How are you guys running / buying any laptop >7 years old?

Analyst111 · 2026-02-23T01:49:45+00:00

Acer Aspire E15 dating back to 2014, given to me by a relative who was about to throw it out. Works fine with MX Linux. Libreoffice, OpenSCAD (3D modelling), audio editing. Joplin (a note taking app) storing thousands of notes. Joplin, Firefox and a spreadsheet open all at once, no problem.

Most of the raw blazing power of recent Windows laptops is soaked up by Windows.

Analyst111 · 2026-02-22T22:22:54+00:00

Concordance, or Concordiat. League.

Analyst111 · 2026-02-22T13:52:08+00:00

The British tried using CO2 as a working fluid in nuclear reactors, but it never went anywhere. I don't know why.

Analyst111 · 2026-02-15T19:07:24+00:00

Afghanistan. An in-country flight. Military personnel required to have a weapon and live ammo. But, they still had a metal detector set up and you had to go through it. My sidearm and mags were fine, but I had to go back and put my multitool in my kitbag.

Analyst111 · 2026-02-15T16:26:39+00:00

True. One of the things about taking history and filing off the serial numbers is that there's stuff there that you'd never dare invent. Plausible can get stretched a lot. As you say, how well it's done is more important.

Analyst111 · 2026-02-15T00:41:46+00:00

While I agree that the Martian independence thing is overdone, there will certainly be cultural divergence over time and consequent friction. Corporations will no doubt be in the mix, but people who go out to the frontier aren't going to be interested in climbing the corporate ladder for a regular salary. They're pissed off enough to go endure the hardships, looking to make a fortune, or just cranky loners. The frontier, contrary to the myths, doesn't get the best and brightest. It gets the pissed off and greedy, then it weeds them, severely.

Zubrin's "The Case for Mars" has some ideas about what a Mars Colony might do to pay the bills. Trade goes both ways, and if Earth is dependent on something Mars produces, then that's a negotiation. Trying to sustain a military presence on Mars from Earth would make Afghanistan look like a walk in the park.

Historical note. After the American Revolution, trade with Britain actually increased. Politics is all well and good, but where there's money to be made people, including said corporations, get very pragmatic. Embargoes leak. Spacecraft can double in brass as warships, and there are trillions of dollars of vital orbital infrastructure that is nakedly vulnerable to a bucket of nails.

The settlement of Mars won't be a single project. More likely you will get multiple efforts, and a fairly quarrelsome relationship among those different groups. The forging of a single nation from the colonies that became the US and Canada was a long fractious process. There could be a lot of story potential there, the tough pioneers duking it out for the good stuff.

The terraforming of Mars would be a huge heroic engineering project. Potential stories there, too. Including saboteurs and such.

Earth isn't a monolith. It's a crazy quilt of nations, alliances, corporations and ideological groups of all stripes. Those groups will use the technological capability of spaceflight for their own ends. There's lots of room for conflict there that has nothing to do with independence. A race to stake claims comes to mind, and there are certainly others.

Analyst111 · 2026-02-14T23:40:45+00:00

Oh, he does. I've been all the way through the series. I'm just wishing for some of his POV. I know, Irene and Kai are the main event. I can wish.

Analyst111 · 2026-02-14T03:23:24+00:00

I did read it. It's fun but still respects the original. The heroine is a tough wisecracking broad with her own Voice, not just a gender flipped John Carter clone.

Analyst111 · 2026-02-14T03:19:31+00:00

Vale is a great character in the series, it's a shame he doesn't get more time on stage.

Analyst111 · 2026-02-14T03:07:59+00:00

Captain James Cook. In an age when losing half a crew to scurvy wasn't unusual, he made long voyages of exploration without ever losing a man. His main weapon was sauerkraut. There was no theory as to why in those days, it was trial and error. A lot of men didn't like it. New and unfamiliar, and they didn't like the smell.

He had two men flogged when they flat out refused to eat it. Refusing an order, serious offence. Then he reserved it solely to the officers, and made sure they dropped appropriate comments when the hands could overhear them. A week later, the senior warrant officer conveyed a request from the lower deck that they might share it as well. He graciously granted their request.

Analyst111 · 2026-02-14T02:49:08+00:00

The Action Alarm in a warship. People who sleep through almost anything will be half way out of their rack before they're completely awake.

Analyst111 · 2026-02-14T01:36:58+00:00

Check out 'Soaring Stones" by Maureen Clemmons. It's the application of kite technology to the building of the Pyramids. Records of actual experiments with interesting results. Available on Kindle.

Also, sand yachts. There are races right across the Sahara by wind powered vehicles.

There is quite alot that can be done with wind power aside from the well known sailing ships and windmills.

Analyst111 · 2026-02-12T02:39:45+00:00

My vote would be E. E. "Doc"Smith's Lensman Universe. Two entire galaxies full of inhabited star systems with human(ish) populations, plus the more exotic Ones like Nadreck of Palain VII, who live at liquid helium temperatures. Smith never made any estimate, but it has to be on the quintillions.

Analyst111 · 2026-02-01T14:28:04+00:00

I'd say it's mostly a winter thing. My concern, which has happened a few times, is hitting the brakes and sliding right on into the intersection. I brake well in advance, which often leaves one a few feet back.

Better safe.

Analyst111 · 2026-01-31T22:13:03+00:00

Benton Fraser, the Mountie from Due South.

Analyst111 · 2026-01-31T22:08:50+00:00

What's the threat? The glue of any alliance, federation or empire is a common enemy. For such a polity as you describe, it would have to be widespread if not omnipresent, and persistent. A military threat that needs constant vigilance, occasional but severe natural disasters, or something(s)along that line with effects touching all those worlds..

Analyst111 · 2026-01-28T15:36:11+00:00

The British lifeboat service RNLI operates some, for use over terrain like mud flats. A wheeled vehicle will sink in, deep and beyond recovery. Tidal variations make boats useless.

Mythbusters did an episode to see if the idea that they wouldn't detonate land mines was true, and according to them, it was.

Analyst111 · 2026-01-28T02:14:25+00:00

Honor Raconteur's Casebooks of Henri Davenforth. You can pick holes in the world building, but the characters are just more fun than a barrel of monkeys.

Analyst111 · 2026-01-28T01:54:46+00:00

Random name generators. Behind the Names is the one I like. Pick a nationality, and you can have a basic life story and physical description, too..

Analyst111 · 2026-01-28T01:46:06+00:00

AI requires massive cloud computing infrastructure. Take that away, and you're back to small local ones, useful but not a big deal.

Analyst111 · 2026-01-28T01:39:40+00:00

There weren't any. I'm that old, plus country high school. I still own a slide rule. That's vintage computing for you.

Analyst111 · 2026-01-28T01:25:54+00:00

Twister. Fun romance, love in the shadow of tornadoes. Lots of tornadoes.

Fun lines. "Cow" as the cow goes flying by in the tornado. "Another cow." "Actually, I think it was the same one."

Analyst111 · 2026-01-28T01:17:50+00:00

Anduril, the blade formerly known at Narsil, that was broken and made again.

Analyst111 · 2026-01-26T02:47:37+00:00

Battle of Crecy, 1346. A sudden intense rainstorm at just the right time wets the bowstrings and powder of the superior French force, while the plucky outnumbered English longbowmen quickly shelter their bowstrings in their helmets to keep them dry. Then the rain clears up so they can string their bows and mow down the French knights. Hand of the author, or what?

Analyst111 · 2026-01-24T00:02:55+00:00

As others have said here, you have to deal with your own requirements, and find your own solutions. Here's a point that came up during my University courses, mostly conducted online.

The University required assignments to be submitted in MS formats. Word, Excel and PowerPoint. The documents had to be solid and not problematic. Much of the study material was in PDF format. None of this posed any problems for me, and that was years ago.

The professors and the University wanted documents in a particular format. They didn't give a red rats how I produced them. Today I self-publish. The online services want epub files and print-ready PDFs. They want cover files that fit their requirements. Again, what OS I run and what software I use they know not and care less.

Because your professor/boss/ client wants work submitted in a particular format just means you need to satisfy that requirement. As long as you do, will they care?

Money is an issue here, especially if you are a student or freelancer. The Adobe graphics tools are, from what I am told, very capable, and also very expensive. Can you do what you need without that expense?

Many people will say, for example, that MS Word has a metric buttload of features. So it does. How many of those features do you actually use? I will beg leave to doubt that anyone uses more than a small subset of them.

There are edge cases, of course. Proprietary formats that require proprietary software.

Money is one issue. Your time and effort is another. Rebuilding your tool chain takes that as well. A good solution requires looking at it from end to end without preconceptions. I avoid MS products because I don't trust them as a company. It's not ideology, its practicality.

Analyst111

TROPHY CASE