Gotcha. Well, I guess being an old guy and having never correlated someone’s computer background to any kind of meaning other than they like that particular background, I guess I don’t see anything into it. But hey, I work with a bunch of terminals all day long so there’s not an opportunity to customize things there, and the one work machine that has a gui, I have just left the background as the default. That is a rule of mine, nothing personal on the work laptop.

younger me would’ve freaked out by the idea of having proprietary files

That’s good for starters. What do you mean by “younger me would’ve freaked out by the idea of having proprietary files”? Exactly what proprietary files are you talking about? Background pics are usually jpeg, or png, and those are not proprietary to linux, so I think that’s part of what has everyone confused about this. Are you also insinuating that people can only use certain backgrounds based on either belief or their own actual background? I am curious to hear your explanation if you aren’t a llm. And by the way, saying you don’t use chatgpt is exactly what I would expect chatgpt to reply with. LOL. I keed I keed.

When you say ‘younger me’ do you mean like four year old you, because eight year old current you doesn’t make sense? I have no idea what the whole point of this post is, other than it must be some chatgpt output someone thought would be funny to throw out.

If you have time to not use the drive, you could use badblocks to test it. I usually use it with -svn as the options. s=Show progress, v=Verbose Mode, and n=Non destructive read/write mode,

Even Arbys has shrunk things down. And don’t get me started on them removing potato cakes!!!

Was riding my motorcycle up to the races at Laguna Seca in Monterey. As a photographer I had all my gear on the bike. Everything, it was packed. It is a sportbike so I didn’t have a lot of luggage. Just a tankbag that was filled to the top, and a backpack I had strapped to the rear seat, which is pretty tiny. Anyway on the way up the 101 I come across another motorcycle who pulls onto the interstate and up next to me. We ride for a while, and then as we get to an exit he motions for me to pull off and points to his tank. I decided that was a good time to get gas myself so I peeled in behind him. We get to the station and he takes off his helmet and he’s definitely in his 70’s or 80’s. I was in my mid 30’s at the time so it was cool to see an older rider. We were filling up our bikes and he asked if I wanted to grab a cup of coffee and I said sure. So we went inside and started talking, and he too was heading up to Laguna Seca for the races. He asked if I had ridden the 1 up to Monterey and I said that I hadn’t. He insisted that it was something you don’t want to miss. I explained that I had to pick up my press pass and was on a little bit of a schedule. We finished our cups (I had oj) and walked back out to the bikes. He said if I wanted to ride with him it was cool and that he was taking the cutoff over to the 1 and would be taking that exit. We hit the road and miles passed. I saw him point to the exit over to the 1, and move over. I waved to him and pointed straight ahead. I was just going to ‘get there’. He nodded his head and headed off the exit. As I was right at the end of the exit something in my head said ‘screw it’, and I jammed on the brakes and whipped over. When I got to the stop at the end of the exit he looked over and pulled up his visor and yelled “you changed your mind?” I nodded and away we went.

It was a beautiful ride, and we stopped again to get gas and were chatting again. We decided that we would stop up the road at a place he knew to eat. We then commented about each other’s bikes and for some reason we decided to swap bikes. I get on his bike, and he hops on mine, and away we go. About 2 miles down the road I am sitting there following him and had a realization… Everything I have is on my bike. Wallet, phone, camera equipment, clothes, etc. I started thinking, my bike is a lot faster than his bike and if he were to take off, I wouldn’t have any way of catching him. Then it occurred to me that I don’t even know his name. I could just imagine getting pulled over on his bike and trying to explain to the cops that this old guy let me borrow it, and then not being able to even tell them his name. I calmed back down and just got back into the ride and we swapped who led a couple of times. The view was/is absolutely spectacular so that kept my mind from going into overdrive. We got to the place to have lunch and pulled over. We both talked about the nice parts about each other’s bikes and we went in and he bought me lunch. We also exchanged names. I explained that when we got into Monterey I had to go over to a certain hotel to pick up my credentials. He was heading over to his hotel and then going to the track. We both hopped back on our own bikes and took off. When we got into Monterey we came to an intersection and I had to go one way and he went the other. We waved to each other and that was it. I really wish I could remember his name, but over time it has been lost in my mind. I think about him every once in a while and wonder things like what ever happened to him. I would guess he has passed by now, but think it would be cool to have one more chat and a quick ride on each other’s bikes if he was still around and riding. I just hope that one day some young kid remembers me as that old guy on the motorcycle.

Yup. I probably shouldn’t ramble as much, but my point was that I am sure all of the “opposite viewpoint than you” people are off in their walled garden asking the same questions. Where that is located, well, you have got me. I wasn’t questioning the legitimacy of his question.

I am not taking sides with this comment, but you could literally swap names of everything you just posted with (the opposite candidate) and there is someone saying this exact same thing somewhere on the internet. They are most likely sitting there posting about where all the Harris people went and how they moved to a saner platform to avoid toxic people… Everyone needs to remember that there is someone out there with a polar opposite viewpoint as you and it’s just as strong as yours. The internet and social media has made it much easier for everyone to wall themselves off into groups containing people with only their viewpoint. And now all of that has been fed to LLMs. This is going to be an interesting future we are walking into.

Spinal Meningitis by Ween.
On a lighter note, I loves me some Señor Coconut.

Sure, I guess it all depends what you have laying around. Like if you had a spare monkey that knew how to type. That’s why I said it was just “an” idea. The only thing I would add though is if she needed to type this all in from a machine she doesn’t have admin rights to, then the extra hardware might be the only way. Again, it was just an option…

So a raspberry pi, or an arduino board will identify itself as a keyboard if you code it right. She could have all the text loaded and ready to go for the textbox and when it gets to that part, push a button that is hardwired and it can ‘type’ all of the text for her so that the system wouldn’t crap it up as it wouldn’t be ‘pasted’ in. Just an idea for a solution for her.

I see your edit, and would like to comment that you also haven’t mentioned which rpi you were going to try this on. I recently wanted to set up a quick little pc using a rpi, just so I could browse the web and maybe watch some videos. Tried a rpi2 I had laying around. No way. Moved to a rpi3, and while it would load most pages, youtube was a bust as it completely maxed out the ram and swap. I then went to a rpi4 with 8gb and it has been doable, kind of. Sometimes it’s pretty choppy with the video, but basic web browsing is ok. I did try my plex the other day through the browser and it was barely acceptable. Lots of stuttering and sometimes just hangs, but that’s not the ideal way to view plex on anything. Haven’t tried my rpi5 yet, but my point to all this is that I think you are on the right track setting it up on a spare pc he has. If you had given him a rpi as a ‘desktop’ replacement it might have just soured him on the whole idea.

Yeah, and I know this will sound odd, but I can’t really bring myself to ‘upvote’ this story. It just seems wrong.

Doesn’t matter, but they contradict themselves.

Headline: why isn’t everyone using it?
Body: This article breaks down what Linux is, why it’s great and how it secretly powers most of your favorite devices, from smartphones to servers.

So it looks like most everyone is using it, they just might not realize it. Which to me is a sign of a great product, when it’s use is completely transparent.

Well I am not him, so I can’t tell you whether or not he actually “could” have figured it out. The options to figure it out did exist, but he chose not to use them giving it the appearance that he “couldn’t”. Are you this much fun at parties?

I guess it depends on where you work. This was a large datacenter for a very large health insurance company. They made it a point later that day to remind people that it was a fireable offense to mess with production machines like that on purpose. And evidently the service he disabled was critical enough that it didn’t take long for the hammer to come down. There were plenty of ways to find out who owned the machine, he just chose the easiest and got fired on the spot for it.

A guy in our data center couldn’t figure out who owned a particular machine that he needed to work on. So his solution to figure it out was to let them come to him. He went and pulled out the network cable and waited. He was escorted out a little while later. The moral of the story is don’t go disabling production machines on purpose.

Advertiser

Or my car…

You don’t think I got this rich by writing checks, do you?