I am an explainer of things. I love working with kids and helping explain the world to them, with a special interest in the places where the answer is that we don’t know. I absolutely adore taking a question or comment and finding the full exploration which can bloom from that moment of curiosity. I do this on Lemmy too, and before that Reddit. Sometimes someone will post an article and it will be way too complex or not really answer any real questions and I will go ahead and explain it in much more simple English with analogies and simplifications which don’t lose the important details.

If you want you can dig into my comment history and find it, but my favourite complement ever is someone who said I took a kegstand on the font of knowledge. If absolutely jives with my excitement and joy at learning while also being way less serious and stodgy about science and knowledge.

ROMs are your best bet for more play with less storage required. Older games are insanely small by today’s standard, often coming in at under a single 600MB disc in size, but console games blow even that out of the water. N64 games are tens of megs, while earlier platforms are only a couple of megs a piece.

PlayStation games are all around that 6-700MB per disc and some games are multiple discs, but that is still way less than the size of modern games. Also a lot of them can play fairly well from a high compression format like 7z, so you can store then compressed.

Also, some games that are older have newer open source engines which can really breathe new life into them. My first example would be OpenMW for Morrowind, but DevilutionX is another great example. Trying to get Diablo running in modern hardware is entirely possible, but the resolution is very limited and it is super clunky. DevilutionX has more options and it is a much more enjoyable experience.

Also, Creeper World 3. I have put 50 full days of my life into that game and regret nothing.

A quick question, what accent do you have? As an Aussie I have real trouble speaking naturally with most speech to text software, open or closed source. I feel like the guys in that Scottish sketch show in the voice activated elevator. I sometimes use voice dictation for my notes for work and I spend almost as much time correcting as I do speaking.

That said, I have found a perfect solution. I can get well over the 95% correct mark by simply using an English or American accent. I can do both fairly well and the speech to text has no complaints. I imagine someone from Boston would have a tonne of trouble being understood, as would a Welsh person, but pretending to be a Californian or similar can help immensely.

I would love to find something that can be trained by my speech like Dragon Naturally Speaking used to be. I used that in the early 2000s and at first it was awful, but training it for a few hours really did offer a noticeable improvement, and ongoing use continued to improve further. My computer died and I lost all the trained data, so I never went back, but if I could I would definitely do that again.

Noooch?

Sad to see this play out again. Lots of people are deficient in B12 and various other essential nutrients. The worst part from my perspective is obviously the loss of life, but the second worst is how easy this is to fix. I am by no means a vegan, I definitely eat my fair share of meat and eggs, but B12 deficiency is easy enough to get, especially if you eat a lot of processed foods or have a mono diet, eating the same thing every day.

For B12 I would recommend nutritional yeast. It gives a cheesy sort of flavour and can be added to foods like beans, refried beans, ragu/bolognaise, various pasta dishes, the list goes on. A fairly small amount packs a lot of B vitamins and you can have quite a bit without any issue. It also keeps very well, just requiring an airtight container and maybe a dessicant packet for longer term storage.

If you take some tapioca starch and add it to water then slowly reduce it you can make a really nice cheese sauce substitute, very similar to Mac and cheese. Nutritional yeast adds the full flavour and colour, making it actually tasty.

I got a lot of fiddling with things when I was a kid so all my fidget toys that I found for myself got taken away in the places I needed them most like school etc. My solution was to use my own hands. I curl my fingers a little and then touch the crease between the first and second metacarpal on the index finger, then go down to middle and ring in the same spot, then diagonal up to the flat of the second metacarpal then the crease of the second and third metacarpal, then I reverse course. I can do the same with the straight from the second to third metacarpal crease on index, middle, then ring, then diagonal up to the first to second crease on the index. It is a nice pattern and except for times where I have broken or flayed my hands respectively it is always available. I can go slow or fast, do variations of the patterns, and I can do it subtly so people don’t notice. Very… Handy. Ha.

I hated the above Avatar movie but I loved TLoK. She is such an awesome character and has tonnes of growth and development, along with the fantastic lgbt end of the series. It was definitely a little difficult in the first few episodes but a big part of that was the transition from a rural setting to a city setting decades later, so it went from the backwater technology level to the cutting edge near a century later.

Space Techno Music | ADHD Intense Focus / Lucid Dreaming Concentration Therapy Study | Workout/Dance

It is a simple loop but it is so chill and works really well for doing study of chores. I have the m4a saved and regularly listen while reading.

Motivated

Something to consider is differences in absorption and context. One angle is coabsorbtion, where two molecules can be absorbed better together than apart. Another is binding, such as with lectins which can bind to some micro nutrients and prevent absorption. So if you add lots of something which is not bound like it naturally would be with foods that contain it then absorption may be disregulated and you may have wildly different levels absorbed than the nutritional label would suggest.

Adding lots of vitamin C to foods because of a cosmetic or preservative function may not be the best idea given how active it is in the body. Maybe it has a similar effect in the gut to what it does in the food in the packet, killing a bunch of microbes, and therefore could impact our gut microbiome. We don’t have the data yet on the mechanisms, so we should withhold judgement for now.

It isn’t one place. Neurotypical eye movement is fairly constant, with a lot of time spent looking at or around other people. People who are autistic or have ADHD have a different pattern and often get commentary that they are staring at something like they want to burn it down or that they are off with the fairies.

To help with masking one strategy is to have a frequent face check, looking near the faces of people who are in the room, especially those who have just entered or moved. If someone is speaking they should be looked at but not 100% of the time, more like 70-90%. Other time should be spent looking around the room, looking at whatever is behind or around them, or at whatever they are presenting if applicable.

That said, if that isn’t enough clarity I would recommend spending some time actually watching other people. You can do this in a classroom environment but people may find it disconcerting, so using sunglasses and doing it at a café is a fairly good option. Pay attention to where their eyes are going and what they are doing. If they are talking to someone compare their eye behaviour while they are talking to while they are listening, it is quite different. Same with if they are eating, drinking, reading, and so on. Some people spend a surprisingly large portion of the time while reading not looking at the page.

Yep, I have a strong reduction in the ongoing stress which keeps me awake. If I want to have a nap in the day I take my stimulants before it and I can actually sleep, otherwise not a chance.

OK, so no shade on your idea, but you actually can tell your dog he is OK.

Using a loud voice is a good indication that there is a threat or play, one of the two. Using a super quiet voice, such as a whisper, can convey the opposite. I have worked with a bunch of dogs and the most effective thing I have found for reducing barking and panic is to whisper their name with a positive tone and get down low enough for cuddles and petting.

They tend to look at me confused, tilt their head, then eventually stop barking and come over. I then give them quiet praise and lots of petting and cuddles as per their preference. Over a fairly short time they tend to shift to a short set of barks to announce the threat followed by coming to me to seemingly verify my attention to the issue, then they settle down.

This is mostly with either family dogs, 5 of those, or client’s dogs, another bunch to varying degrees.

Also, I would recommend Training Levels: Steps to Success by Sue Ailsby. I have used that book for a lot of dog and cat training and honestly it also works with how I interact with kids. Clear communication, lots of praise and love, capturing behaviours and associating them with words, and never ever using negative stimuli like hitting or yelling. Or as I see it now, respect. Dogs are intelligent beings and if you try to find your common communication tools you can be much more effective at sharing your needs and getting their buy in. Same with kids, actually listening to their needs and observing their behaviour gives you a massive step up, and then never ever being mean or unsafe and always being safe and protective can take you a long way.

Ah, good to know. I have found that the state I was used to calling tired was actually really exhausted, absolutely out of energy. Using Ritalin made the cost of things much lower so I felt like I could go for hours after my dose ran out. It was actually that I had gotten used to being absolutely ruined by the day and expected to feel like crap that drove my response, and now I go to bed with the capacity for a fair bit more than I used to.

I go to bed less fatigued and tired and sleep more than I did before Ritalin, but I do sometimes have trouble sleeping. I have found that heavy work, like a weight lifting routine or playing with kids, helps a lot with getting the physical agitation under control. I need to be active to be OK and when I am not able to be active I end up with depressive symptoms and sleep disturbance.

I would recommend trying a calisthenics or weights routine at some point, maybe a few months down the line, to see if it helps after your initial adjustment. It also helps with getting mood regulation working a bit better and can make sitting still much easier. I have worked various jobs and lifting heavy things helped a lot with the physical symptoms, though the boredom set in and made the job intolerable fairly quickly. I now work in personal disability care and the varied needs of my clients helps to make the job sustainable over a longer time.

Do you mean you didn’t sleep the night after you had a dose in the morning? Normally the dose wears off after 3-4 hours for standard release Ritalin and 6-7 hours for extended release. That would mean if you took it at 10am it should be completely worn off around 2pm for standard Ritalin and by 5pm for extended release. Did you take a second dose?

It is important to remember that how it is today is unlikely to be how it is in a few months. Your body has to get used to processing Ritalin and also the different level of demand you will place on it given your improved capacity. You may overextend yourself and maybe even hurt yourself in this process. It is normal to have some trouble adjusting and small issues like one missed night of sleep but it should level out within a fairly short time, maybe a week or two. If you have ongoing disruption make sure to talk to your prescribing doctor and make sure it isn’t a side effect.

Good luck, have fun!

My personal recommendation is to get started asap with what you have. That would mean using any old thing you have laying around. Do you have an old laptop? They are ideal for beginner self hosting as you can physically access the machine and it includes a battery backup right in the machine. Usually they are also fairly lower efficient, so that is nice too.

Buying dedicated hardware acts as a barrier to actually doing things, so getting past that is key. If you find you don’t actually want to do self hosting you can just stop using your old laptop, but if you bought a full server machine it will be a bit of a trap and make you feel like you failed in some way. Also, the cost right now is fairly prohibitive, but using existing hardware can make that much more manageable.

As for what to run, I would recommend trying a fresh install of a distro based on Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, and Arch. Yes, four. They are different and have a different feel to them, but also have different communities. By going through the process of installing each one you will get a feel for the system and the community around it and have a better idea what works for you. I spent a few years having around the Debian end of things but eventually moved over to Arch stuff and am currently using EndeavourOS. Your experience will likely be different to mine but trying a few different options will help you figure it out.

Then moving on to services. Try to see what you actually use your machine to do now and then find services for that. For example, if you use something like Google Drive to synchronise data from your phone to your desktop then try using Syncthing to replace that. If you use Netflix to watch stuff try using Jellyfin. If you do play things like Minecraft get a local server running.

These will all be for learning, so their performance doesn’t need to be better than what a professional can provide, they just need to work and be yours to learn with. If you find you love doing this and enjoy the process but the hardware is holding you back this is a good time to upgrade to a dedicated machine.

For this I would recommend getting an office computer like an Optiplex or similar, just a basic office computer with an i5 or similar. You will want a fairly good amount of RAM in it, probably 16GB minimum and really 32GB is where things start getting good. A dedicated graphics card is not likely to be useful this early as the iGPU in most modern processors is actually fairly robust and should handle transcoding video for most use cases at a small scale. Storage could be one SSD for the OS and multiple spinning disk drives in a RAID or similar configuration for storage. The SSD will make the actual OS faster, decrease boot times, and make it faster to install and update things making updates less disruptive. The spinning media is way cheaper and you can backup all of your OS drive onto the spinning disks as a cron job in low usage times.

That’s my two cents on it, start with what you have, expand as you need but not aggressively before you need it, and try things now before you are too afraid to mess something up because you rely on it. Remember to have fun and experiment, nothing teaches better than experience. Enjoy yourself, don’t take it too seriously, and don’t lock yourself in to one specific thing, be flexible and willing to experiment.

My experience may be different to yours, but I found that I could actually sleep better with Ritalin on board than without. I can actually have a nap if I decide to and will actually fall asleep while having an active dose, whereas if I don’t I am too agitated and can’t relax enough for a nap.

As for eating, OMAD (One Meal A Day) is good for me, I can not worry about it and just eat in the evening and cover my full day intake in one go. It makes organisation much easier simplifies my schedule. It is also better for blood sugar regulation and insulin resistance, so if you are prediabetic it can help reverse that damage.

That said, if you take it every day you will probably find your hunger signal changes to be more obvious while on the meds. I have found that I can get my three meals a day while on Ritalin after a couple of years of taking it, but skipping is also fine and doesn’t upset me like it does without meds. This is also true of pain, I can tolerate pain much better with my meds than without. The pain isn’t gone, it just doesn’t intrude and disrupt as much so I can keep doing other things.

I will also say that the sense of holding two tasks and switching between them, not forgetting the other, is something that I find works better off the meds than it did before the meds. I assume it is because I can actually train the skill with the meds on board and get better at it, then when I am off the meds the pathways are stronger and easier to use. I can’t say that for sure, but it certainly seems more possible to ignore distractions off the meds than it was before the meds, so I think skill is a part of it, though the other side is probably some degree of burnout and a lack of resources before the meds compared to after having them for a while.

Anyway, good luck, I hope it goes well for you.

As an autistic person with ADHD too I was going to say this. I hate my name being used, I strongly prefer dude or mate, I’ll even take “hey you”, but using my name is very similar to extreme eye contact or touching my hands. No, no thank you, I would prefer not to.

One can dream, but action is better. Asking for transparency is a good start, having legislation presented before voting for public comment is actually not that hard an ask for a legislature. Starting at your most local level and asking them to put legislation under consideration publicly on the local governmental site is a reasonable ask and may actually be done in a reasonable timeframe. Asking the next level up for the same once it is done locally and works out fine is actusy easier than starting at that level, so starting smaller is practically more effective.

I would recommend asking your most local form of government for the transparency you want and explaining your reasoning. Go to town hall meetings, be part of the process. It is more possible at that local level than at any higher level.

Honestly, I want much more democracy than we have. Right now we have a vote over who represents us every couple of years, depending on the system. That person goes to the seat of government and casts a vote ostensibly because that is what all of the people in their electorate would have wanted.

The fact is we actually have an oligarchy. The people we get to choose from are almost always landlords, at least where I live. They have multiple houses, lots of wealth, and connections. This is needed to get elected, but it means that the only choice we really have is which arseholes we want to vote for. There is no option for “none of the above”. Those people who we can pick from get a 4 or 6 year term and then we vote again with either the same person winning, which happens the vast majority of the time, or someone else who is also a rich fuck.

These rich people don’t know what life is like for a poor person. They are completely oblivious to how hard accessing our social support systems is and how dehumanising the process can be. They don’t know how often you will get your payment cut because someone else didn’t do some paperwork properly. They don’t understand that it takes a whole day on the phone to fix it every time.

They also don’t know the price of bread and milk, how much school uniforms cost for kids, how hard it is to afford anything nice at all on so little money. They don’t know how to cook because they can afford to have someone else do that for them, so they don’t know how hard it is to budget your tiny income to feed a family. They don’t understand that the major reason people don’t want kids is because it is too damn expensive.

The rich pigs have to go. They have been slurping up resources for all recorded history in one way or another and they really don’t add anything to the world. Could they be reformed by having their insane wealth removed and being average in wealth and income? Maybe. I would be willing to run the experiment. But at this point they have all committed so many crimes that a vanishingly small number of them would not be due to serve considerable prison time for wage theft, fraud, worker exploitation, and all the actually salacious crimes such as in the Epstein Files.

So I do actually want a radically different world than we have now. I do want to have a world where if someone abuses a child they face a fair and impartial justice system and then have justice play out, be it prison time or something else. I also recognise that aiming for that society from here is like aiming for a Mars base to build a space program. It is a reasonable long term goal but the steps along the way must be incremental and will involve a lot of time, effort, and energy. It won’t be a linear process, it will have stops and starts along the way, but with determination we can make the world much better than it is right now. Each step towards that amazing goal is progress that makes living here better, so I am willing to take those challenges and victories along the way.