A little bit of Monica in my life

A little bit of Donald by my side

it’s a little ARM box running Android, right?

That is EXACTLY the path I took. I started playing with a Raspberry Pi as part of my ham radio hobby, a Pi 1B in those days. Then my old laptop died, I bought a new one from Dell, which came with Win 8.1, and it kept dying. While going around and around with Dell’s tech support, I pretty much had to use that Pi for my normal work. I got a pretty good crash course in Linux, to the point it was more familiar to me than Win8.1. So I tried Ubuntu, it was okay, I tried Mint, and that was my home for the next ten years.

I still like Cinnamon better. To quote Jeremy Clarkson, “This is brilliant, but I like this.”

I mean, just now I was talking about dual booting Linux and Windows, and they fight over the RTC, Linux wants UTC, Windows wants local time. It’s a line of bash to set Linux to use local time, it’s changing a registry key in Windows.

The way you phrased that, it’s like the queen wouldn’t fuck so dicks went out of style.

Which is all of them; the Great Pyramid of Giza is the largest pyramid ever built by man, and I’m pretty sure it was the single heaviest structure built by humans until certain hydroelectric dams built in the 20th century.

The second largest pyramid is only a couple hundred feet away, Khafre’s pyramid. Khafre’s pyramid is the middle of the three Giza pyramids, it’s the one that has some of its casing stones left on the top. It is somewhat smaller, the base isn’t as wide and it’s at a slightly shallower angle, so it isn’t as high. To partially compensate for this, it was built uphill from Khufu’s pyramid to hide the size difference somewhat, and since antiquity several courses of stones have been removed from the peak of Khufu’s pyramid, slightly shortening it, but Khufu’s pyramid still stands higher above sea level than Khafre’s pyramid.

The third Giza pyramid, Menkaure’s pyramid, is much smaller, though about a third of its height was cased in granite rather than limestone. Something incredibly stupid happened to Menkaure’s sarcophagus. You’ve probably seen a picture of what’s left of Khufu’s sarcophagus, a plain, partially ruined granite box with the lid entirely missing. Khafre’s sarcophagus is intact, almost mysteriously so, it was set into the floor and the lid had a locking mechanism that apparently wasn’t defeated, yet the lid stands open. Menkaure’s pyramid used to contain a beautifully carved basalt sarcophagus, but in the 1800s the British decided to take it back to England, and then the ship wrecked and it was lost to sea.

Your mind-blowing scale of history fact is a tribute to Elvis was written in the 1980’s?

YOu didn’t (fully) fix it. This is something I don’t see a lot of people talking about regarding Windows/Linux dual boot.

Unix-like systems like Linux set the computer’s built-in real-time clock to UTC and then do any conversions to local time on the fly. I think that traces back to UNIX’s origins as a minicomputer OS; it needed to talk to other minicomputers across time zones from the beginning.

Windows, like DOS before it, is designed to sit on a desk by itself plugged into nothing but power and accept data one, maybe two floppy disks at a time. Why would the user care about anything other than the local time? Hell the original IBM 5150 didn’t even have a built-in RTC. It would forget what time it was when powered off and it would ask you when DOS booted.

Either OS can be set to do it either way in the modern era; pick one to change so that they don’t fight. It’s done with a registry edit in Windows or a bash command in Linux. Do one, or the other, but not both. I recommend changing Windows, because Windows will reset the RTC every daylight savings time and on a mobile system every time it crosses a time zone, Linux doesn’t.

I mean, Ubisoft and EA both still have business models, somehow. It’s kinda wild what people will put up with.

There’s a whole bunch of academic shitware that doesn’t work on Linux. Last time I was in college the math textbook came with a code to a website that wanted to install some Wolfram thing, I dropped out again, shit like that.

A lot of engineering software and CAD isn’t present. You just turn up to the town council with the bridge you’ve designed in FreeCAD. See how that works out.

Business software is a wild ride. It’s some mishmash of Windows software, AS400 software, web portals and iPad apps. I genuinely don’t know if I could rent a storefront downtown, fill it with merchandise, and successfully run a business with nothing but x86 machines running Linux.

Have you run into the system clock issue yet?

I’m an experienced Linux user, I put Bazzite on my old machine that I’m using as an HTPC.

It’s imperfect. The install process is quite brittle, especially if you’re doing something as mundane as “I want the OS on this SSD and my home folder on that SSD”.

You can learn how to use the terminal. You have demonstrated the ability to compose a coherent sentence, you can learn.

Every terminal command is a program. Typing a “command” into the terminal is just typing the name of a program. If you type firefox, Firefox launches. If it’s installed, we’ll come back to that. Anything else in the “command” like if you see letters or words after a dash, something like ls -a is an option, it’s like ticking a box in a dialog window, but on the front end. I recommend spinning up a virtual machine or getting a Raspberry Pi or something you don’t care about, and following some tutorials. Learn how to move around the file system, install software, run some utilities.

About that “if it’s installed” part. You mentioned you run Zorin. Zorin is what I call a Trendy Distro Of The Month. I’ve been using Linux for twelve years now, this hasn’t stopped yet. There’s the mainstays like Debian, Ubuntu, Mint, Red Hat, Fedora, Arch, OpenSuSe, there’s the niche special purpose things like Kali and TAILS and Puppy and Tiny, and then there’s the hundreds of quadrillions of “We took Ubuntu, put Steam on it by default, swapped SystemD for whatever.rs, swapped Firefox for Chromium and did a half-assed job at theming and extending Gnome that’s going to break every time they push an update.”

PeppermintOS, ZorinOS, ElementaryOS, Pop!_OS, Garuda, Nobara, Endeavor, Manjaro, Bazzite, Cachy, hundreds of others, are basically the same software in some slightly mutated permutation that most veterans aren’t familiar with. Invariably the veterans first hear about them from noobs who went looking for a distro that is “good for gaming” or “easy for beginners” and because SEO they find the Trendy Distro Of The Month. Which always offers some little gimmick that ultimately doesn’t matter. The process of getting a Bazzite ISO is taking a little Cosmo quiz about what you’re going to do, but then the installer is really borked compared to Mint or even Fedora.

A lot of instructions are written with Ubuntu or sometimes Fedora in mind, and then you pick a distro that differs from those, and then bitch that instructions don’t work.

Also, you need to upgrade your backup hardware if it takes 20 hours to image a drive. That should take minutes.

Artie! The coziest cat… …IN THE WORLD

“They told me to type words into a black screen with green letters, and the mere suggestion burned down my house and killed my family.”

What, in your mind, does said revolt look like?

I actually haven’t ever built a computer that didn’t boot on the first try. The closest I came, somehow, was my cousin’s PC. I got it all built, I pushed the power button, and nothing happened. A quick glance around the case and a chuckle later, I pushed the Reset button and the power light came on and it booted to the BIOS.

You know, I made a bit of a hobby out of Arduinos and Raspberry Pis, which use similar connectors, so those never bothered me. The ones that always make me cringe are those USB 3.0 ones with the heavy inflexible cables, the big stiff plastic plug, and the delicate little pins. I cringe every time I plug one of those in.

You need steel for the industrial revolution. You can’t make a steam locomotive out of bronze, first of all it’s too expensive, second of all the boiler will burst before you get up enough steam to pull a train, third the crown sheet would melt. You outright need the Bessemer process to make steam engines.

Incorrect.

Cleopatra lived from ~70BCE to ~30BCE.

The iPhone was released in September of 2007, slightly over 2037 years after her death.

The Great Pyramid of Giza, tomb of Khufu, was built ~2600BCE, making it some 2530 years old when Cleopatra was born. So the statement “Cleopatra was closer in time to the iPhone than the construction of the Great Pyramid” is correct. But, the Great Pyramid is the largest and heaviest, but not the oldest, of the ancient Egyptian pyramids. So, the same can be said for the dozen or so pyramids built before, to include the Bent and Red pyramids of Dahshur, the Meidum pyramid, and Djoser’s stepped pyramid.

You’ve also got 500 years after the Great Pyramid as well, which covers the rest of the Giza necropolis (with the possible exception of the Sphinx), right on up to Pepi II with room to spare. There are some pyramids newer than ~2000BCE but they’re smaller, not as well built, most are ruined.

What’s wild is how short the pyramid construction craze was. Both pyramids ad Dahshur and the pyramid of Meidum, and their complexes, were built during the reign of Sneferu, partially simulteneously. Djedefre and Khafre were brothers, so they’re pyramids were constructed either simultaneously or in very quick succession. The entire Giza necropolis including the two largest pyramids ever built was done start to finish in approximately 85 years. One human could have lived to watch the whole thing. The Great Pyramid itself was built in 20 years. And they did it with human muscle and copper chisels.

If we go to something like the discovery of electricity or the founding of the United States, we can say without qualifications that event was closer to Cleopatra’s life than the construction of anything we would call an “Ancient Egyptian Pyramid.”