piezoelectron

joined 1 year ago
MODERATOR OF
 

I'm going to be camping for 4 days at a location without easy access to fire (hence no boiled water). As such, I'm going to be packing a bunch of canned stuff for my daily meals. The place is in England, where we're expecting a few hot days this week and maybe some rain over the weekend.

However, I have some free time before the trip to cook food. But I'm not sure if there's any good foods I could bring along that could keep for 3-4 days without a fridge. I guess that crosses out most meat dishes.

Some ideas I had were: falafel, fritters, bread, calzones, pasties. Have you tried taking such foods camping and if so, did they last a few days without spoiling? Are there any other foods you'd recommend? Thank you so much!

[–] piezoelectron@sopuli.xyz 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Cheers! Yep, I'm gonna give them the down low on Linux. I might even modify the DE to imitate the Windows 11 UX so the transition is easier.

I'm basically boiling it down to Debian/Debian-based OR Fedora..

[–] piezoelectron@sopuli.xyz 1 points 1 year ago

This is actually a good shoot. Or maybe something like Gallium OS, but dunno if that's still around haha.

[–] piezoelectron@sopuli.xyz 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Thanks for the heads up. My main concern with Zorin and Pop (out of ignorance, more than anything) is that they're built with more modern devices, and will make the ThinkPad experience extremely slow? You think this should be a concern or it'll be fine?

[–] piezoelectron@sopuli.xyz 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Perfect! Honestly, my greatest fear is that something breaks and they need to look up fixes by themselves. For a technophobe, StackOverflow and other forums can be pretty intimidating or downright hostile.

Ideally I'd like to opt for a distro that firstly works well on old machines (I'm going for a ThinkPad T400, i.e. an ancient one), and secondly, if it does break, can be fixed with a GUI hopefully.

[–] piezoelectron@sopuli.xyz 2 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Based on my understanding, primary uses:

  • Read research papers (PDFs). Annotations functionality is a must (includes highlighting, commenting etc).
  • Write university essays, including formatting, academic citations etc. I'd personally stick to Libre Office but realistically, they're gonna use the MS Office suite. So I'd like to either have MS Office offline on the machine, OR let them use the on-line version easily.
  • Listen to music fairly regularly, so Spotify is a must.
  • Easy access to banking, finance etc.

Secondary uses:

  • Streaming-wise, they occasionally use Netflix but mostly stream via one of "those websites" if you catch my drift
  • They also like to use a VPN, which I can help set up (I'm planning to use my own OpenVPN instance)
  • Social media, i.e. Gmail, FB etc.

So yeah, I think the ideal situation would be one that easily allows:

  1. Using MS Office
  2. Using Adobe (I'd have used Okular personally, but it's annotations are utterly inaccessible if I share my Okular-annotated PDF with an Adobe user and vice versa)
  3. Browser for everything else (I'll likely give them Brave)
 

I'm trying to set up a Linux laptop for a friend who lives in another city. They have only ever used Windows, and likely won't have easy access to fix issues (not that I'm an expert).

First off, is it a good idea to give them a Linux PC at all? Have others had good/bad experiences giving technophobes Linux?

Secondly, if I go ahead with it, what's a good, stable, "safe" OS for a beginner? I'm shy of anything that's a rolling release (e.g. Arch, Manjaro etc) as "bleeding edge" can break things more often than not. I'm leaning towards Debian or something Debian based. But I've also heard good things about Fedora.

If I was the one using the PC, I'd have installed Fedora, as I've heard it's well-maintained. Then again there's been some good buzz about Debian 12. What would your advice be? Thanks!

[–] piezoelectron@sopuli.xyz 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (4 children)

Hey! You can also post this to !beatles@sopuli.xyz if you fancy :)

Beatles

[–] piezoelectron@sopuli.xyz 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Could you share any particular points that made you switch? I'm currently on Manjaro and I was thinking of switching to Fedora. But now I've started hearing good things about Debian...not sure how to proceed!

 

For me it's either Punchup at a Wedding ('you had to piss on our parade .... you had to ruin it for all concerned') or Bodysnatchers ('your mouth only moves with someone's hand up your ass', re-the Spez AMA). How about you?

 

I'm aware that Leah strongly discourages using CH341a, but I understand that this is chiefly because it's voltage is 5V, whiich risks burning the 1.8V or 3.3V datalines of the devices we're librebooting.

At the same time, I've seen a popular video specifically recommending CH341a when librebooting an X200. I assume this advice should be ignored.

However, Leah also specifies that you can technically tweak the CH341a to reduce it's voltage, following this guidance.

My question is: is this worth it, or is it safer to just use a Beaglebone Black/Raspbery Pi instead? What's your experience been?

I'm unfortunately on a budget, and BB/RPi are both prohibitively expensive for me. Then again, so is a laptop that's bricked thanks to an improperly fixed CH341a.

Have you had problems using a (tweaked or untweaked) CH341a? What's your advice? I really appreciate it. Thanks!

 

I'm aware of a few good ones, say, Tom Boellstorff's Coming of Age in Second Life, Gabriella Coleman's work on Anonymous, and Daniel Miller's Why We Post series.

But I feel like these examples are somewhat dated now. Curious to learn about any good ethnorgaphies on this topic from the last 2-3 years, especially from the COVID/post-COVID era. Cheers!

[–] piezoelectron@sopuli.xyz 3 points 1 year ago

Oh interesting! Last I checked Njalla was Bitcoin/Ethereum only but glad they accept XMR now. I run a 1984 VPS so can confirm that they accept XMR. I prefer them as they're cheaper than Njalla (only a little bit still)

[–] piezoelectron@sopuli.xyz 2 points 1 year ago

I believe it can but don't take my word for it

view more: next β€Ί