I may be using Mint, but know that I’m wearing sandals

ARMs Race

Sometimes it’s hard to do a task and you deserve a treat

I’ve got a Mint box that I use for file sharing and it gets by just fine. Set that up a year ago and the worst problem I had with the conversion was my old hard drive crapping out in the middle of it.

But I’m waiting for a nice long weekend to back everything up and do a proper upgrade. My computer doubles as a home theater and I know I’m going to have at least a day or two of “Why doesn’t thing thing that used to work do what its supposed to anymore?” while I juggle a grumpy wife who just wants to watch movies and a sneaky toddler who just wants to steal my keyboard.

Do I want someone to look over my shoulder and say “BTOP? That shit’s badass”? Yes.

Do I want to give up my nice, simple GUI heuristics and get a tattoo of all the esoteric commands down my forearms? Sadly, I am not actually cool enough for that shit.

No. I will accept my fate, install Mint, diminish, and go into the West.

I mean, I’m definitely at the end of my rope on Windows. Going to have to take the plunge sooner or later.

CMD

power

We Just Can’t Win

Just use copilot to write a powershell script to disable all the crap Windows 11 ads.

You wouldn’t believe it, but some people still think the solution is to install windows

It’s up to the authors how they want to license it.

Plus or minus some amount of piracy, sure

I mean, look what happened with TCP/IP.

A fucking disaster for humanity on a global scale

Even just the act of writing something down helps solidify it in your memory.

Also, since you have those tabs, you can just… flip through them and check. Then close out anything that’s unimportant or past its usefulness. Its not like this information is “forgotten”. You’re just choosing not to look at it, for whatever reason.

I feel like I’m looking at a scene from The Reanimator.

I mean, tell it to Jeffery Epstein. The man was pulling strings halfway around the world with his endless supply of blackmail and bribery.

“If this password doesn’t work, I’m going to break your thumbs.”

“Uh…”

“Yeah, its not the real password. Lets break his thumbs and ask him again.”

your full disk encryption will pay off one day

They day you fuck up your password one too many times and lock yourself out of your own computer.

check the IP logs

Its all encrypted? This guy uses VPNs and Tor?

Presuming that Mossad can be topped with a subscription to ProtonVPN or a Tor browser is adorable. Hell, presuming nobody in the intelligence services is familiar with Linux is even more adorable. “We’ve got everyone at the NSA fooled because we’re Arch users”. Yeah, sure buddy. What do you think these professional computer nerds are doing in their own free time?

Where do you even think encrypted applications come from?

What becomes epidemic can often be assumed as normal.

A Cautionary Tale: Sudden Infant Death Syndrome And The “enlarged” Thymus Gland

In the first half of the 19th century, physicians were becoming alarmed by sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS). Healthy infants would be put to bed and found dead in the morning. In 1830, pathologists noted that SIDS-affected infants had enlarged thymus glands compared with “normal” autopsy specimens. It seemed logical to conclude that these “enlarged” glands were in some way responsible for the deaths.

…

If an enlarged thymus was leading to sudden infant death, removal of the thymus might be of preventive value. Radiology had advanced to the point at which physicians began making the diagnosis of thymic enlargement from x-ray films. After radiographic diagnosis, thymectomy was initially recommended, but the mortality rate was unacceptably high. Thymus irradiation became the treatment of choice.

The first “successful” use of irradiation to shrink the thymus was reported by Friedländer in 1907. Thousands of children eventually received radiation to prevent status thymicolymphaticus. Some physicians advocated prophylactic irradiation for all neonates.

There was only one slight problem. It turned out to be deadly

The cadavers used by anatomists to determine the “normal” thymus size were from the poor, most having died of highly stressful chronic illnesses such as tuberculosis, infectious diarrhea, and malnutrition. What was not appreciated at the time was that chronic stress shrinks the thymus gland. The “normal” thymus glands of the poor were abnormally small. Here is where the fatal mistake occurred: because the autopsied thymus glands of the poor were regarded as normal in size, the SIDS-affected infants were erroneously believed to have thymic enlargement

In a household or community where large numbers of people express the same symptoms, it is very possible for people to assume this condition to be the normal one and good health to be the abnormality. They may even conclude healthy people are in need of treatment to bring them back to “normal” patterns of behavior.

You can see this error repeated historically, from abusive parents assuming “being beaten by my parents toughed me up so I should do the same” to anti-vaxxers who think measles and whooping cough build character.

My Diagnosis

~ Rachael Bloom, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend