Some middle-aged guy on the Internet. Seen a lot of it, occasionally regurgitating it, trying to be amusing and informative.

Lurked Digg until v4. Commented on Reddit (same username) until it went full Musk.

Was on kbin.social (dying/dead) and kbin.run (mysteriously vanished). Now here on fedia.io.

Really hoping he hasn’t brought the jinx with him.

Other Adjectives: Neurodivergent; Nerd; Broken; British; Ally; Leftish

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 13th, 2024

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  • The on-board sound died on my old PC a while back. There was a free slot on the motherboard that looked like it might take an old sound card, so I found one for cheap online.

    Installed it. Fingers crossed. Linux (Mint in this case) didn’t bat an eye. It worked fine.

    My newer PC is budget and has barely any slots on the motherboard (pretty sure there isn’t one that supports the same card), so I’m hoping I won’t need to pull that trick a second time.

    Other potential solutions:

    Sound via USB or Bluetooth.

    HDMI and DisplayPort carry sound as well as video, and there are ways to tap into that.







  • I wouldn’t want to keep the 11 in there. The entire reason for (hypothetically) making this change is to get away from the old version number and any potential confusion it might cause.

    I also prefer smaller version numbers, so “subtract 2000 from year” works better for me (and there’s no better time to take advantage of the fact this produces sensible numbers), but I can see why the full year might be preferable for someone else.


  • Odd question: What would be the fallout from changing the version numbering to be more like the change recently made by LibreOffice? That is, making it be related to the year number rather than the current system.

    The reason I ask is that Linux has been and will be getting refugees from Windows 10 and 11, and the timing of the current version numbers is somewhat unfortunate and potentially confusing in that regard.

    I’m aware I may be imagining a problem that won’t actually exist in any meaningful amount.

    There’s also the potential problem of Microsoft following suit with whatever follows Windows 11 being “Windows 2029” or something, but it wouldn’t be too hard to deliberately throw in another jump if that were to happen at the loss of some synchronicity.

    Wine 49 certainly has a ring to it!









  • Apparently I’ve misunderstood the word liberal every time it’s been used across my life in the same way that people think that “epitome” is pronounced “ep-i-toam” because they’ve only ever read it.

    When I looked up liberal, one of the places I looked was https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/liberal but I did not click through to liberalism, which might have taught me a thing or two.

    But please note the bit at the bottom of the link where the meaning has recently split into meaning “leftist” which is a lot closer to what I thought it meant… so apparently it hasn’t been just me getting it wrong, but a significant portion of the English-speaking world.


  • Me: The Earth is round.

    Them: Several seemingly legitimate paragraphs, patiently explaining that it’s flat.

    Me: …

    Someone else brought up the term “neoliberal” and I might have gone along with that. A prefix can do a lot of heavy lifting in allowing the rest of a word to mean something else entirely, even opposing the original meaning.

    What I’m gathering is that economists have redefined the original word, and what I think of as liberal, they call progressive.


  • If what you’re saying is true, it doesn’t explain why the greatest increase in capitalism has historically occurred under governments that were not liberal (by the dictionary definition. Or my simplistic one.)

    Unless, that is, that what you’re saying is that all the pro-capitalist governments were liberal by your definition (or some redefinition to which you and certain others believe is, or should be, correct). That, I think, is a ridiculous way to go about things, and smacks of trying to steal the word or besmirch people who would otherwise use that word to describe themselves.

    In short, I think you’re being disingenuous.


  • The belief that no-one is above anyone else and that everyone should be treated equally. The doesn’t quite match with the dictionary definition, I grant you (I looked it up afterwards), but nonetheless I think I was nearer the mark than “capitalist = liberal”.

    Capitalists tend to think of themselves as more deserving than others which would seem to be at odds with that supposed equivalence.

    And there’s that the biggest capitalist booms of recent years have been driven by illiberal politics, by and large. Reagan wasn’t a liberal. Thatcher wasn’t. Today’s billionaires are stumbling over themselves to swear fealty to distinctly non-liberal political parties, in power or not.