Tippon

Just a reminder:

A lot of it is momentum / inertia? (I can’t think of the right word).

Basically, Ubuntu was the distro for years. It was the one that just worked and was easy for new users. It built on Debian’s stability and made everything easier. All the beginner guides and how to guides were written with Ubuntu in mind, so lots of new users switched to it too.

Mint built on Ubuntu’s success, and made things even easier for people switching from Windows, by doing things like putting the start menu in the same place, and making everything look familiar. Because it’s based on Ubuntu, the guides all still work too. As Canonical started making unpopular decisions with Ubuntu, Mint took the lead as the distro to switch to.

Now, other distros like Fedora, and DEs like KDE have caught up, and even passed Mint for ease of use, that history is hard to overcome :)

About 20 years ago, I lived in a shared house in the city. I worked nights, so if I left a download running when I went to bed, it would affect the others in the house. I saw a post online where someone was giving away a cable modem, and not knowing much about how they worked, I had an idea that I wanted to try.

The cable internet came into the house through a coax cable, rather than the phone line, and was split with a dumb splitter between the router and the TV. I used a spare splitter to run a cable to my room and plugged my modem in.

I tried it first on my day off so that I could check with my housemates if it caused any problems. It connected and everything worked with no issues, except that it only connected at about dial up speeds. We were going out for the night so I left it connected with some downloads running to see if it would stay connected. When we got home, the downloads that should have taken a few days were done. A speed test showed that I was getting around 35Mbps, when the fastest speed we could pay for was 4Mbps.

We later found out that apparently the street was sharing a connection (to the cabinet I think, it’s been a while), and because my modem wasn’t registered, it was just getting whatever was left over. At night, when everyone was in bed and their devices were off, it was going a lot faster. It didn’t last long, only a few months, but we took advantage of it while we could :)

Look for the QxR group. Lots of their releases include special features, and often as a separate folder.

I’ve got a CF-25 here. I keep meaning to find the power supply and seeing if it still works :)

My wife doesn’t just do this, she irons t-shirts inside out to protect the design, but also folds them with the design on the inside. Most of my t-shirts are black, so I have no way of telling them apart without unfolding them…

Get a fairly stiff brush, it feels really good, like scratching an itch that you couldn’t reach :)

It works in Voyager on Android if I tap the image, but it’s static in the thread.

I wish I’d thought to take a photo of a computer I cleaned in 2010. It had been sent to the recycler I worked for from a factory as it had stopped working, and I opened the case to see what sort of components it had.

It was a mid sized ATX tower case, and was literally filled with dust. I don’t mean that there was lots of dust, I mean I couldn’t see any of the internals. I took the side panel off, and it looked like someone had filled the case with foam.

The business next door sold cars, and had an air compressor, so me and the guy who ran it took it in turns blowing the dust out. I never found out what the specs were, as even the PSU was full, and I didn’t want to risk turning it on, even after cleaning it.

Yep, that’s what’s killed them for me too. I like having a physical magazine, and I like reading about things that I might otherwise miss, but the news is always old, and the guides tend to be spread across several issues that cost upwards of £6 each.

I’ve noticed a new news bot in the last few days, and it’s the only one that seems good so far. It posts links to news articles, but puts a short summary under it too. I find that to be a lot more helpful than the bots, and even the users, who post a headline and a link, then nothing else.

I’ve just messaged you :)

Do you still want a code for Yes, Your Grace? I’ve got one here, and you’ve got first refusal :)

I’m going out for a few hours soon, so might be slow sendng it to you, but I’ll be back on here later :)

I’ll reply to a human, and they might reply back. Replying to a bot is just shouting into the wind. The bot isn’t going to see it, and isn’t going to respond. Even if it did respond, it would just be more nonsense.

Every post on Lemmy has a comments section, even the ones with external links…

The opportunity to post is there, but that doesn’t mean the bot is driving engagement though. The fact that it’s a bot actually puts me off from engaging.

You can **be** the change you want to see in the world.

I am, I’m complaining on the internet. Viva la revolucion! ✊😁

But that’s my point. A bot that posts links to external content isn’t driving engagement or fostering discussion, it’s just sending people to other sites. Even a brief summary of the link would be better, as it gives you a starting point.

A plain link is pointless, other than posting for the sake of it and claiming that it’s content. Browsing All and seeing post after post of links with no discussions is just depressing, and doesn’t make me want to stick around, and especially not have conversations with bots.

It’s not though, is it? You’re replying to a question post here, in a community for questions. A significant portion of Lemmy is communities for questions, media, memes, and tech conversations.

Of the posts that share links, a decent number of those are either posted with a summary to encourage discussion, or are at least posted by a human that you can speak to. A headline and link to another site, posted by a bot, does nothing to encourage interaction with Lemmy. It’s literally a link that points to content somewhere else

I haven’t seen much from the rest of the instance, but I blocked the bot a while ago. It’s a bot that drives engagement to other sites by posting nothing but plain links. I don’t see how that’s supposed to be helpful or useful 🤷🏻‍♂️

Commodore VIC20 first, with the cassette deck and memory expansion card. I can’t remember now what size the expansion was, but we couldn’t play some games without it.

My first proper PC was an Advent 486 SX25, with either one or two megabytes of memory on board. My brother convinced our parents that it would be good for school work, but I added a single speed CD reader and a generic sound card to it and got Doom for my birthday.

That became my PC, so I upgraded the RAM to 4MB and the CD drive to a blisteringly fast quad speed! Crazy, I know :o

I’ve actually got it at home at the moment, but don’t know if it works. It was in my parent’s attic when there was a leak near it, so I’ve brought it here to let it dry for a while before I risk doing anything with it :)

That doesn’t mean that your laptop hasn’t developed a problem in the meantime. As someone else said, you had problems before you ever tried booting from the USB stick, so before Mint ever ran on the hardware. It looks like a hardware issue.