Back in 2022, Tildes helped me build my current PC (Thanks everyone!). Back then I knew that eventually I would have to replace my motherboard, which underwent corrosion and became unreliable. I never turn off or even put my PC to sleep because, otherwise, it won't turn on for hours. I'd like to change that. I'm pretty confident that is an issue with the motherboard, which underwent repairs before. Other components are much newer and my power source is top notch.

Here's the machine on PC Part Picker. Should I just buy the same motherboard again? I mean, I don't have any complaints, I just happened to live by the sea back then, leading to premature failure. But it's still working. It's cheap, too.

I might be up for a better processor, but price is a concern. What would be the next affordable step from what I have now? In any case, the CPU is rarely an issue for any of my tasks, and the only game I play that could use a more powerful processor is World of Warcraft, which I only play intermittently anyway. Maybe it isn't worth it.

I'm getting a 1TB SSD, those seem to have gotten much cheaper since 2022!

Because, unlike me, most Tildes users are in the US, Canada, and Europe, when taking prices into account, multiply them by 5 in your head to have a sense of what that expense means in my country.

Thanks!

What has your brain been spending its time pulling apart and thinking about?

It doesn't have to be a complete thought, or something you've come to a conclusion on. It can be as messy or odd or significant or inconsequential as you feel.

Inconclusive, directionless, stream of consciousness posts are welcome. This is a place to mull over the topic out loud, outside of your head -- not necessarily to take a stance or make a point.

It’s been a few weeks now since the release of iOS 17.4, which

[…] provides new options for app marketplaces, web browsers and payments for residents of the European Union. […]

Now, don’t get me wrong, I am a firm believer in the underlying regulation to it, and have been ever since the possibility of this becoming a reality was in the Brussels air. But so far, I haven’t really been able to come up with a truly practical use case.

Furthermore, I haven’t seen any marketing for an Epic Store, Meta Store, or similar “app marketplaces”, but this may be attributed to the still rather… wobbly legal situation surrounding, notably, still having to direct payments to Apple while not using their store for app distribution. I don’t think there has been any follow-up from Apple (or the EU) that retracts these conditions.

So: Have any fellow EU resident ~tech’ies done anything fun or interesting with this new freedom yet?

To those not affected by this regulation, what would you like to “sideload”, or are perhaps already sideloading on Android?

Do any of you think big companies will move their entire palette onto an alternative store anytime soon, e.g. Facebook and sister products? To be honest, I doubt this will happen, otherwise it would’ve long occurred on the Google Play Store as well.

My ideas were:

• I’ve thought about trying to install Minecraft (the full version, probably using Pojav), or a game of similar caliber, on my phone just for fun and to see how well the iPhone GPU really fares against a “real” game, but didn’t find the time yet for looking into it.
• Also personally, I’d love to see a real “root-capable” shell on iOS, but I don’t think that will ever be a thing irrespective of how much sideloading Apple is forced to allow into their OS.

I've always considered myself a rather clean and tidy person (and get comments from others to that effect), but realized I was never formally taught on best practices for cleaning. There are probably things I tend to overlook, things that may not be visible (best practices for cleaning pipes for example). There is likely a lot of "traditional" knowledge on cleaning I don't know.

I am curious if anyone here has some sort of "ultimate guide for spring cleaning" around the house to get everything to a nice deep clean, and some sort of routine on what someone should do every week/month/whatever in order to upkeep this cleanliness over the course of the year.

Not looking for some extreme clean freaks guide but I am genuinely curious as to what I may have missed and overlook as I was never really "taught" how to clean.

I already have the best ear muffers money can buy in my country, and it is still not enough. I cannot use ear plugs because of my tinnitus hearing aids. I'm in an area with a lot of noise and this is not going to change. The main issueI face is loud music. Could a noise canceling headphone provide some solace?

Have you watched any movies recently you want to discuss? Any films you want to recommend or are hyped about? Feel free to discuss anything here.

Please just try to provide fair warning of spoilers if you can.

There are a lot of awesome open source projects that I'd love to donate to, however, I can't afford to donate to all of them.

It would be great if there was something like a charity fund (eg. GiveWell), but for FOSS. So a lot of people donate to it, and it distributes all collected money between some curated projects (most influential/important/promising/underfunded/etc.).

Do you know if something like this already exists? if not, could it potentially be a good idea to do? It seems like the idea of donating to open-source is currently more prominent in the community due to the xz backdoor thing.

New job. I've been wanting to learn something new for a while, so I took a project where a lot of React is done. I'm learning it from scratch while I work with React.

I have some comments about it.

1. React makes front end work a lot more like programming -- I like that!
2. Javascript has changed a lot, and for the better, since I last used it over a decade ago.
3. The React-Redux tool kit is the bomb. It should be integrated/absorbed into React. I can't see any reason not to use it, even for small applications as it is less wordy wherever you use it.
4. The updating of state values should be more automatic, especially for flag variables not tied to GUI components. It is the major source of hassles with React
5. Udemy React videos. My company makes them available free of charge to employees. I've sampled videos from a number of courses. I'm not a fan of the instructors showing you how to do things in older, less efficient ways first in a learning/demo project, the ERASING that code to do it a better way. The should include copies of the project at each stage if they do that. I finally figured out that the best way to take notes I can use later is to comment out the old code and put the new more efficient next stage stuff on top.
6. React tests really need to improve. They are often more time consuming than the code itself. The tests have forced me to change my code or do needless testing to get the tests to pass. I had one situation where no matter what I did React test said I didn't cover the code until I broke an else clause off into it's one if clause. Blech.

All in all I've been enjoying learning React. It is neat new ( to me ) thing.

I feel sad that I will likely forget it all when I go back to my specialty language.

I had a long-running discussion about this last year with a trans person on the Fediverse. Before that conversation, it had never even crossed my mind that Klinger was anything other than a cis-het guy desperately trying to exploit a weird Army regulation to escape from a war zone ... who may admittedly have become a bit too attached to his wardrobe in the process.

However, she pointed out that Klinger was the closest thing to a role model she had on TV growing up at the time, and that she had definitely seen and identified a lot of traits in Klinger that strongly suggest he (she?) was a semi-closeted trans character, effectively pulling a double-switch, pretending to be a "regular guy" who was pretending to be a cross-dresser just to get out of the Army, while actually having found a way to be openly trans in the US Army all the way back in the 1950s.

Thoughts?

Friends believe in peace, kindness, simplicity, listening, non-violence, emotional understanding, activism, continuous learning and revelation, silence, togetherness, the inner light within all people, silent togetherness, friendship, love, respect for life. You may know Friends as Quakers. Some of your children may attend Friends schools. Friends gather at Meeting for Worship. Meeting (unprogrammed) is quiet and contemplative; individual; punctuated by the voice of spirit (you and I); an opportunity to be heard, and not be judged, and to hear, and to not judge; to connect. It is thoughtful, and beautiful, and somber, and joyous. And unlike anything else in my life.

I attend meeting in a very old house. It is beautiful and smells of ancient wood, with benches far beyond the years of the bricks around them. History runs deep in such spaces. Death, too: it is a burial ground many generations over, but these days we find it to be a garden both literally and otherwise. For a time, this place had dwindled (so I am told), but now it seems fresh and full of life. We come and we sit and we stand and we speak and we sing. The little ones do their best to keep still, but we know they're moved to run about, for that is the way of things. I don't mind. They are our future.

I was grateful to have been invited by Friends to a retreat out in the country. The residence was rustic and the setting was scenic, calm, and I had been there once for another purpose. I could tell that it was full of meaning. There was space to adventure. I did so. My cohort, which you might broadly call young adult, does not often have space to reveal ourselves. After so many years of repression, we instinctively put up barriers and we forget what it means to really laugh and feel. The goal of the retreat was to provide an open forum for emotional communion, especially getting in touch with who we were (have been), are, and will be. It was not prescriptive. As time passed, our leaders invited two elders to share in and expand our thought with teachings, music, video, movement, objects. Some examples of tone:

• "Welcome."
• "Friend speaks my mind."
• "That of the spirit is within you and I."
• "You were once very small; smaller than this seed."
• "Spirit moves me to vocal ministry."
• "You are among Friends."
• "What do you think?"
• "We love you."

A few specific words stand out to me from the retreat: "BREATHE" "DELIGHT" "LISTEN" "MUSIC" "VISION" "SMALL" "GROW" "THANK YOU" "HELPING" "FRIEND" "FRIENDS" "WORSHIP" "MUSTARD" "LAUGHTER" "JOY" "COMMUNITY" "REVEALING" "HEART" "SING" "SPACE" "CLEAN" "LIGHT" "STARS" "PEACEFUL" "PASTORAL" "WOODPECKER" "SUPPORT" "GREEN" "IDYLLIC" "DOG" "SOCIAL" "WHOLE" "MELANCHOLY" "INTIMATE" "CRY" "HOLD" "BELIEVE" "SEE" "RENEW" "SHARE" "APPRECIATE."

It is not very often that you meet a group of strangers and in just a few days leave each other with such bright smiles and quite a few hugs. And it is quite a bit rarer for those hugs to be deep, meaningful embraces. To be realistic, you can only get to know fifteen people so well in a weekend, but the grace in which these Friends held each other eased my reservations more than I expected. I am learning to see the light within other people (and within myself) more clearly. I find this highly instructive as well as reassuring.

There's talk in our society about the absence of community, especially for young people. Economy, government, technology, culture itself seem to disconnect us. Children are pushed too hard and yet they are left behind. I had opportunity in retreat to think about what it means to be a child and what it means to be an adult. I think everyone in our group had a different and personal takeaway on that matter. I also had opportunity to spend time with people who I would verily call role models. They were (are) kind and considerate and it was a gift to be with them, and to be called Friend (and friend).

I take great comfort in knowing that I have a path of forward support here. I can see myself continue to nurture my emotional maturity among this community, something I think I've neglected until relatively recently. I am grateful that this is not the final time I will see my new friends. We have our entire lives to live. It can be together. Suddenly, I start to see a fullness in the world that I was missing before.

That's what I wanted to share. Forgive my esoteric sentences: it's challenging to express the feeling of emotional/internal dialogue in conventional language. I'm more than happy to expand on anything I wrote here. I also welcome your reactions and your own experiences with faith of any kind.

The machine will be a laptop.

So let's say I'm doing this on Antix Linux or MX-Linux, which are both based on Debian. I already set up everything that I want. Now I wish to make that installation incapable of accessing the internet ever again -- even if I want it to. However, I wouldn't want to achieve that in a way that will negatively affect any application I might need. How can I do that?

You may be curious about my motivation. It is simple: that machine should be only for writing and nothing more. Maybe I'll use YLINAT, @Areldyb's Timasomo project.

For the purposes of my usage, it is nothing more than an electronic typewriter with a screen. That is a drastic measure but I have ADHD and I need to write. I'm afraid that if I don't do something about it I'll see myself in a difficult situation regarding deadlines. I'll just take the laptop with me to a quiet place and leave the cell phone at home.

Every day I will take my writing off the laptop via USB and back it up.

This thread is posted weekly - please try to post all relevant Israel-Hamas war content in here, such as news, updates, opinion articles, etc. Extremely significant events may warrant a separate topic, but almost all should be posted in here.

Please try to avoid antagonistic arguments and bickering matches. Comment threads that devolve into unproductive arguments may be removed so that the overall topic is able to continue.