They’re trying to bring back the St Patrick’s day parade with private funding while leaving the other stuff cancelled.

Oh that’s interesting I wonder if it’s the same one I’ve been using. Maybe I can try it on a vps. Yes I’m used to the live DVD installer from the MATE iso. Thanks.

Windows is dead

Netcraft confirms it.

Yeah mostly browsing. She decided on a GNU/Linux switchover after considering taking her laptop back to the store and getting a chromebook instead.

I expect she’ll want to run Libre Office at some point but it should basically be fine. The differences from Microslop are pretty subtle if I’m not mistaken. I confess to using LO myself sometimes (instead of TeX), since I’m lazy these days.

Ah, thanks to you and the other poster about UEFI. I may have confused it with secure boot but if Debian supports that, then great.

Debian uses Gnome by default so I used it for a while and hated it even after getting used to it, so I switched to MATE. KDE looked ok to me though I never explored it much. I might suggest it to her. I’m unfamiliar with Cosmic or Cinnamon. I think I want to start her with MATE, since I use it myself so I’ll be familiar with what she’s using in case she hit snags. But if she wants to switch to something else afterwards, that’s fine with me.

She no longer seems to be able to boot into Windows because of a Microsoft lockout. So I’m going to write a USB drive for her and snail mail it to her.

Someone else mentioned a VIOS setting so I may have to look into that too.

There is a GNU/Linux user group in her town which has a meeting next week, so I suggested that she go to it. Maybe someone there can help her with installation if she hasn’t gotten it handled by then.

Right now her only computer is an iphone, so it would be cool if there was a way to write a USB drive from that. Her phone does have a USB-C port but for older iphones, there are also USB drives with a Lightning connector on one end, so you can still write them from the phone.

The next Elvis’s name is Nene (pronounced Nay-nay). She’s 16 years old and is from Thailand and plays an Ibanez MC300 Musician guitar that she was gifted by a Danish fan. More recently she received an PRS Private Stock guitar from a Thai office supply tycoon or some such. She became semi-famous in the US by winning America’s Got Talent this year but she goes much further than that. Here she is with her band OZONE covering Psychosocial by Slipknot: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5eeUEEfdhhg

She’s the oldest band member. People have said that the band is all high school students but that’s incorrect. Boon, the drummer (also insanely good), just turned 13 and he is in middle school.

Here’s Ozone’s cover of Master of Puppets with Nene singing and playing BOTH guitar parts: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZMDvdAzUXxs&t=2605s

Here are Nene’s AGT performances (audition, “judges’ callback”, quarter final, and final, plus collabs with The Warning and with Lincoln Park; she skipped the semi-finals by getting a golden buzzer in the quarter final): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rUWK9-GV4hQ

She opened for Avenged Sevenfold in Singapore last month, and then in their own show they invited her up on stage for two songs, which she absolutely slayed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pQN2vQdSshg

Wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nene_Royal

But, yeah, screw that AI stuff.

I almost bought a Yoga with 16GB ram and a very fast AMD processor on black friday sale at bestbuy for $500 a couple years ago. A friend talked me out of it because the 16GB ram was soldered in and not expandable. Similar machine is around $1000 now. Oh well.

Yeah get something sort of recent. Depending what you’re doing 16GB ram is more than plenty. 8GB is ok, 4GB is marginal.

My 2011(?)-vintage T510 is ok for most of my purposes, but youtube has been migrating to cpu-hungry codecs so videos these days bog down the cpu and look janky. Maybe I can change some settings to fix that.

I do like the idea of a yoga-style tablet for use as an e-reader.

Nothing in the article about the commission getting to see the sekrit contract.

We’ll know the bubble is over when we can get $3/GB DRAM again. Until then we’re still under it.

We don’t need another web browser. We need another web.

Wonder if they can trigger cosmic inflation in their lab.

Won’t “AI compute campus” make people hate them even more? Also, in Washington it’s supposed to be SI instead of AI now lol.

Um what are these things and who should care? That info would help a post like this.

“Beszel” is Hungarian for “speak” if anyone cares.

This is cool, it’s sort of like the hanging chain problem. Simplest solution probably uses the Lagrangian. Basically you want to minimize the potential energy, which is found by adding the gravitational potential and the spring energy as a function of where on the spring the weight is hanging. Then integrate the Euler-Lagrange equation to get the shape of the uncoiling spring.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catenary for info about the hanging chain. There are good online tutorials about how to solve it but a quick web search didn’t find the one I remembered.

Photo in the article shows the examiner looking into the person’s eyes with literal binoculars. Is that really how the test is done? Is the picture AI slop or what? I don’t even see any optics between the binoculars and the target a few inches away, so dunno how the image can possibly be in focus. Is it because of the eye’s lens combining with the binocular? I read someplace that the eye’s lens has around 20mm focal length so maybe it focuses the binocular on the back of the eye.

Ehh there is also nothing looking like scanning in the picture. The examiner just looks through the binocular. I think the picture is bogus.

What I had been wondering was whether the test could be done with a phone camera and an app.

I use “screen” which i guess is similar to tmux, if that’s of any help.

Not sure what you want. You’re trying to monitor that process so you can tell when it finishes? You want to know when the file is closed? You can do that with inotify(2).

Yeah figure I’d rather have a spare phone on hand as I sort of want one anyway. I don’t have any google play store apps as it is now, so I’m sort of partway there.

A $449 or $550 phone with a 4 inch screen whose “key specficiations” don’t include the size and weight, meh. Still looking towards LineageOS on my Moto G. It’s supported now but I have cold feet about the reinstall til I can get a backup phone just in case.