Seperis

I semi-regularly distro-hop, but Xubuntu is the distro I keep coming back to between hops to take a break or when one goes (temporarily) dormant. It’s currently running on my primary server/linux machine.

Reasons: 1.) It’s light on resources 2.) It’s very simple and clean. 3.) It works with all the programs I use regularly; only one needs to be hand-compiled (but that one has to be compiled for literally any Linux machine). 4.) I know it. Scrub/partition/install/configure in under an hour. I can pick up any of my projects again immediately where I left off.

If you ever need a wifi adapter that will definitely work with Linux (plus reviews!): https://github.com/morrownr/USB-WiFi/blob/becbea2d5213438e25dc3d35f161e1a0d8a1b12f/home/USB_WiFi_Adapters_that_are_supported_with_Linux_in-kernel_drivers.md

TP-Link AC600

Oops, this was meant as a reply to someone about the TP-Link AC2100 router in anothrr window, ugh. Too many google results open.

Let me google the chipset for that one if you haven’t found drivers that work yet. For some of the Realtek based ones, there’s some you can compile yourself by morrownr.

Yeah honestly, wafflemaker is one of those things that if you want waffles not in frozen form, that’s pretty much your only choice. If there is a manual way to do it, I’m honestly scared of the person who worked out how and what they have to do to make it happen.

I am tempted by your grill, though. Hmm.

Which one? What was the chip?

God, I just did the set up new laptop process on Sunday; I completely forgot how insanely long everything takes to set up, update, configure, etc. Linux SBC, maybe an hour end to end; install, update, all my configs neatly in a file, ready to be copied over. Regular Linux: two hours end to end at most. You just do not appreciate the beauty of apt update/apt install quite as much as the moment you are confronted with a new Windows install.

Windows? Pretty much most of Sunday afternoon and evening. First the Dell updates, then the driver updates, then the pre-installed program updates, then the Windows updates (though not in that order and not all at once, because predictability what is that). Then I could actually start adding my programs and configuring it, and oh boy.

Just my base configuration for Office–that being each individual program in the suite, God knows–required a hunting expedition and a lot of googling to track everything down in multiple locations and I still had to do a lot of it manually; putty and kitty required copying bits of the registry; calibre I gave up as it was less work to do it myself from memory; firefox was the only thing I could just copy and paste a folder and be entirely done. That part was nice. Every other program I needed I had to track down and install separately then hunt up configs in multiple locations and Windows kept interrupting the process because oh, we forgot, here’s more updates and one to three restarts. Why?

And Windows 11’s start menu is just insulting; talk about salt in the wound.

Egg boiler. On the surface it’s just the most gadgety pointless product invented but I literally wore it out because suddenly I could have hard boiled eggs and no risk of setting my apartment on fire because I forgot about the eggs. After I move, it’s the first thing I’m getting for my kitchen because low-risk hard boiled eggs are totally worth it.

There’s a lot of seemingly ‘useless’ kitchen gadgets like this: full size food processor, waffle maker, breadmaker, even my ridic large instapot. I don’t use them every day or even every week and no, I don’t need them for daily life. Yes I can mince fifty thousand vegetables for this really complicated soup by hand or make bread from scratch or do whatever you do to make a pot roast without them–but I won’t do those things. I know me pretty well now; if I want to make that soup, make some fresh bread, or do that thirty-step fancy pot roast, I need those tools or I’ll default to frozen pizza and maybe have fresh Italian bread if I went to Central Market recently and remembered to grab it from the bakery.

Sweet Roko’s Basilisk, so I wasn’t missing some mysterious reddit setting where I ‘new’ was translated as ‘wtf’ and ‘crap’?

It’s a whole new world.

I mean, I try and test drive all new social media platforms that don’t actively make my skin crawl, but. I’ve really bonded with it super fast, and not the way I did with Mastodon where I really sat down to make myself adapt. Don’t get me wrong, I love it and pretty much use constantly, but there’s always an adjustment period; the very worst was tumblr’s hellscapy postingness, but reddit was a very close second. My first social media was livejournal, so for me, everything is compared to that. When I went to dreamwidth, I had enough experience scripting and remembered enough from doing web design to build my own layout and theme straight from the available source, so my friendslist there (dw: circle) is literally customized as close as my skill level then could get to exactly how I want to read, and the right sidebar is customized to only want I personally want there that aren’t distracting to me, which is basically a fancier and more idiosyncratic version of my livejournal friendslist. I do me, okay.

Back to Lemmy: from the first, it was super comfortable and familiar. Community posts to the left, right sidebar, almost the exact amount of white space I need, so it was effortless to follow along and add communities and post comments. No weird distractions, nothing unnecessary or fancy to take my attention from content, and I can open up pictures directly in my feed and close them there without having to go to the community or change my scroll rhythm much. Joyous.

I just went back to DW to search for one of my posts and while there, I paused on my circle page and took a moment to realize: oh. They are not the same, no, but Lemmy is basically a less idiosyncratic minimalist version of my specific reading aesthetic; the base elements of both are the same.

(The only thing I might want to change is coloring the post titles since I’m very trained to see plain uncolored black text as text and not links, but three entirely different colors on a general feed page like this one might be a dealbreaker for me; I can adapt to seeing ‘post title is link even if black’ but tossing in a green or something with blue and orange in close proximity feels like a nope and I do like the blue for user and orange for community very, very much.)

So tentatively: this may be my new community-oriented home.

Both specific and in general 1.) Nectar mattress. The only mattresses i’d ever bought were from amazon and very on sale. Important Life Advice: whatever you have to do to make i happen, get a good mattress. Even my bed approves and it thinks everything is beneath it, including me.

2.) My bed.

Oh boy, here we go. This goddamn bed.

I bought it roughly twenty years ago and it literally took my entire tax return at my first job and then some to get it and the very first piece of furniture I personally picked out and bought for myself which may explain absolutely nothing about how I ended up like this.

It’s fairly straightforward, plain four poster queen bed but so incredibly melodramatic no matter the room I put it in, this thing will dramatically not fit and carry on like it’s actually in a castle tower in 1700s Frances waiting for a princess to sleep in it (it did not act like this at the store, okay). It has an unnecessary number of parts (some really could have been consolidated and a couple I’m not sure even have a function other than to add time to assembling it) every piece of it is awkward to move, even the parts that have no reason to be and don’t look like they are, and every single piece is ten times heavier than than look or is reasonable, sane, or really should even be possible. The wood is dark and does a very cool dark gleaming thing, and it takes hours to clean and oil it to a soft gleam (so. goddamn. many. parts). Twenty-four hours later it’s sitting there dull and dramatically telling everyone who sees it I never clean it and also use substandard wood oil

It takes a very base minimum of two people to even attempt to put it together and you better not have plans for the rest of the day because it doesn’t matter how many times you have done this, somehow, you will always get six parts wrong because whoever designed this has another job making complicated puzzle locks that you will never solve and will die mad about it (this person is a sadist). Just looking at it in any given bedroom I live in, it makes me feel I should be wearing something long, white, and flowy while waiting for my angsty vampire lover to visit me in the dead of the night and not taking my night’s sleep shorts and a tank top.

This bed is a snobby, judgemental asshole who acts like I didn’t buy it at the goddamn Roomstore at ten percent off because it was a floor model.

But. it’s a goddamn tank that’s been in substandard moving vans and the backs of multiple trucks and dropped down stairs and sometimes forgets to at least look scuffed. It will survive all the wars and still give its occupants a great night’s sleep. Those deceptively slim posts are strong enough to joust with a burglar, beat him to death, and then put back and rehang my very melodramatic bed curtains on them (though I’ll need a little hysterical strength to hold them up for very long; I am not kidding how stupid heavy those thing are and should not be). I love this bed, it is my soulmate, and it is where I will sleep until I move to a convenient grave. I hope all of you are able to have one of these in your life and if you already do, you have my condolences; but it’s ride or die now.

3.) The best headphones I can afford and a budget for potential upgrade/replace every two years (you don’t have to use that timeline,but it works for me). Related: Sonos speakers. No, they are not the best in any class but they are good to really good in multiple speaker classes and are affordable–if you budget strictly and buy a piece at a time or watch for amazon sales like it’s your job–for normal people.

4.) Kindle may actually be the most important single decision I have made in my life. I like books; I didn’t want to use a screen. I did it and a decade and change greater with slowly degrading eyesight I bless the day I decided to try it every day. Currently on an Oasis.

5.) Giving up and budgeting specifically to pay a ridiculous amount of money for my jeans. Sure, the receipts legit horrifies me, but they fit perfectly, are crazy comfortable, can pretty much survive anything I do to them (and I am hard on my clothes) and some have been with me since before the Obama administration and don’t even have a loose thread on them. I have literally every single pair i ever bought and they still look great (and I never add up the cost of them all and what thing I could have bought with that much money, God).

Okay, hear me out:

I get the argument that most of these protests are meaningless/if you REALLY want to change you’re going to have to do this this this. whatever (I usually stop reading there). I understand, but I don’t agree.

Sure, it’s nice when a protest can actually enact real changes but lets face it; that’s not common and sometimes not going to happen: fine. The decision to make a protest shouldn’t be decided on the basis of ‘can I win’; a much less restrictive–and very deeply fun–philosophy should be "is this worth taking time out of my day just to annoy/frustrate/irritate those who are doing this?’ If yes (it should always be yes), "So lets find out how many ways me and anyone else I can recruit can make this happen’.

In other words: every time a subreddit finds a new and interesting and stupid and ridiculous and just weird way to be irritating and embarrassing af…I am living for this.