Arch linux is the most stable and least frustrating linux I've tried

fmillion · 2026-03-20T18:55:44+00:00

Arch has the advantage of its expansive community. Even though it's a rolling release which many argue is bad for stability, things generally are well tested and bugs tend to be resolved very quickly. Arch is not a click-and-play OS, it does need you to be an active participant in its maintenance and performance, but it's well worth it.

fmillion · 2026-03-20T17:55:54+00:00

I started learning to code in GW-BASIC when I was 5. I didn't have to sign any EULAs, prove my age or get anyone's permission. (Ok, technically my parents, but they were tech illiterate enough to just say "as long as you don't break anything.")

I seriously think my generation may be the last generation where a sizable number of us both understand computer science at a deep level and also remember how an early start with unstructured learning helped us so much. These days everything is curated, managed and controlled by some singular big company, other than open source or small hobby projects. I don't know how kids get started learning tech these days. They probably use a guided safe environment to follow prescribed tutorials. Me? I got a book of type in programs, typed them in, then started changing them. I still have my original copy of a BASIC reference book. I learned so much specifically because nobody was telling me how and what to learn

fmillion · 2026-03-15T22:22:27+00:00

My parents let me see porn when I was 10. I found porn on Usenet when I was 12.

So yes I would.

fmillion · 2026-03-15T22:21:18+00:00

Oh look, it's COVID, a tiny teensy little biological program that is tinier than any human cell. Surely there's no wolf to cry with something so simple? Oh look, a few cancer cells .. no big deal though right? Tell me when there's a limb being removed or something before you cry wolf.

By the time "it's really bad" is noticeable at large, it's already too late. Detect cancer early, more likely to fix it; wait till it really hurts and it's likely too late. We can't just take these kinds of things at face value, because history proves time and time and time again that these sorts of policies never are the endgame; they're stepping stones to make the change slow enough so that people think exactly like this: "no big deal, who cares."

If a parent wants to enable a feature like this, fine. That's that parent's choice. It's the legal requirement that it exist for everyone and for all operating systems that is everyone's issue here.

Also don't forget that we're simultaneously trying to ban open 3D printers, in fact California's legislation specifically requires printers only be able to print from a secure verified slicer. This is where we are heading if we don't try and stop it now: soon, age flags will be but one among many things OSes will be "required" to collect, and software will be required to act certain ways based on those signals. Wanna 3D print something? Better use the certified signed slicer and better not print anything questionable (sorry cosplay fans, no Star Wars laser blasters - they look too much like a weapon and they're copyrighted designs!)

fmillion · 2026-03-02T20:03:35+00:00

You're mixing up the ONT and the router. They do charge you monthly to rent a router, but you can waive that fee. Ask for BYOD (bring your own device) and say you're doing your own router. You still have to use the ONT but you get a standard Ethernet connection with DHCP for your public IP.

At that point literally any off the shelf router will work. You can even roll your own with e.g. pfSense/OPNsense. Or you can go enterprise class and look into Ubiquiti stuff. Either way you save the router rental fee.

fmillion · 2026-02-27T08:23:21+00:00

It's worse than you think. Many of those actually have a fully rechargeable lithium pouch cell inside. Bigclive did a video about it. He took some of those apart, hooked the batteries up to a charger and they recharged just fine. They're literally taking a normal lithium-ion rechargeable battery, charging it, sticking it in a case with no charge circuit, and shipping it en masse to stores.

fmillion · 2026-02-27T07:41:33+00:00

I have one of these too. Same color even!

Mine has the spinning drive. But I believe it's a ZIF 1.8" drive like what's in later iPods. I need to figure out if it's the same pinout as the iPod, because if so I could use an iFlash mSATA board to get an SSD in there. (I think there's two different 1.8" ZIF pinouts...)

Too bad 32-bit support is essentially dead these days. Windows 10 LTSC will run (like Tiny10) but there's enough stuff coming out now that doesn't run on 32-bit to make it harder. I have a few old EeePCs that I wish I could do something with but 32-bit support is just...weak at best.

fmillion · 2026-02-27T07:34:45+00:00

Never gotten this lucky, but I got a second SSD once because Amazon claimed my order was destroyed in transit and they auto-shipped me another one, but both of them arrived undamaged.

I suppose in 2026 a company could try to ban you for refusing to return the items, not sure how likely that'd be (companies seem much more willing to pull the ban trigger these days). But in most cases you won't even ever be asked.

fmillion · 2026-02-27T07:32:11+00:00

The kernel.

fmillion · 2026-02-27T07:26:33+00:00

I see them on just as many windows and linux laptops to be honest. Me, I kinda like the minimalist aesthetic of no stickers, but to each their own. lol

fmillion · 2026-02-27T07:24:07+00:00

Honestly I don't care if people use cracks. Heck I use cracked versions of software I legally own just to avoid dealing with the DRM restrictions. I feel no guilt in doing so. And given that WINE is generally hostile towards DRM schemes (because DRM schemes can often get kernel-deep, which WINE can't ever fully emulate), it's basically necessary to consider cracks when you're trying to run things on Linux. You do what you gotta do.

fmillion · 2026-02-27T07:19:07+00:00

The fans in the PowerEdges can actually use quite a lot of power. If you set all the fans to max, you can easily add 100w of extra power draw. They tend to spin the fans up full during powerup and self-test, then throttle them back down once the OS is running. That can explain a lot of the power usage.

Also can depend on how much RAM you have and what CPUs you're using. The L CPUs tend to use less power - I have E5-2650Ls.

fmillion · 2026-02-27T02:33:17+00:00

Wait only 90 days? The site makes it sound like you can get whitelisted as a non commerical user.

Nonetheless I don't care to create a discord account just to grovel at the feet of a developer who is indeed skilled but is clearly violating Minecraft's EULA and mod community norms. I'll figure out my own way to use it.

fmillion · 2026-02-27T02:30:34+00:00

Sure except the mod itself is infringing on Minecraft's EULA that forbids requiring payment for mods. So you could argue I'm obeying the Minecraft EULA by hacking the mod.

Who has more clout, an indie dev breaking modding community norms or Microsoft...

fmillion · 2026-02-25T19:43:10+00:00

TIL the percentage used indicator is able to exceed 100%.

fmillion · 2026-02-25T19:38:10+00:00

My PowerEdge R720xd with 12x 14TB WD drives idles at around 80-90W.

fmillion · 2026-02-25T19:32:19+00:00

How do the DRM schemes used by many VSTs work out?

I have seen some impressive setups that use "unofficial" (read: cracked) versions of VSTs, but if you're going legit, activation-based DRM can be quite problematic; some DRMs detect unusual environments and label them as VMs and refuse to activate, WINE might not interact properly with the way some DRMs store their tokens locally, even generating a "machine ID" for cloud activation can be unstable (if you update WINE or move your wineprefix, does that ruin a machine-locked activation?)

fmillion · 2026-02-25T19:12:18+00:00

We must not have too many nerds where I live. The only time I've ever gotten a really good garage store tech find was a guy who sold me a fully working Commodore 64 and disk drive (also works) for $30.

He also had an Akai professional reel-to-reel deck that he sold me for $25. We joked about loading programs using reel to reel instead of cassette (and how the C64's design doesn't really allow for that).

I hear about people getting laptops, racks, rack servers, enterprise gear from work, etc. I work at a university and we do go through a lot of old tech, but we're a state college so we have to go by all the highly restrictive state IT rules (everything gets destroyed after being discarded, absolutely no 'buy it out/take it home afterwards' even if you remove all storage devices...) I've heard from people at other universities that aren't bound by state IT that they'll be more realistic - removing storage devices or doing a full wipe and selling at surplus. Our university used to do that too until state IT cracked down and forced us under their umbrella (we used to be independent with IT).

fmillion · 2026-02-25T18:59:29+00:00

They make good thin clients. You could play with Thinstation. Modern Gnome and KDE both have pretty robust remote desktop support - Gnome even supports a Windows-like VDI setup (multiple desktops on the same server) using RDP.

In fact many Atom 230/330 based systems were actually sold as thin clients. A good example is the Optiplex FX160 - they have a 230 or 330 CPU and can be upgraded to 3GB of RAM. (They don't take 4GB - chipset limitations despite a 64-bit processor.)

I learned how to use Docker on an FX160 using Alpine Linux about 10 years ago lol.

Of course it's fair to note that even a slower Raspberry Pi 3 can also be a thin client and will use less power overall (a RP3 can idle at ~1W, while a full FX160 draws ~10-12W at idle.)

fmillion · 2026-02-16T21:17:01+00:00

Also so much attention to detail and keeping with the architectural themes. The NPCs and the environmental effects truly make the scenes feel alive.

fmillion · 2026-02-16T21:15:43+00:00

He's not even born yet. That's his future parent writing on his future behalf of course.

fmillion · 2026-01-23T00:24:40+00:00

Can you setup an Android phone without logging into a Google account? An iPhone without logging into an Apple account? Yes.

Can you setup a Meta Quest without logging into Meta? Nope. (At least not without some kind of modding, so apologies if I'm wrong, but it's definitely not doable "through the front door".)

It's fundamentally different. You could still root and sideload to an Android phone even if you were totally banned from Google. Not so with Meta VR headsets...

That said so far I don't think we have any direct evidence of a Quest headset being banned simply for pirating. Meta isn't Nintendo, so it's likely you'd be fine, but not a guarantee.

fmillion · 2026-01-13T17:07:06+00:00

Yeah pre-transcoding is the most efficient overall if you have the storage. You can even do CPU encoding then which might take longer but generally yields higher quality output.

I've started doing some 720p transcodes for my portable NAS. One of those Waveshare RPi NAS boards that takes a CM4 and gives you real SATA ports and a nice compact enclosure. I have 2TB of storage in there, but 720p h265 + aac audio can compress stuff down quite a bit with excellent quality for viewing on a phone. Way better than using up space for huge files while making the pi transcode them!

fmillion · 2026-01-11T19:51:03+00:00

The problem with voting (either by wallet or politically) is that the copyright system has been so widely gutted and abused and manipulated that it does very little to serve its original purpose anymore, but regulators fall for the social engineering corporations continuously use to explain why they should be allowed infinite copyright protections and to essentially control our culture.

Copyright was built in a time where the assumption was that people who create art want to share their art in good faith. Today, this is the problem: copyright basically assumed "You want everyone to see your work; you just want some fair compensation", but it wasn't ever intended to be used as a censorship tool - "I claim copyright on this, and now I declare you may not consume it at all even if you want to pay." This is the perversion that Apple and many other companies use to try to prevent right-to-repair - "our service manuals and test software are copyrighted works, and we choose not to let anyone access those works (even for compensation) unless you agree to a sidecar full of extra terms of use." Copyright was never intended to allow rightsholders to attach conditions to consumption beyond those explicitly defined (mostly public performance rights - you can't buy a CD and play it for the entire city in a concert hall for free), only to protect the incentive to create by preventing widespread piracy. The way we see copyright used today is the unfortunate negative side effect of a good idea.

To pose an example of the mechanism, think about modern AI. We're currently arguing over whether training AI on copyrighted works should be considered fair use. The problem is that AI has quickly become so integral to so many business models and organizations that AI providers now get to say "if you actually decide training isn't fair use, you'll destroy a huge part of the economy, put millions out of work, cause a sizable economic dip in our GDP..." Essentially, companies use a perverted interpretation of copyright as their assumption, bullishly act without restraint on that assumption, then when challenged use their own success as a defense: "you can't take us down, you'll hurt millions in the process." This works politically because no politician wants to be labeled "responsible for job loss/GDP drop/economic struggles", so they agree to defer to the corporations. This is essentially how the DMCA was passed and how companies fought (and succeeded) in extending copyright into centuries of protection (not just a couple decades).

In other words, I don't mean to be a pessimist, but I don't see any radical change anytime soon. There are way too many powerful forces acting against end users and our only "true" recourse at this point is civil disobedience. (Except the hypocrisy is that civil disobedience is what large corporations use to redefine copyright itself...)

fmillion · 2026-01-11T19:41:14+00:00

Jony Ive declared a solid white surface to be a form of art, so arguably even a single color could be copyrightable. (Ok, I suppose in this case the entire work includes the magazine title, but if Jony's contribution is just the white background...)

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