😂 I also read this as Ron’s voice!

Nah as much as i love doing stuff via terminal, I am extra paranoid specifically about writing to the wrong device and losing data; I prefer as many confirmations as possible that I’m writing to the correct drive, and graphical installers tend to give me just a few more reassurances. A few examples would be stuff like

• a graphical representation of partitions (the general layout of a drive tends to offer an easy ‘fingerprint’ in my mind; like the pattern of partitions help me confirm I’m looking at, say, a Debian install USB compared to a single-partition general purpose storage disk)
• icons for different types of devices, like an SD card, USB, or hard disk icon
• confirmation dialogues summarizing what device is targeted, and what all will be performed

I’m also the kind of person who stares at a written email worrying about every last nuance of my phrasing, so 🤷‍♂️😂 definitely a me problem, I think!

HL2 soundtrack? HELL Yeah

I checked their site and it looks like you can download the teamspeak server binary for free, even TS6 beta! Or did I miss something here?

Their site has a download page for the ts6 beta, client and server! There’s even a Linux client!

Spacebar.chat (or github here) is meant to be a drop-in replacement with support for discord bots, but it has been super alpha the few times I’ve tried it. Haven’t checked in for a few months though!

(Edit: yeah I just checked and spacebar is still very much a work in progress. Looks extremely promising though!! It seems there are devs posting updates on the main spacebar instance, which is cool)

Rocket.chat also has a self hostable option, but I don’t recall that one being super great either.

This 100%. Calling is also super iffy in my experience (element / schildichat), and group calls are a non-starter, since it outsources them to a separate service, jitsi, embedded inside the element client.

What the FUCK.

I immediately went to settings and, I guess at some point I’d already given these swine my phone number? Went to remove it and I’ve greeted by this wonderful toast message=

God I wish something was fully suitable as an easy discord replacement 😭 spacebar seems rad if it wasn’t super alpha. And as cool as element is, it just doesn’t have the same low bar to entry that discord has (not to mention group calls are jank as hell, when they work, and there’s no screen share yet tragically)…

Balenaetcher has, for me at least, failed to write to USBs for the last 3 years or so that I’ve tried to use it - meanwhile random iso writers from flatpak have been more reliable for me. Very obnoxious that so many iso related sites recommend it. Rufus kicks tons of ass, if for whatever reason you’re still on windows.

Also on most distros I’ve tried, the disk utility has some sort of right click or context menu that gets you a ‘restore disk image’ button that works great as well.

Edit= I used Popsicle USB writer from flatpak on steam deck with no issue today! Made by system76 (makers of popOS) and found on flatpak. It is absolutely no frills, but works well enough to write an SD card image for a raspberry pi! 🙂

Recommend checking them out! Sorry, typo’d on my comment - the brand name is Boox!

I have hers all loaded up with a FOSS reader, f-droid (droid-ify), Nextcloud, Element messenger… The only thing I haven’t put time into is custom launcher stuff - but the native launcher isn’t half bad, if you ignore their attempts to coax you into their cloud subscription crap!

My partner has a ‘Boox’ that runs android, complete with apk side loading its basically an android tablet! Super cool so far - there’s even a model with a color screen!

I slapped the Nextcloud app on there and she has been syncing her books between her phone and the Boox!

Edit= the brand name is called Boox! Autocorrect makes a fool of me yet again

🏅

…in 2003, [bismuth] was discovered to be extremely weakly radioactive. The metal’s only primordial isotope, bismuth-209, undergoes alpha decay with a half-life about a billion times the estimated age of the universe.

Jesus crust!

Edit= source

That’s not even the best one, though. For a brief window I tried my best to create a little portable Ubuntu environment on a USB drive so I could just bring all my software with me, games and all, and just boot into it when I got to school!

Well, eventually I had the thought that I could potentially install it on a second hidden partition, and select it from boot time… But I guess in the heat of the moment (I had a little group of friends standing behind me blocking the librarians’ view, all cheering me on), I ended up misclicking and overwriting the OS, wiping the hard drive in the process 😅😅

Needless to say, they were not thrilled. Unfortunately, believe it or not, a group of kids crowded around one guy at a computer is a fucking beacon when you’re searching video feeds for suspects 😅 they had found me out by the next day and banned me from the computers for a year. (My friends just gave me their logins anyways 🤘)

Ah man I have so many stories about my high school schenanigains.

Every student had a folder named as their student ID on the smb network, all in one big folder. I created a folder there with a fake student ID just 1 above mine, so all I had to do was change my path from /students/1234 to 1235 and bam - I’m in my alt account. I had cracked copies of halo, starbound, gmod, powder toy, Terraria, Minecraft… all sorts of goodies!

Eventually I found that since this phony user folder 1235 wasn’t tied to a domain user, its read/write permissions weren’t locked down - so anybody on the network could access or add to the folder, so I shared it around with friends and it grew quickly! Didn’t realize that meant deleting stuff, too; some kids just had chaos in mind, and would randomly delete shit because hAHa I DelEted the FolDer!!1! Ah, high school.

So eventually I got a system down where I’d keep backups elsewhere, and I’d refresh the war-torn main folder every so often, or switch to a new bogus ID to keep it among my friends - but better yet, if I was lucky enough to catch it disappearing in realtime, I’d often throw it right back up with something flashy and new in there, like a new CoD game or something, with surface level ‘shortcut’ links to the game executable right at the top of the directory, complete with a convincing custom icon. Instead of running a game or something, though, it instead ran scripts that either identified the leak (CD tray eject in a library computer bay? Immediate audio queue locating the assholes), or in later stages when patching the leak still failed, I’d bait them into a script that’d nuke their PC somehow 😂

my personal favorite, I built what I called the ‘tree bomb’ - a recursive .batch file that launches itself in another window, then runs "tree C:". Within around a second you’d go from a functional PC to a screen filled with terminals spitting out a representation of your hard drive’s contents 🤣 in retrospect, I made a malware! 😅

Ah shit this rules! Cheers, yo!

Yeah same here! I had a brief moment where I thought the audio coming out of my remote desktop on my phone was the headset… Dreams shattered 😭

+1 for kdenlive!! Kickass software

For real?? 😓 I was rockin a 3080ti on a 4k panel for a bit there and Wayland was impossible to run on Debian-KDE. Like as soon as I got to desktop everything stuttered in slow motion, dpi was janky as hell, and wouldn’t respond to DPI config changes… And that was on a fresh install from Debian’s KDE installation media! 🤔 did ya’ll have to do any tinkering or was Wayland cruising for ya outta the box?

Had to sell that card as I got tf outta the US anyways (been maining my steam Deck on a dock, which has been fun!), but I’m thinking I’ll go AMD for my next build. VR & Wayland are way better on an AMD GPU, from what I hear!

Fuckin gottem 🤣🤣 bullseye!