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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 21st, 2023

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  • I do love me some Gunpla, but I wasn’t thrilled about the computing equivalent of having to sand, glue, assemble, and paint a Master Grade kit every time my distro upgraded and everything inevitably broke. Granted, a lot of that boils down to matching the right DE for your distro, and I liked to try to make KDE fit where it wasn’t necessarily the best option. Eventually, I learned to enjoy GNOME, but then started messing with distros that weren’t a good fit with that. The freedom Linux offers is both its greatest asset, and biggest weakness. It can make just setting up a basic, decent-looking desktop environment feel like you need IT classes just to know what the heck you’re supposed to do to get things working the way Windows and MacOS do right out of the box.

    It’s excellent when it works. But a frustrating, often times deliberately obtuse mess when it doesn’t.





  • Judging by your vernacular, you’re from the UK. I think the entire globe has something to say about the nightmares brought upon them by the British Empire. India and Pakistan in particular. Nothing the US has done comes even close to the outright chaos and bloodshed sown by the British in pursuit of global conquest. To quote the old PSA: We learned it by watching you. Except the US never quite had the stomach for for mass murder the way Britain has, so thankfully we’ve failed to live up to the legacy you’ve left.

    In your own parlance: Slag off, mate.


  • I used to drive truck over the road, and I can attest to the fact that those red light cameras can also be made very deliberately unfair. The city of Hannibal, Missouri had these cameras at the intersection of Highway 61 and Red Devil, at the bottom of a steep hill. About 1/5 of a mile up the hill south of the intersection was a pole with a sensor on it set to about 12’6". I observed that any time any vehicle over that height passed that sensor, the light would trip to red. And it was set at a distance that a loaded semi would be all but guaranteed to run that light. Those of us who traveled that corridor with any frequency knew the sensor was there, and would try to want other drivers over the CB, but a lot of drivers had stopped routinely using the CB by then, so the light proved quite lucrative. At least, until it started causing wrecks from the trucks jackknifing in the intersection in the winter. That setup ran for three or four years before the city was dragged into court over it and forced to remove the red light cameras, though it was done in such a way as to question the enforceability of the tickets and without ever directly acknowledging that the cameras were set up to entrap commercial vehicles.