who had {his, her, their...} Nvidia driver shit the bed so hard that it rendered the system unbootable. As for the exact flavor, my time with the Pi told me that KDE is best DE.

I think I'd have a similar experience with any reasonably popular distro, to be frank, but my experience with Kubuntu has been amazing! This feels like a desktop, rather than an experimental thing that happens to run a desktop. Granted, I still do mess around in the terminal because I like updating from within the terminal instead of a graphical front-end. It does the things I want it to do: let me use Discord all day, read web pages about stuff that interests me in the (misguided?) belief that what I've read will be useful some day... actually, that's most of what I use this box for, why'd I keep the 960 in here? It does those things blazing-fast (at least compared to the stuff I had before), so I'm really happy with it.

Spoiler: Misc. Solved Annoyances (click to show/hide)

Speaking of Nvidia: yes. That thing has been a source of pain... about once or twice. For Ubuntu-based distros, the command you want is (give or take a sudo):

Code: [Select]

ubuntu-drivers install
autoinstall is deprecated, just run install without args; it'll install the proprietary Nvidia drivers for you, and hopefully it works. Hopefully. I run a card 3 generations old, you may not be quite so lucky.


Since I set my country to [REDACTED] during install, I had issues where SDDM would end up displaying the localized time and date on the login screen, but everything else was in English. This is undesirable behavior for me (rather not dox myself if I hook up a capture card to this thing), so I had to call on Google for answers. Here's the Stack Overflow question about that. SSDM reads from LC_TIME within /etc/default/locale, edit that to solve. I went with the update-locale method, I did:

Code: [Select]

update-locale LC_TIME='en_US.UTF-8'
Not sure if UTF-8 was the Right Thing here, but eh, it works. Maybe my knowledge of UTF-8 support in Linux is desperately outdated, I just like UTF-8. SDDM now displays my time and date in English.


Motherboard audio didn't work at first. This is mostly my fault; I didn't plug in the front panel HD Audio header at first. Shut off the PC, removed the GPU, plugged in the header, rebooted... and all I saw was HDMI audio out. Fun. I'll save you the trouble of futzing around with aplay and pamixer, and just immediately tell you this:

Motherboard audio devices don't show up until after you plug them in. Don't be like me. Please plug in audio devices as you'd use them before you go on a wild Stack Overflow-assisted goose chase across the desktop environment and terminal in a desperate attempt to find where the hell your audio devices went.

[None]

Real fun, isn't it? I've done my share of whingeing about esoteric Linux breakages (wallpaper and subsequently file manager (why are these two fundamentally linked?) breaking across 1.5 screens), audio input devices freezing entirely as soon as any key on a keyboard is pressed (Damn you, Pulse Audio!), the Windows clock weirding itself out, Steam not working at all for programs on Windows NTFS drives, Windows disabling my keyboard across all operating systems until I unplug my PC (beginning to see a pattern here)...

Oh, fair warning- if you share your screen on Discord while running Linux, it won't capture your desktop audio. That's a feature request that's been neglected for over two years.

It's nice to be able to spend most of my time outside the Windows sphere, and there's so many tools and creative conveniences out there for Linux. Like using the previously-damned Pulse Audio to send audio to my Chromecast by setting it as an audio sink so I can stream arbitrary audio. Can't do that on Windows! ...Or maybe you can, but I don't spend enough time in windows to want to do that, heh. Y'could retire the Pi as a PiHole if you have any autonomy of your network!

[EuchreJack]

To put an end to private investors buying houses to rent them out at exorbitant prices, or just keep them unoccupied specualting on prices rising further, the city of Rotterdam has decided that it is no longer allowed to buy a house in the city districts with mostly social rental housing, unless the buyer will actually move in and live there.

About time. Housing prices are going through the roof over here, and housing shortages are insane. 12-15 years waiting time to rent an appartment in the affordable sector isn't exceptional. Children are sometimes forced to keep living with their parents until they're well over 30 years old.

Let's hope more cities follow the example.

Take that, Blackstone, and keep your filthy paws off our social housing.

...and that is my WTF for the day.

You already have an extremely long wait time for rental property, and your city/town just said that nobody can buy houses to convert into rentals, unless they live in them.  Your city made it worse!

[LordBaal]

What you need is more competition to drive the prices down, not less.

[Frumple]

You already have an extremely long wait time for rental property, and your city/town just said that nobody can buy houses to convert into rentals, unless they live in them.  Your city made it worse!

They only made it worse if the previous situation was actually seeing things done usefully beforehand... which is frankly unlikely, and explicitly wasn't happening in the situation mart just described. We've seen a few cases stateside where local governance did something along those lines, and big name real estate jackasses made the astounding threat of saying they wouldn't be building the housing they were... already not building and had no plans to build.

So, y'know. Telling predatory speculators and rental mogals to fuck off when they're already doing nothing useful to the general population probably isn't actually hurting anyone (that's not some billionaire making bank off immiserating your local population, anyway)

[martinuzz]

They didn't make it worse. Investors have been buying houses that were rented out at affordable rates for the low incomes, and turning them into appartments that no-one except very rich people could afford (or just keeping them empty so they can quickly sell again when prices rise).

Oh and it's not my city, I live in Eindhoven, not in Rotterdam.

[EuchreJack]

They didn't make it worse. Investors have been buying houses that were rented out at affordable rates for the low incomes, and turning them into appartments that no-one except very rich people could afford (or just keeping them empty so they can quickly sell again when prices rise).

Oh and it's not my city, I live in Eindhoven, not in Rotterdam.

To clarify, we're talking about the Netherlands, right?
So we're basically talking about the Netherland's equivalent of New York City?
Yeah, speculating on that is outside my pay grade, I'll stick to speculating about things in the US, and outside New York City.
No reason to get into a pissing match over a Country that I haven't even visited and thus can't understand.

@Frumple: Not everyone that owns land is a "big name" or a "billionaire".  Many are just retirees taking too much risk with their life savings.  And they're FUCKED.

[methylatedspirit]

Real fun, isn't it? I've done my share of whingeing about esoteric Linux breakages (wallpaper and subsequently file manager (why are these two fundamentally linked?) breaking across 1.5 screens), audio input devices freezing entirely as soon as any key on a keyboard is pressed (Damn you, Pulse Audio!), the Windows clock weirding itself out, Steam not working at all for programs on Windows NTFS drives, Windows disabling my keyboard across all operating systems until I unplug my PC (beginning to see a pattern here)...

Oh, fair warning- if you share your screen on Discord while running Linux, it won't capture your desktop audio. That's a feature request that's been neglected for over two years.

It's nice to be able to spend most of my time outside the Windows sphere, and there's so many tools and creative conveniences out there for Linux. Like using the previously-damned Pulse Audio to send audio to my Chromecast by setting it as an audio sink so I can stream arbitrary audio. Can't do that on Windows! ...Or maybe you can, but I don't spend enough time in windows to want to do that, heh. Y'could retire the Pi as a PiHole if you have any autonomy of your network!

I like it when things break in Linux. There's always a way out, some workaround to solve your problems. My main gripe with proprietary stuff is that the companies behind them have to pretend like their stuff is perfect because they can't risk losing business to admitting bugs. Can't lose business to bugs when you're refusing to admit them, right? And don't get me fucking started on the number of times Windows (as an example) diagnostic methods tell you to "rEbOoT" or "rEiNsTaLl wInDoWs" or "rUn dIsM" and so on. These solutions are cookie-cutter, one-size-fits-all bullshit that may or may not fix the issue that you're having. And I'm supposed to be happy with this system?

Under Linux, under open-source stuff, I have a damn good chance of getting exact solutions on Stack Overflow et al., and even if not, I can usually piece together stuff to find a solution. It may be more cumbersome this way, but damn it feels good to have solved problems yourself. I have control. I have power. I have autonomy.

I feel like I'm seeing people, a community, rather than this black box I call a "company". That's why I'm so patient with open stuff over closed. At the end of the day, that software I'm using are made by people trying their best. Don't get me wrong: they can be rude, harsh, even cruel at times. But it's people at the end of the day, not a monolithic hive-mind. This causes, er, interesting differences of opinion, but again, it's not like any one person has that much more power over any other. If a "B"DFL does things that are massively against community opinion, the biggest weapon the community has against one is to fork the project.

And, you know, every time I solve problems, annoyances in Linux, I'm learning bits of the system. I understand the system's inner workings just a bit more. Can you say the same about Windows or Mac?

[None]

Oh yeah, absolutely. Windows' capacity to take ever more and more autonomy from the user is really grating. 'Member that one time Win10 was installing itself on computers that had no business running it? 'Member that time it installed a weather widget on the toolbar and did its damndest to hide how to remove it? 'Member Cortana coming back every time you nuke her? Bbbbgh.

Unfortunately, most of my fixes have been "unplug the machine" or "don't use that device" although that latter fix seems mostly to be a truly niche problem of having too many USB buses between the monitor and the keyboard and there being some kind of a race/listener collision. Believe you me, there was no stack overflow for this one, but in all honesty, the intersect of people using an early 2010s Dell monitor, Apple keyboard, retired forensic workstation, and a Zoom Handy H4 recorder in tandem on Linux is pretty bloody slim.

But hey, it's my say my way as I say it, assuming the core software works. In the case of Lubuntu- eh, crapshoot. Seriously, if the file manager can't find the background image you set, you can't run the file manager at all, or the settings widgets to change the wallpaper to anything else. That was a few hours and a command line unfuck I won't get back. Don't go deleting your Downloads folder by accident when your wallpaper lives in there, yeah?

[delphonso]

I'm job-hunting in a nicer city (one I lived in previously, I currently live in a factory village). I already have 4 interviews lined up next week and 2 job offers. By Jove it's nice to have options. I've been waking up at 5:30 every morning to commute an hour to my current work place...totaling 12 hours away from home for a work day (6 to 6, roughly). All these would be less than 9 hours at work with commute (8 to 4 work-time), depending on how close we choose to live (they're all reasonably in the center of the city.)

More time with baby, less time feeling wasted, more social life, more nature, more community. Hell, I might even have a garden.