Mr Fish + Cosmo makes my brain completely skip the fun show made by a horrible person and go to A Fish Called Wanda for whatever reason

Well did she ever give his nose back?

My workplace is basically as close to 100% Microsoft as you can get. When I started I figured “hey let’s try out this new Edge browser and see if it’s as good as people are saying” and y’know what, it’s had some nice features that Chrome lacks that I really appreciate.

However Microsoft entirely killed it for me by recently making every browser profile automatically sign into the Microsoft account that Windows is signed into. I was using different profiles to use different Microsoft accounts for managing Microsoft services so now I have my named account everywhere instead of the correct admin account that actually has access to more than the bare minimum. Literally entirely defeated the purpose of browser profiles. So I switched to Firefox at work because I can use the tab container feature for the same purpose and have fewer windows open at once as an added benefit

Oh that’s a very good question! I’ve seen the comic shared around the internet so much I don’t know myself

I mean the original source would be the Hogfather by Terry Pratchett. This comic is a rendition of a humorous interaction that goes down in the book.

In short, there’s a plot to eliminate the Hogfather (Santa) by controlling children into not believing in him, so Death (the Grim Reaper) fills in for the Hogfather while others work to the plotters and save not just Hogswatch (Christmas) but also the entire disc (the world)

Nice to see the concept applied to a righteous cause for once too!

There’s even better ones available now like the Tangara which is open hardware+software and it’s creators are here in the fediverse!

I believe they’re referencing the classification of Palestine Action as a terrorist group in an effort to chill speech against the Israeli genocide. The UK has also notably been attempting to chill protest in general through several laws passed in the past few years to try to quiet the increasingly impactful pro-climate and anti-genocide protests

Sit/stand desks are also great for ergonomics. You can set your desk to whatever the right height for your monitors is.

I worked at a bank where some of the offices had big fancy banker desks made of gorgeous hard wood and others had much newer sit-stand desks which while made of cheaper materials they did in fact allow for whatever height the user needed for best monitor ergonomics. I’d start my day standing to help me wake up, then around 11/lunch time shift to seated and there were some days I’d simply forget to put the desk down and be standing for the entire workday

Y’know what, I honestly haven’t looked at what the PCIe lane layout is like on newer chipsets. Maybe it’s gotten better since I last really paid attention like 5+ years ago. I remember in early-mid AM4 there was a lot of grumbling about how there’s only 20 PCIe 3 lanes followed by early PCIe 4 platforms that would give only 16-20 lanes with another 8 or so PCI 3 lanes. I also didn’t really pay much attention to AMD before AM4 given how far behind Intel they were. But I could be entirely out of date now that I think about it

So hardware that may still be perfectly usable but predates NVMe should be tossed out then?

The exact same thing you already have to do to upgrade the memory on such a computer, you go buy used/old stock DDR3 or cannibalize from another system. Pre-NVMe systems are DDR3 era and older. Time goes on, interfaces update and anyone looking for compatibility with their older system will need to either use an adapter or buy used/old stock. If there’s enough demand like with motherboards there can be a random Chinese brands making new hardware for old platforms using a mix of new and cannibalized parts

I did similar when preparing my wife and I for windows 10 EOL. I went back to Linux on the new drive, my wife to Windows 11. Honestly both have a similar amount of issues (mostly wake from sleep challenges on Linux, although my PC wasn’t great about waking from sleep on Windows to begin with) and most importantly my wife can still play Fortnite and I can have fun trying new stuff out and reveling at how every single game I try just works on Linux whereas 5 years ago it was more of a 50/50 chance whether or not a game would work

Does require you to have the PCIe lanes for it, BIOS support for booting to PCIe (which Intel 6th gen core CPUs were the first to support. 4th gen never did but some had m.2 slots and NVMe support for secondary drives and the 5th gen X99s had some receive BIOS updates to support but that’s its own can of worms) and both Intel and AMD have historically been pretty bad about being stingy about PCIe lane availability

Plus to run more than a single NVMe on a single slot your motherboard either needs to support PCIe bifurcation which is almost exclusively an enterprise feature or they need to have the right lane configuration available to support that x16 slot handing out 4x4 lanes (or 2x8/2x4 for dual NVMe)

Yeah my recent IT experience is similar. I redeployed monitors that had “vista-ready” badges on them during the monitor shortages of 2021-2 I’ve replaced so many of those analogue to digital adapters (usually because the computer only has 1 digital output and 2 displays to drive, or 1 HDMI and 1 DisplayPort but the displays only support HDMI and I only have VGA to HDMI adapters, etc.)

The challenge simply comes down to the fact that displays tend to last so much longer than the computers they’re connected to. Heck my wife is using my decade old 1080p monitors because they were an upgrade over the even older 720p monitors she had before which may well find themselves mated up to my kids’ new computer

To be fair, most languages end up using English words for stuff that’s tech related. For example, I’ve been learning Italian and actually laughed out loud when I learned that the Italian word for coach (which seems to be used for both buses and trains) is “Pullman” it gets even more obvious when it’s a computer-related technology

Probably next year I might try to learn a bit of German because I keep encountering Germans writing in German on various parts of the internet and it would be fun to join the club (plus I’d love to visit Germany sometime so that would remove one barrier for sure)

A couple of years ago I got my wife to finally play Portal and Portal 2 for the first time. Its been long enough she was entirely unaware of any of the memes about the game so she immediately fell in love with the companion cube and cried when she realized she had no choice but to incinerate it, even going so far as trying to find a bug to exploit to bring it with her

When they do you can still play 2009scape! Has up to 5x XP modes in case you want a less grindy experience, a single player mode and a brilliant community

Worth noting that OSRS is really just a fork of RuneScape from around the mid RS2 days, (if I remember correctly it’s based on a full backup someone found of their codebase, so it started as “hey look we found this old version of the game in a box in one of our offices, wanna play?”) and now it contains more new content than original content. Heck way back in the day the idea of a sailing skill was always a silly joke that nobody took seriously, and I’m talking back when Hunter and slayer were being added. Yet here we are.

So honest question, what is everyone’s hopes with the increase in Linux desktop use?

Like when I think about it the only thing I really care about is that I have decent hardware/driver support and holdouts for anti-cheat give up on requiring other operating systems (mostly so that my wife and eldest child stop complaining that I can’t play Fortnite with them) as well as other random stuff that flat-out blocks use with Linux and requires either extra configuration or to keep a spare computer around with Windows.

Basically I hope that Linux can be where MacOS was about a decade ago, a second platform that vendors are aware of and will put in some amount of effort in to support (and will be clear about limitations/lack of support otherwise) and it won’t be as weird to employers or schools if you have a preference for the platform

For an rail network that runs 24/7 they’re going to have crews specifically to wake up should there be a problem on the busiest sections of mainline as this hoax indicated there were. That’s a significant amount of dollars burned if they close the line due to a citizen reporting heavy damage to the bridge, and just waiting until 8am on the next business day to actually look at anything.

I strongly suspect what happened was they woke up their on-call inspectors (or scrambled an inspector who worked nights, which a rail network may very well have) informed them of photos circulating showing significant structural damage to this 150 year old viaduct, so they roll up and see the exact same viaduct in the exact same shape it’s been in for their entire life and call up their boss and say “oy you wakin me up for this shiv? The bridge is bloody fine! Check your sauces mate!” (And after reporting that it was a hoax probably went and did a more thorough inspection to make sure their bases were covered)

This is the real consideration, depending on your career so far, such a role might be easier just left off the resume. But they did say it was an internship so they likely have no good career experience to speak for. Personally, I’d aim for purely talking about the experience and just say that “the internship ended”