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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: March 26th, 2024

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  • As someone who had to carry one of these for work at the time -

    One of the most ridiculous things about it, was that you didn’t have to use the speakerphone with the walkie talkie feature. You could hold it up to your ear like a regular cell phone, talk at a normal volume, hear the other person perfectly fine, and actuate the PTT with your thumb (or index finger if left handed) when necessary.

    There was zero reason to use it as obnoxiously as most people did.


  • It works except when it doesn’t.

    Our previous cats (who have all crossed the rainbow bridge) were happy to use scratching posts.

    Our current cats are a different story. We’ve tried scratching posts with various coverings, including cardboard, jute, and carpet, and even uncovered, bare wood. They all prefer one particular chair, and occasionally the wood trim on one corner of the kitchen.

    Shrug





  • If you don’t have an Intel CPU, then you shouldn’t need it. At least, I think it’s only for CPUs and not for other intel-based devices (NIC, graphics, whatever).

    It’s prompting for upgrade because it’s already installed. It’s recommended (but not required) by initramfs-tools, so that’s probably why it’s installed (recommended packages are installed by default). oops, read that wrong. Intel-microcode recommends initramfs-tools.

    You may want to run

    apt-rdepends intel-microcode 
    

    to see what pulled it in.

    But you should be able to uninstall it, and then it won’t prompt you any more.



  • I’ve been using Debian since 2000 (potato).

    I’ve occasionally had to use other distros for work (Red Hat or Ubuntu, typically), or to verify/troubleshoot bugs reports in upstream packages.

    But my preference is Debian all the way, for servers or workstations.

    It’s stable, and it has a great community. Also ideologically speaking, it has the Debian Social Contract and Debian Free Software Guidelines.




  • I have sort of had enough of copy and pasting commands I find on the internet without having a good understanding of how they actually work.

    One thing you could do is start trying to understand those commands.

    Read the man pages or the documentation to figure out what the commands are actually doing. Once you have the “what” , you can dig deeper to get to the “why” if it isn’t obvious by that point.

    After enough of that, you’ll go to copy/paste and already understand what it’s doing without needing to look it up again.

    Then from there, it’s a matter of building the instinct to be able to say “I need to do X, so I’ll use commands Y and Z.”


  • We used to feed our cats almost entirely dry food, with wet food as an occasional treat (no real schedule for wet, just every now and then).

    But over the years we’ve had a number of cats that had health issues that were mitigated by switching to mostly wet food.

    So now it’s reversed- almost entirely wet food with dry food occasionally (every couple of days or so). At least, for our indoor cats.

    We also take care of a feral colony (many of which we’ve TNR’d), and those cats get dry food for logistical and cost reasons.


  • Interesting bee fact -

    In a hive that has been queenless for a period of time (long enough that there’s no way they can raise a replacement queen), one or more workers may develop the ability to lay unfertilized eggs.

    Due to how honeybee genetics work, those unfertilized eggs can hatch into drones (males), which may then have the opportunity to mate with queens from nearby colonies.

    I guess this is sort of a last ditch effort to propagate the hive’s genetic material before it fizzles out and dies. Which I think is fascinating.


  • I don’t have an alternative program to suggest, but there are some workarounds for using redshift.

    First, in the config file, you can set the location provider to manual, then specify a lat/lon and it will use that location in its time calculations. I do this on my laptop, and it works well except for when I cross multiple timezones - things are obviously off a bit.

    Second, with the caveat that I haven’t tried this, it looks like you can also manually set dawn/dusk times in the config, which sounds like what you’re after.

    See man 1 redshift for more info.