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data1701d (He/Him)

@ data1701d @startrek.website

187
1440
2 yr. ago

"Life forms. You precious little lifeforms. You tiny little lifeforms. Where are you?"

- Lt. Cmdr Data, Star Trek: Generations

  • Remain Klingon!

  • Also, DuoLingo has lost its honor in general with its AI obsession and heavy layoffs; only a petaQ would use such a coward’s website.

    The only way a true warrior can learn Klingon is the old ways - the Okrand books and tapes!

    EDIT: Klingon Wiki is also helpful, as is KlingonSKA for searching words and Hol ‘ampaS for font-related stuff and digital versions of out-of-print Okrand tapes.

  • Lieutenant OwOsekun

  • "Feeeeeeeeed me!"

  • Junoir vs Senior

  • Replace the Macbook with a Thinkpad.

  • How I feel after installing Linux instead of "upgrading" to Windows 11

  • While doing the world building for a very Trek-inspired story I’ll probably never finish, (I’d originally planned the story ad a Star Trek fanfic, but later chose to make its own universe), I jokingly claimed the ship’s computer of the AAS Alan Turing was running something like Linux 126 LTS in ~2500.

    (I have to have my organization call starships “aero ships” in the story because my organization is called A.M.P.E.D, and I don’t think I could take the acronym of “AMPED Star Ship” seriously.)

  • What are the silliest reasons people have given you for not wanting to try Linux?

  • I think I made the mistake of pushing my grandfather away from Linux. He’s retired but does some professional photography; he’s used Photoshop for years, but said he’s open to leaving Adobe.

    One day recently, he told me he heard about “this Linux thing” and asked me if it would be a good fit and run Windows applications well. I told him his main issue was probably Photoshop, and that even switching, he’d still need some stable, consistent way to open past PSD files. In retrospect, maybe I should have looked more closely at his use case to see the complexity of his edits and if they might have worked well in another program that runs on Linux.

  • What are the silliest reasons people have given you for not wanting to try Linux?

  • I think for the MS Office thing, it depends on what it’s being used for. If it’s just creating a fresh document or editing a simple existing docx, LibreOffice it totally fine; I’ve heavily exclusively used LibreOffice Writer during my time in college and been okay, as I’m either just writing in MLA or using a provided Word file that I can then just save as an ODT after initial conversion and export as a PDF when it comes time to turn it in.

    However, from what I can tell, if you’re working in an organization that extensively uses MS Office, files may need to survive multiple openings and edits between multiple editors, and multiple cycles of translating between document representations can lead to degraded documents and just make your work life absolutely miserable. Thus, LibreOffice isn’t an option, though I hear there are more MS-compatible suites that are usable on Linux, though not all of them FOSS.

    This is why I’ve so far left my mother alone about Linux; maybe if I saw some evidence that her workflow would be more amenable to LibreOffice than I think it is, I’d reconsider.

  • Probably a dumb question, but: do I need to do anything to my media drive when swapping from Windows?

  • I usually format my external drives to exFAT since it's fully supported R/W on all major operating systems, in the slim chance I have to use macOS.

    Still, no need for the OP to reformat their drive; NTFS tends to work just fine.

  • "Designed by (underpaid) workers"

  • The Drumhead, what a prescient episode

  • I mean, while the ownership of the franchise is legit concerning and I am worried about where it's going with the end of LD and PRO, at least SNW has managed to get in some good ones, especially Ad Astra Per Aspera and Pelia bluntly calling Star Trek "the whole no-money, socialist utopia thing".

    There's certainly been some gaffes, and I've been driven a little nuts by the relationship stuff going on in S3, but there's still strong stuff in that show for now (granted, I've only watched up to S3 E8 so far). At the very least, it got some last words in before we possibly hit a dark age for while.

  • The Drumhead, what a prescient episode

  • SNW Ad Astra Per Aspera for the win!

  • "Designed by (underpaid) workers"

  • Young man, I see profits are down, I saidYoung man, workers leaving the ground, I saidYoung man, 'cause you're in hoo-man town, I saidThere's no need to be un-FerengiYoung man, there's a person in town, I saidYoung man, when you're short on latinum you willSee him and I'm sure you will findMiserable days and bad times

    It's time to get probed by Brunt F.C.A.It's time to get probed by Brunt F.C.A.He'll do everything young entrepreneurs fearYou can't hang with other Ferengi boysIt's time to get probed by Brunt F.C.A.It's time to get probed by Brunt F.C.A.You won't have shirts to clean, you won't have a good mealYour bank account is gonna reel.

    (These days, I normally wouldn't want to reference Village People, but this parody just works so well that I had to forget my political rage for a second and just get it out of my mind.)

  • "Designed by (underpaid) workers"

  • TIL: There is an open source "Alexa replacement" project

  • I need to play with HomeAssistant more. My last bit of hesitation was I was struggling to find a replacement for the announcement and intercom functionality, which is half of what my family uses Alexa for.

    It looks like it got announcements with the "broadcast" intent in February; for the intercom, there may be a plugin. This seems like it might have me covered on the intercom front: https://github.com/JoeHogan/ha-intercom

    Perhaps I'll mess around with it again once the semester's over; a lot of my family would really like to jump the Amazon ship and certainly be willing to try it if I give them the option.

  • If Danny DeVito were to guest star as an alien in an episode of Star Trek, would you rather see him portray a Tellarite or a Ferengi?

  • But have it be slightly implied he's an El Aurian, Lanthanite, or something like that.

  • System keeps freezing

  • I agree with other people that you should futz around with your GPU drivers and different Wayland compositors first, but also, if you ever had to reinstall, there is such thing as saving your dotfiles to significantly reduce setup time.

    I don't do that because I'm lazy, but it certainly is a thing

  • Me checking on the fediverse during the cloudflare outage:

  • Meanwhile on startrek.website, blissfully mostly unaffected other than being unable to access a few other Fediverse servers:

    At least my Canvas isn't out again. It was fun to chill during the AWS outage, but the rest of the week was quite stressful as I worked to catch up.

  • bop

  • Also, I find it really funny you commented on my 3 month-old comment.

  • bop

  • Michael J. Fox and JG Hertzler have secretly been the same person all along... somehow. I don't how; how does spacial scission thrown together with some other sci-fi stuff sound?

  • Saved my parents 2015 MBA

  • For reference, sharing your local IP address is a little like saying “I’m in room 223” (local IP address) and not saying what building (network) you’re in. Someone can’t walk into 223 in a different building and get to the same room you’re in.

    Honestly, even if someone knew what network you were on, a local IP address wouldn’t be that useful because even if they successfully got on your network, as long as you have a properly-configured firewall and no vulnerable network-exposed services on your system, they can’t really do anything.

    Honestly, while it’s still not a bright idea to tempt fate like that, even sharing your public IP isn’t that bad for the same reasons if it’s a competent home user; the worst that can happen on a properly-configured network is that someone tries and fails to exploit vulnerabilities that aren’t there and MAYBE drum up your internet bill. Also, for most ISPs, your public IP changes pretty often anyway, usually something like every few days to a week, due to changing DHCP leases.

  • Saved my parents 2015 MBA

  • I thought the same thing.