https://x-plus.store/products/n150-netbook

I picked one of these up after it got some buzz the other week. Still waiting for delivery, though, will report back once I’ve had some hands-on time with it! Probably just going to do Arch.

Trackmania, although depending on how you want to slice it, you might consider it ONLY grinding.

Incredibly low skill floor (4 button racing sim) but with near infinite skill ceiling as you learn to master all the nuances of movement, surface types, tricks, etc.

Endless amounts of content with the seasonal campaigns, tracks of the day, and weekly shorts, but also just a full blown track editor for community content on the side. Each track is like a little puzzle where you memorize all the details then try and get your best performance. Play in an online server with your friends and just chat, listen to music, or watch a movie in the background. Find your favorite style and master it: tech, dirt, NASCAR, lol.

It’s my favorite game to just turn my brain off and drive.

In addition to this, or rather before, you can run pacman -D --asdeps package_name to mark a package as a dep. If it is no longer required by something else it will be removed with the above. This can be useful for things that are deps that you installed manually at some point for some reason.

Oh, that’s some amazing info, thanks!

I had noticed this might be a problem when I was setting something up and tried to install a dependency that was already on the system. It informed me it was being set to explicit and I wondered if it might lead to a situation like that.

EDIT: More information provided. I disagree with the upvoted comment implying you should leave your system alone because you might break something. You’re using Arch, and part of the reason to use Arch is understanding how you built and maintain your system. Understanding how to inspect your system and perform proper maintenance is a crucial part of that. Read and think carefully before taking any actions and make sure any important information is backed up before taking major actions. Without throwing too much further shade, I find it disappointing so many in the community would take that stance and discourage you from pursuing this further.

When I switched to Arch, I started a notebook in Obsidian with a bunch of different information in it, I have a section devoted to Maintenance. Here are a few things I’ve put in there:

Clean package cache with paccache: https://ostechnix.com/recommended-way-clean-package-cache-arch-linux/

Clean orphaned dependencies: sudo pacman -Rs $(pacman -Qtdq)

• https://man.archlinux.org/man/pacman.8.en
• Qtdg, Q (Query) t (unrequired) d (dependencies) g (groups)
• Rs, R (Remove) s (recursive)

Additionally, you can run pacman -Qe to list the packages you yourself have explicitly installed with pacman, or pacman -Qdt to list the packages that are dependencies of other packages. Use pacman -Qm to list packages not found in the official repositories (i.e., things installed through yay). This will allow you to review packages you may have explicitly installed in the past for some reason, but now find you no longer need.

For yay, I’m unsure if I should be using -Yc, -Sc, or -Scc. If anyone has more info with that, I’d appreciate it.

For flatpak: flatpak uninstall --unused

And for journals: journalctl --vacuum-time 7days

That’s most of the “automatic” stuff, cruft that can be cleaned out with little to no consequence. Other than that, you’ll just have to manually review what you have on your system.

If anyone has other commands or comments on the ones I provided, I’d be happy to accept further advice here as well 😃

I appreciate him trying to drum up excitement for the terminal. A lot of people are afraid of it and I understand why, but you don’t need to know everything about it in order to benefit from it.

I wanted to post some Trackmania replays to Bluesky when they first rolled out video, but they only supported up to 50MB. I dreaded having to open kdenlive, figure out how to work the GUI and then also possibly have to do some terrible math to balance size and quality. Maybe this is easier than I expected, but I found this: https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/520597/how-to-reduce-the-size-of-a-video-to-a-target-size

ffmpeg_resize () {
    file=$1
    target_size_mb=$2  # target size in MB
    target_size=$(( $target_size_mb * 1000 * 1000 * 8 )) # target size in bits
    length=`ffprobe -v error -show_entries format=duration -of default=noprint_wrappers=1:nokey=1 "$file"`
    length_round_up=$(( ${length%.*} + 1 ))
    total_bitrate=$(( $target_size / $length_round_up ))
    audio_bitrate=$(( 128 * 1000 )) # 128k bit rate
    video_bitrate=$(( $total_bitrate - $audio_bitrate ))
    ffmpeg -i "$file" -b:v $video_bitrate -maxrate:v $video_bitrate -bufsize:v $(( $target_size / 20 )) -b:a $audio_bitrate "${file}-${target_size_mb}mb.mp4"
}

ffmpeg_resize file1.mp4 25 # resize `file1.mp4` to 25 MB
ffmpeg_resize file2.mp4 64 # resize `file2.mp4` to 64 MB

I’m not proficient in bash enough to have written this myself, but even I can glance over this and see it’s just doing some math for me while invoking two programs: ffprobe and ffmpeg. Easy peasy.

I put this in my ~/.bashrc and use it all the time now, it’s almost silly how simple this has made things. I get why nerds get super attached to their profiles now, I’m collecting a bunch of scripts and functions that just make life easier.

Currently I’m working on writing some scripts with ratbagctl (https://github.com/libratbag/libratbag) so when I launch a game through Steam it’ll automatically set my Logitech mouse profile for that game. You know, the thing the Logitech mouse software makes you sign up for an account and connect to the internet for. All of the control, none of the bloat 😝

For those not in the know, “Trusted Computing” is a very specific THING and maybe not what you’d expect, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_Computing

TC is controversial as the hardware is not only secured for its owner, but also against its owner, leading opponents of the technology like free software activist Richard Stallman to deride it as “treacherous computing”,[3][4] and certain scholarly articles to use scare quotes when referring to the technology.[5][6]

You can pretty much guess where I land.

a backup of your bitlocker key is in your Microsoft account, and normally nowhere else. It’s pretty easy for Microsoft to lock you out of your ow computer and data completely, if they wanted.

You make a good point, I’m missing the forest for the trees. Why even bother theorizing that BitLocker may be compromised when they’re removing local accounts for consumers and forcing the key to be uploaded to their servers anyway?

Yep! They don’t teach this stuff because consumer level cyber security is in the absolute pits of despair and moreover, they’re trying to do away with what little we have access to. Governments and police agencies like how easy it is to access files.

Personally I don’t bother with full disk encryption (FDE) since I don’t really have anything private on my main computer. Just a bunch of game files, comics, movies, etc. Anything extremely important such as tax documents, personal data, etc. is honestly very small and I keep in a little Proton Drive folder, <1GB total. I think the best approach is to simply educate yourself and be aware of what’s worth protecting and how best to protect that. Just enabling FDE and thinking you’re safe ignores all the other avenues that personal data can be stolen.

My current pet conspiracy theory is that FDE with BitLocker isn’t even worth it on Windows due to the TPM requirement. Why is that a bad thing? Your system probably has fTPM supported by the BIOS, why not just enable that?

https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/blog/windows-itpro-blog/tpm-2-0-–-a-necessity-for-a-secure-and-future-proof-windows-11/4339066

Integrating with features like Secure Boot and Windows Hello for Business, TPM 2.0 enhances security by ensuring that only verified software is executed and protecting confidential details.

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/5283799 (I don’t believe we’ll see this EXACT implementation of DRM, I’m just providing an example of TPM being used for DRM and that these ideas have been in consideration since at least 2009).

Now, if I were Microsoft and I wanted to exert an excessive amount of control over your system by making sure you couldn’t run any inauthentic or “pirated” software to bring it more inline with the walled garden Apple approach they’ve been salivating over for the past decade+, you’d first need to ensure you had a good baseline enabled. You know, kind of like the thing you’d do by forcing everyone into an OS upgrade and trashing a lot of old hardware.

It won’t be instantaneous, I don’t know exactly how or what it’s going to look like when they start tightening their grip. Again, this is all speculation, but it’s not hard to connect the dots and their behavior over the past couple years does not give them the benefit of the doubt. Microsoft is no longer a company that can be assumed to be acting in the best interest of the average consumer, they’re not doing this for your security. They want to know that your computer is a “trusted platform”.

EDIT: Further lunatic conspiracy theories: BitLocker is/will be backdoored so Microsoft forcing you into that ecosystem further guarantees they have access to your system. This all stinks to me, like your landlord telling you how you can arrange the furniture in your own apartment.

Just used the default for one big partition. I used to do tedious partition configurations, but it always ended up biting me down the road more than helping. This drive is for the OS, games, and working files. I have a 16TB NAS that holds anything worth saving, so if I need to nuke the whole thing and do a reinstall, all I really end up doing is downloading a bunch of Steam games again.

I use Arch on all my systems now. It does great for gaming on both my beefy gaming PC and my little work laptop (within their respective punching weights). I haven’t felt the need to explore CachyOS or any other variants for performance gains and I really do appreciate how bare bones Arch is. Just having the lightweight OS that isn’t doing a darn thing beyond what I’ve asked it to claws back plenty of performance, although I’m speaking more in contrast to Windows than other distros having any sort of bloat.

Still, Arch has been the first distro I really committed to, I’ve been on it for a year and a half now and learning how to build it out taught me a lot about Linux.

Also, I’m just never sure how long some of this offshoot distros will hold on for, you know? Is that unfounded?

Second paragraph?

Tesla is just the latest to see the symbol of bearishness, which occurs when a company’s 50-day moving average crosses and drops below the 200-day average.

As an example,

https://assets.finbold.com/uploads/2024/06/What-is-a-death-cross--1024x631.jpg

38/M/US

Home is a very complicated question that’s going to mean a lot of different things to people emotionally, so I try not to get too prescriptive about my own definition. I moved away from my rural upbringing as soon as I could and I never really looked back. It was not a place I enjoyed or felt like I belonged either. I kind of lost my sense of home and I can’t say it’s something I really look for anymore. It feels too permanent for me. To me, home is a treasure that must be hard fought, then protected, and can therefore always be lost. I don’t think I want a home anymore.

What I want is a sense of belonging. That seems a lot easier to manage because it’s built out of the values and interests I’ve made for myself. I bring it with me wherever I go. I’m free to change it or grow as I like. I try to match it to the people and places around me to see if I like them and if it works for me and if I’m happy. I moved from the rural town I grew up in to a larger city in my state. Then I moved several thousands of miles across the country and spent most of my 20’s and 30’s here. During that time I’ve moved to several small towns and suburbs around the larger city. I’m thinking of moving again, this time outside the country. I’m still excited by the prospect, and afraid.

I assume a lot of this is probably just some psychological phenomenon that is inducing a fake/unreal fantasy. I assume even if I could move to some other country I might not feel as joyful like when I was a kid and even if I do, at some point it might not feel special anymore and it might not be like I hoped.

So maybe this is just this classic “the grass seems always greener on the other side” thing and in reality it might not be like that.

I do think these things are at least partly true and it’s perceptive of you to point that out, but it shouldn’t discourage you either. It’s a very human thing to want to try. Just set your expectations, I don’t know that you’ll simply find a new home. You’re going to have to bring some of it with you, you’re going to have to make some of it on your own, and you’re going to have to ask for help along the way.

If you’ve got Logitech, check out Piper (which is really just a GUI wrapper for libratbag). After a lot of searching, this ended up being the solution I went with.

EDIT: pulled up the link but then forgot to paste it, sorry! https://github.com/libratbag/piper

KDE is Windows 98, full of fun customizations, but unpolished in odd ways no matter what you do.

Absolutely perfect. And part of why I’ve grown to love it.

Check out https://www.giuspen.net/cherrytree/, lightweight note-taking app with interesting scripting function built in.

Even if that’s not your cup of tea, it has the option to save your notebook to a single sqlite file, so I take that as good enough proof it’ll work for your similar purposes as well.

Other backers include OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.

WTF, no, this is worse in every way. So instead of being involved with the people and topics I choose, it’s instead left up to an algorithm? Somehow even more opaque than usual because of AI involvement.

This isn’t solving any problem, this is yet another mask to push content in front of people.

You’re getting downvoted by cryptobros, but you are absolutely correct, there is no good use for block chain and never will be

It’s a fully public database among trustless parties. To the first point, there’s no reason any database can’t be made public if so desired. To the second point, for the block chain to have any meaning or value beyond itself, some authority eventually needs to interpret its contents. That authority might as well hold the database or, in trustless cases, a third party trustee. Nothing about it makes sense at a very base level, you don’t even need to explain the tech because it just doesn’t hold up logically.

In response to a perfectly valid question about dumbass plan I just came up with:

“we’ll burn that bridge when we come to it”

One of my favorite examples of this was playing The Legend of Zelda: Four Swords Adventure on the Gamecube back in they day. Me and a friend were really into it, but had trouble rounding up extra players. We got his little sister and an unwilling third friend to join. After about 30 minutes the unwilling friend, Marcus, gets bored with the game and starts sabotaging the rest of us. He’d run around smacking us with his sword making us drop rupees or refuse to stand where we needed him. That’s honestly when it became fun for all of us, though.

The other three of us would plan out the room and then we’d figure out how to wrangle Marcus back into place. Someone would hold him so he couldn’t go rogue and hit us while the others got in place to pull some levers before the wrangler would toss Marcus onto a pressure plate or something. He got to continue being a little bastard while we (slowly) made progress through the game. He eventually came around and helped us when it was absolutely necessary, but it was always clear it was just so he could keep being a bastard again. I really enjoy that asymmetrical style of gameplay and wish more things capitalized on it.

Also on the Gamecube of notable mention was Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles. Always fun when someone would get the personal mission of “take the most damage” and become a suicidal maniac in every encounter, much to everyone else’s detriment. Ah the good old days.

But if I give them one of my nickels, what will I rub the other one against?

Thank you, that’s good clarification on what the actual motivations are here. Was having trouble following all the threads and sussing it out myself. Appreciate it.