FFF (Fighting For Fun) made some of my favorites. This is as good a thread as any to ask: I’m pretty sure FFF made a keygen with the main window having a pixel art’ish Milton, from “Office Space,” with his red Swingline stapler and I’m trying to find it. Anyone remember it and maybe have a screenshot or something?

I rarely pirated software back in the day except maybe Photoshop 7 (give or take a release) plus a couple popular plugins like “Eye Candy”, 3D Studio Max 5, or something like Nero Burning Rom but I don’t think it was for any of those. I associate the song at 4:20 of this video with it but I could be mixing memories at this point. The comment with the timestamps says it was used for Virtual Painter. That was standalone software but also a PS plugin (?), but unfortunately doesn’t ring a bell with me.

Anyway, I’ve been trying to find that silly pixel Milton off and on over the years if anyone else happens to remember it.

I should’ve clarified: “I actually loved that machine, referring to the HP*, …”

The HP was my first successful Arch machine, after various failures due mostly to impatience and incomplete knowledge; failing to install necessary drivers, not understanding how easy it is to just boot the live media, chroot back in and fix those sorts of things, and so on. It marked a point in my life where I just really went into crunch-mode, consuming as much as I could about as much as I could.

The Compaq was a hunk of junk, even when it was new. I can’t imagine servicing them was remotely pleasant, but I’ll give it credit for being the first machine I ever ran Linux on. Even if it did so poorly, “we all start somewhere.”

Just the battery for the thing probably weighed more than my next two laptops combined, and one was a 17" “Media” edition HP with the DVD ROM and the full keyboard with numpad. I actually loved that machine, and it ran Arch for a good while, before HP’s garbage thermal management (and, likely, aging solder) killed it.

I still have it because of sentimental stupidity and it being the only one I’ve ever stickerbombed the hell out of. I might need to craigslist a toaster oven just for hobby projects and see if I can bake it back to life. Would make a fine addition to “in case of LAN party” stack of old laptops I keep around for when friends are over and want to run some CS:S, Quake 3, Brood War or whatever.

My first was Slackware. I don’t remember much other than following instructions really well and coming away with a working, albeit slow, OS. There was a joke video making the rounds back then of someone opening their laptop in a library or something and the Windows startup chime playing so slooooooooow. That was unfortunately my embarrassing experience, in a community college class, with the KDE startup chime. I didn’t know anything about TWMs, the terminal, or anything else really and foolishly thought my secondhand, 90s Compaq Presario (?) laptop would run a full DE in the mid 00s.

Anyway I got Ubuntu running a while later, when the Beryl (Compiz) cube desktop videos were showing up everywhere, and it was much easier. Same time Live CDs got popular and you could test run the OS. Then did Debían for a while because I hated Unity and the end of Gnome 2. Riced out Arch with Xmonad after that, learning Emacs, Vim, TeX, Bash and so on along with the various coreutils. Arch(wiki) and some solid YouTubers got me finally learning to be a proper power user.

Now, servers aside, I’ve just got a Steam Deck and WSL. My next build, when/if prices get less stupid, will probably be Arch again unless I do the lazy thing and run with Bazzite or similar. I love Arch but I hate the occasional troubleshooting after I don’t update for a while, even if I have gotten better at it.

I’d have to run the numbers but, once the various productivity research gets upgraded a bit, I’m thinking it might not be too hard to abuse asteroids as a form of infinite resources. Or, at the least, as a pretty significant supplement to terrestrial resources. I’m just theorycrafting in my head right now but I’m expecting my space casinos to get nerfed soon enough and they’ll hopefully repurpose easily into a new astro-mining role.

No break for me but I’ve been doing “old dog, new tricks” by picking up some SMW Kaizo. I’m four exits out of seven in Shell’s Retriever so far. I think I’m doing fair for only being a couple weeks into playing romhacks and for last playing SMW in the 90s. I don’t think I’ll ever get around to “Baron of Shell” or any other crazy hard hacks but it has been fun working on a few of the “easy” ones.

I’ll probably get back to Factorio after I finish Retriever. Possibly not until after the sequel, Shell’s Redeemer, but I’ve previewed it and it looks substantially tougher.

As Minnels pointed out, Wube put in work to make the game controller friendly for the Switch. On Deck, the trackpads make it even better. I play with the default settings but, like the OG Steam Controller, the controls are further customizable through Steam’s own interface. There are a few community layouts people seem fond of, which probably map some toggles or whatnot missing from the default layout, but I think it’s incredibly playable as is.

I’ve been on a hiatus from Factorio for about a month now but I’ve set up a dedicated server on the aforementioned NAS. I think I’m going to go another another bender soon and use it as an excuse to learn a little LUA and maybe Grafana as well. I think it’d be fun, once my build is semi-stable, to let it run unpaused even when players aren’t connected and have alerts set up based on the tracked stats. Will see how that pans out.

Instead of a gaming computer, the last time I had some spare cash, I built a NAS. When I had a little again, but not enough to really build out a high end rig, I got the OLED Deck and immediately bought Factorio. I’d been binging Factorio content, recently found some channels like Dosh Doshington, DocJade, etc and knew I wanted in. For a PC game, that really wants a keyboard and mouse, it plays friggin fantastic on Deck.

More recently, because I was watching SMW romhack players a while back and Pangaea Panga just released Super Dram World 3, I’ve gone all in on learning Kaizo Mario games. Panga’s “Kaizo Kindergarten” is a great intro, along with “2Kaizo2Learn.” “Joy of Kaizo” is a beautiful dedication to Bob Ross’ “Joy of Painting” where level backgrounds are recreations of paintings from actual episodes of the show. It also features difficulty options and the beginner mode is pretty noob friendly. At least for someone like me who hasn’t played SMW since my SNES was hooked up in the 90s. Anyway, if you’ve fond memories of SMW it’s almost a crime not to revisit it and its hacks, either on a Deck or any portable emulator.

Sure thing. I got on a fuzz rock and stoner metal kick for a while and that album cover stuck with me. Then the usual compulsion took over and I ended up on a deep dive through old sci-fi, pulp comics, etc.

Cover of Utopia Zukunftsroman #299, 1961 by Karl Stephan. I’d never heard of it but it reminded me of the cover art for Truckfighters’ album “Gravity X” (which itself is from the cover of an issue of Space:1999). Turns out he didn’t do that cover but he did actually do some work for Space:1999.

I usually set vi mode to have vi(m)-like line editing but I’ve always liked Ctrl+u over Esc d d. Thankfully it still works even with vi mode enabled. Seems to also be implemented as a shortcut for a lot of login managers and in DEs for settings menus, dialog boxes and such.

It’s less relatable now, and the technology was fucking stupid to begin with, but: Imagine printing out a document and feeding the sheets into a fax machine instead of just sending the file directly to the machine.

Or using a cassette tape adapter to play music from your phone through a stereo system when that system has a built-in Aux port you could plug directly into (“Useless Use Of Cassette?”).

cat’ing into grep, and a handful of other programs people commonly pipe into from cat, is pointless when grep can be called directly against a file. cat is being run for no reason; a useless use of cat (uuoc). It means fuckall for most people today but I imagine it could’ve been an actual concern when hardware was much more limited and multiple users were connecting to a single system.

I’d love it if their equipment racks all simultaneously burst into flame the day it pops so they can’t pivot or hock their hoarded hardware to recoup the investment. Then again, if that finger on the monkey’s paw did curl, they’d probably all get bailed out by the taxpayers the following week anyway.

Win+R, wt, enter

Alt+Space, wt, enter (or .term and auto complete will fill in “Terminal”)

It’s pretty much identical in terms of keystrokes. I just always forget “wt” is the way to launch Windows Terminal from Run, and that it works with PowerToys Run as well. My main sell was that the latter is a decent quick launcher with some useful tools built in to keep you from ever bothering with the start menu. I’m sure if I played with the Keyboard Manager a bit more I could probably go for something like Super/Win+Shift+Enter and skip Run or PowerToys Run altogether. I just haven’t bothered for whatever reason.

On my one remaining Windows machine, I installed PowerToys and use the “Run” launcher. Alt+Space opens Run. If you lead with a . you’ll search programs. Alt+Space, .term, for example, should immediately show Terminal and you can slap enter to open it. You can also do stuff like = 1 + 1 or = 0b101 + 0xf for quick calculations, %% for unit conversion (%% 10MB to Mb), etc. It’s not KRunner, dmenu, etc but it definitely beats the hell out of the start menu.

PowerToys “Keyboard Manager” might let you reclaim some shortcuts as well. I used it to swap Caps Lock and Escape but I’m pretty sure it can be used to create custom shortcuts. There’s also some option to remap shortcuts on a program specific basis. So you can say Alt+T should send Ctrl+T but only when Firefox has focus, for example. Haven’t messed with it myself but I can see the value.

Still looking forward to ditching Windows entirely but, in the meantime, MS has some decent tools that aren’t included by default and don’t seem to be advertised because power users aren’t the target market and “they already know to look for it” I guess.

I paid $160 US for 2x32GB DDR4 3200 ECC almost exactly a year ago, when I built my TrueNAS server. I told myself I’d grab another pair down the road to fill out the last two slots in my board. Now I can’t find the same pack anywhere for less than $350. Upgrades are indefinitely postponed, to say the least.

Some of us are old enough to remember when “that command terminal thing” was computing. Now there’s something about text on a black screen that seems to make people’s eyes glaze over and their brains turn off today. You’d think they were being asked to decipher the Matrix. Too many generations removed I suppose.

The reality is I’m definitely not figuring out how my compositor works, almost never touching system files, infrequently scripting, and almost always using “a tool NOW for a SPECIFIC thing.” I’m not a tech luddite. Modern computing is shiny and awesome. You want graphical tools for graphical tasks. But there are so many excellent specific-purpose CLI tools, typically included by default across nearly every distro, that make so much more sense to use over a GUI. Maybe not always but most of the time.

Simple example, damned if I’m gonna open a file browser, navigate to my downloads directory, right click - Cut (or Ctrl X), navigate to another directory, paste, then right click - Rename. Not when I can just open a terminal (realistically, I always have it open) and mv ~/downloads/kewlwallpapers_abstract_dark_blah_blah.jpg ~/pics/wallpaper/abstract_003.jpg Especially when tab completion means I just have to type a partial path or filename and slap Tab to fill in the rest. It’s just so quick.

I hate it because I don’t know how to do anything

Some examples of what you’ve been unable to accomplish might add clarity.

but I’m not smart enough to learn terminal

Bull. Shit. You’re just not used to it and, even without picking up any knowledge of shell scripting, you’re only a man somecommand away from understanding what specific command line programs do. somecommand --flag --another-flag /home/me/thing typically isn’t much different from opening some GUI app on Windows, ticking two boxes, opening the file picker and selecting C:\users\me\thing then clicking a button.

All that said, now we really need examples because there’s probably no need for you to be messing with the terminal to begin with. At least not if you aren’t doing anything outside basic computing like web browsing, chat, productivity tasks and such. So what are you trying to do in the terminal that the OS failed to provide a GUI for?

Flatpaks… NOOOOO…

I haven’t used Zorin but flatpaks are enabled by default if I understand. Yes, you can install them via the command line but it looks like you could just open the built in software center and search for whatever it is you want. The only exception I can imagine is if you’re trying to install from a source other than whatever Zorin uses by default (Flathub, I would guess).

dependencies not found

With Flatpaks? Wat? With some other command? Context, please.

Anytime I have to use terminal I ALWAYS make a backup

You’re competent enough to image and restore your drive but not stay out of trouble in your OS? You presumably had to learn whatever software, and the underlying concepts, you’re using for that. Clonezilla, Rescuezilla, Macrium Reflect, etc all exist to make it easier but you’ve gotta know what an “image” is, what it means create it and subsequently write it onto a drive. How to identify the correct drive so you’re not wiping out something unintentionally.

So, are you not spending even a few minutes to check if the code snippets you’re pasting are applicable to your specific distribution? At least skimming the man page for the commands you try to run? Are you assuming “it’s all just Linux, right?” and that there isn’t nuance between distributions? Running shell commands you don’t understand is like running whatever backup solution you’re using without understanding it - just blindly clicking buttons and maybe you get a backup or maybe you format a drive and lose decades of family photos, your research paper draft, and whatever else. And if a fuckup costs me a literal day of my life in restoration time, I’m making it a point to use that time to figure out why so I hopefully don’t repeat the process in the future.

There’s little substance in your complaints and I’m left just so genuinely confused. In my head I’m imagining a walking talking XY Problem. Some specific examples of what you were trying to achieve or the snippets you were blindly pasting might shed some light but, left to guess, your actions sound akin to gamer kids running random batch scripts claiming to tweak power settings or whatever else in order to eke out a few extra FPS. Windows isn’t going to protect anyone who treats it the same way you have seemingly treated Linux.

Yeah, I’ve been having trouble with my feeds not refreshing once I’ve scrolled down to the “bottom” of what has initially loaded. Been driving me bonkers. Shame, because I rather like Jerboa, but I’m probably going to start scouting for alternatives or sacrifice convenience and stick to a desktop browser.

A bit odd I suppose, but he’s also “The ansible guy” and a solid “proxmox/truenas” guy. It’s not unlikely they could’ve become aware of him looking for information on automation or virtualization. That’s actually how I first came across his content. The Pi and other hardware reviews are okay but I care more about the how-to’s and what I’m actually running on my toys over the toys themselves.

Anyway, I didn’t dig real deep but I’m not ready to nail him to a cross. I’ve met Christians who “don’t approve” of whatever while simultaneously acknowledging someone else doesn’t need their approval in the first place to be who they are. That it isn’t their place to thrust their moral beliefs upon others. Not to say I don’t still find their worldview problematic either, and their level headedness is being drowned out by Christofascist rhetoric as of late, but time is still sanding the edges off their faith and it remains light-years ahead of other parts of the world.