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

Lurked Digg until v4.

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

Now I’m here.

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

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • Reminds me of a TV ad, older than this comic, for a frosted cereal (probably not the first one that comes to mind) and the adult about to consume them has the inner dialogue “What about fat?!” “Wimp!”

    (I always heard it as “Wamp!”, so to this day I’m not completely sure if it was an early example of a spoken sad trombone, but “Wimp!” is more likely.)

    They don’t make ads like that any more.






  • It’s not about whether it works, it’s about proving that they’re keeping pace with the trends in technology that they’re not directly driving.

    They’re afraid that if they don’t give that impression, their stockholders will pull their money and give it to someone who does, and since that’s what their stockholders also fear about all the other stockholders, that’s what will happen.

    AI funding is so far up it’s own backside I’m not sure they’ll hear the cry of the small child pointing out that this Emperor has no clothes.


  • Gonna guess people who missed the memo about Mint until well after they installed Ubuntu. They haven’t had the time or energy to switch distros yet, but did manage the time and/or energy to install Cinnamon.

    Maybe a couple of others who have unknown reasons for avoiding Mint. No idea what those reasons are, but there’s always someone with a different take.


  • Set one up when I used a different handle but literally never used it. Thought I had a short ID number but, for reasons I’m not sure of, the piddly scrap of paper I wrote the number down on has always been in a particular place (and has been there for well over a decade), and it was 9 digits.

    Must have been thinking of that handle’s Slashdot ID. That was 6 digits.

    … and technically still is. Wow. The account is apparently still there. Not sure I’m going back there any time soon, but took this opportunity to reset the password just in case.



  • You need to lay at least some blame on Logitech for that one.

    They’ve sold drivers to Microsoft, but since no-one writing Linux would give them any money, they wouldn’t provide drivers for their proprietary hardware.

    This then lead to early Linux adopters buying non-Logitech devices and not seeing a use-case for rolling a reverse-engineered driver into the kernel.

    Logitech still haven’t written their own Linux driver. I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the money from Microsoft is so that they don’t.


  • Had to check. It looks like the comic actually only ceased production last year after the passing of the (second) artist.

    Chris Browne took on Hägar after his father Dik - who drew the linked comic - died, but today I learned that Chris died last year.

    As an extra kicker, I also learned that his brother Chance died a couple of months back. He didn’t draw Hägar but had taken on another of their father’s strips, Hi and Lois.

    My denial about getting older can only take so much of this.



  • Do. Take a boot USB for a spin. Try a few distros.

    I’ve been on Linux (Mint) for years and never had a mouse-wheel not work or any problems with sound (hardware failure notwithstanding). The computer’s been the same all the way through, but it is a bit of a Ship of Theseus at this point. Mint has had no problem with new (and old) parts that I’ve thrown in. Or new mice, as I implied before.

    Getting old Windows games to work has been the biggest non-starter, which is pretty much where OPs friend was having trouble too.

    Minecraft (Java) runs fine with the standard launcher, but I do get FPS problems if I’ve had an Xorg update. That’s more of a “your graphics card is so old Mint doesn’t really support it any more” problem, which I know how to work around.

    I did have problems getting Linux to run on a laptop once, but then it was 1998 and Linux drivers weren’t quite so plug and play. I had no idea what refresh rates my TFT screen needed and neither did Linux, boldly warning that if I set them wrong I could burn out my screen. Since I needed a GUI, I went back to Windows 95.





  • True. There are various legitimate tools that are only really one step away from malware, so it’s not too hard to imagine going that one step further.

    Thinking specifically of the fact that a new process is allowed to change its apparent name, as well as creating secondary process pools, but there are bound to be other, deeper ways.