Charlotte’s Web.

All billionaires in electric chairs.

currently my only option for internet is by tethering my phone mobile data. i do it with a usb hotspot. i have a wifi router but it seems unnecessary, complicated and slower than usb, so it is not currently in use. it’s an android phone and a linux computer but i don’t feel i know enough about either device or networking in general. should i be worried or do things different? i don’t have much that’s important. i still fear i might be doing things wrong.

i got my amateur radio license (U.S. technician) about a month ago at a big convention. i was thinking of suggesting the hobby to the poster but first read through the comments, to check if it were suggested already. your initial advice is probably better. i’m realizing i overloaded myself and burned out during the time leading up to the test and now i’m not entirely sure why i tried getting the license in the first place. i still don’t even have a radio. I think i wanted to learn more about electronics and one thing led to another. now my mind goes blank when i try to think about what to do. i’m not OP but found it to be good advice, thanks.

This setup isn’t what I use, i had wanted to try as many monitors that i had ports for and this was one result that worked.

2 Sharp 18" tv’s at 60Hz, different models and one can’t do higher than 1280x720p so it was scaled 125%

LG ultrawide 34" 100hz

Asus 27" 75Hz

Samsung 42" tv scaled to 75% but I couldn’t get its refresh rate to change. it’s supposed to do 120Hz but i only get 60 Hz

since switching to wayland, i rarely have monitor problems and i love it, especially after switching to an AMD GPU. i had constant issues from my previous nvidia card.

side note, i’m super poor and all of these except the LG were given to me by friends who no longer had use for them. many of these friends do website design and ask me how their sites look occasionally. they can emulate different screens i think but they’re probably trying to show off or they know i have a huge variety of screens i can test things with. I have at least 6 other monitors from 4 different brands in 3 sizes and 3 different native resolutions with 2 that do rates other than 60Hz. two are CRT’s. now i’m probably trying to show off.

tl;dr: if you think this is too long, don’t read it.

near the end of 2004 i was given a computer that cost $100 at a garage sale. it had windows xp installed but it was not activated. i had also just gotten out of jail for amateur botany (growing weed) and was on probation. there were strict rules with probation and commiting any illegal act would have meant far worse sentences if i were caught. since i could not afford a windows key and did not wish to illegally pirate one as that put me at risk of prison (at least, in my head it did but this was unlikely) i looked for alternatives to windows. that led me to linux.

i should add that my memory of this time is not the best and any or all of this could be absurdly wrong but it’s how i remember it, however incorrect that may be. my brain’s memory does not work right.

at the time my only access to the internet was one hour at a time per day, through the local library. it was there that i tried to download linux onto a flash drive. i thought it could be installed like any regular windows program. i don’t think there were linux distros that even had USB installation support back then, although that might have been a motherboard limitation. i used a 1gb flash drive and saved a .txt file to the drive which i had copied and pasted man pages into, like ‘man man’ among others.

i don’t know what it was i downloaded for sure anymore but i believe it was a linux kernel, as in just the linux kernel source code. no DE or bootloader or anything else, i think it was a .tar.gz of source code in text files but i never figured out what to do with them. i didn’t understand what a .tar.gz file was until years later. i believed they were linux somehow, that’s all i understand. needless to say, i failed in my endeavor and that $100 computer ultimately became an oversized media player, forever in ‘you need to activate this copy of windows’ mode.

fast forward to 2009. i had completed my probation and finally was a rehabilitated citizen. i had established friendships with more tech savvy people than myself (but still not very tech savvy, they just played WoW a lot) and with their help, i built a computer from a tigerdirect barebones kit. one of my coworkers installed a copy of windows xp on it that did not need activation. i doubt it was a legitimate version but i was still too ignorant to care. i was reminded of linux at some point and to show off my newfound knowledge of computers, i decided to upgrade my system to a dual boot of windows 7 (courtesy of a local college) and linux mint. it was successful but i had also made friends with several gamers by then. linux gaming was fairly nonexistant at the time. i did log into the mint installation occasionally but i never did much with it and none of it involved the command line. i soon forgot about it entirely.

i built my second computer in 2012 and upgraded to windows 10, for free because i had started classes for computer science. i quickly learned that where i lived, IT jobs were non-existant unless you had military base security clearance, which was impossible for me due to my previous life of criminal gardening. i gamed heavily instead of attending classes and soon dropped out entirely. i spent a few years drinking heavily in a haze of depression. i quit drinking in 2016 and worked a minimum wage job a few years in a haze of depression.

by 2019 i had saved up enough to upgrade my computer. in the upgrade process i changed enough parts to trigger windows to believe i had an entirely new computer and it demanded i purchase a new copy of windows. i’ve learned since that there were ways around that and that i probably did not need to buy windows again but thanks to that and to my cheap, frugal nature, i decided to revisit linux once again. i installed linux mint. two days later my apartment was hit by 2 tornados, frying my power supply and bricking two of my three harddrives. one was a data drive with all my important personal files and the other drive had mint on it. i was left with a plain install of windows. this is when i learned how important backups are. it took me until nearly the end of the year to be able to afford a new power supply. early 2020 i spent a lot of time trying to recover accounts. because my landlord is a slumlord i was fixing a lot of my apartment as well.

in march of 2020 my mom gifted me my first smartphone. it was an android phone which reminded me of my linux journeys in days of old. i bought an SSD and a couple flash drives with a tax return. i started downloading distros while also downloading all the apps in the google play store. i rather quickly acquired malware on the phone which in turn spread to windows i think. within a couple days time, the pandemic lockdowns began, i became unemployed, my internet was shut off, my phone wouldn’t work and all i had was a flash drive with a few iso files of 64 and 32 bit linux distros. without internet, i had to rely on man pages to learn things. i couldn’t download anything. i couldn’t search the internet for help. i had lost my drivers license back in 2004 and while i had gotten it back, i had not been able to afford a car so i couldn’t drive to friends houses or the library for help. it was not a pleasant experience. there is no direction to the man pages. if i didn’t know something, i probably didn’t learn it. it did not help that i had an nvidia gpu.

i’ve been mostly using manjaro kde with moderate success since winter of 2021. i tinkered with a few other distros and made all the rookie mistakes. i really enjoyed puppy linux and always have a version or three on a flash drive and play with it from time to time. i’ve learned a lot and unlearned some bad behaviours. i quit videogames entirely as well as tv and movies, so i could focus more on learning. i still barely know what i’m doing and i make mistakes often. they aren’t critical mistakes at least now and i have a backup system that’s almost good enough.

last year it was determined that i am developmentally disabled. my memory, meaning the kind in carbon not silicon, doesn’t like to work properly. i tend to use repetition to force it into long term memory. numbers don’t process well either but i’m not counting that. the previous sentence should demonstrate that my sense of humor is also probably affected.

this became far longer than i expected. my linux journey has not been conventional. it has not been positive until recently but mostly due to my own mistakes and ignorance. if i could change something, i would have asked people for help more. i hope you enjoyed reading it and thank you for your time. have a nice day.

Not quite related to the initial post topic, but “Every billionaire, deserves the electric chair.” is a phrase I’ve been spouting for the past few years. I like to think it’s a more extreme version of “Eat The Rich.” but probably not as catchy nor as easy to spraypaint onto stuff.

The 2019 Memorial Day tornado outbreak. Less than a week away from the 5 year anniversary of it.

My apartment is located roughly 500 feet (152 meters) from the end point of an EF4 tornado that hit and about 1500 feet (~450 meters) of the start point of an EF3 tornado that hit. One ended and the other began within minutes of each other.

I recall I looked out of my front door and could only see the sideways winds. I had just woken up after sleeping all day because I was tired, having stayed up late the night before, burying my cat which had eaten mouse poison, which I was unaware of the symptoms for until it was too late. I had to bury my cat a second time then next day and broke my hand in frustration while doing it.

My power was out for 10 days and I had no water for 6 days. I didn’t own a car and public transportation had halted in my area from trees blocking the roads. I walked 4.5 miles to a nearby Urgent Care for my hand but they had closed due to damage. From there I walked 9 miles to the nearest hospital. They had too many people. I gave up waiting to be seen after 8 hours and went home, then wrapped my hand with bandages myself, around an old brace I had from a previous unrelated broken wrist.

When my power came back, I learned that a power surge had fried the power supply of my computer. I eventually managed to check my email at the community college, which is when I learned my health insurance coverage through Medicaid had ended, thanks to an order from the president at the time.

My absentee landlord never checked on the building. Less than a month later, the in-wall A/C unit fell out of the wall, leaving a hole large enough for me, a 6’3" 250 lb man, to easily crawl through. It was there for 6 months before it was repaired by the landlords maintenance person, who bought a cheap window unit A/C and stuck it in the hole then filled in around it with expanding foam.

The hole was ‘fixed’ around the same time I was able to buy a replacement power supply for my computer. My data storage drive had also stopped working and I learned an important lesson regarding backups. That was right around Christmas time.

Unrelated to the tornados, that’s about when I started passing kidney stones. I tried to go to the hospital for them but without insurance, they turned me away. It wasn’t considered an emergency. I missed several days of work while I passed them at home. Work said because of the amount of time I missed, I needed a doctors note to return to work. Work would schedule me 6 hour shifts, 6 days a week, which comes to 36 hours. Employees needed 40 hours a week to be considered full time and to qualify for the company insurance. Without insurance, I couldn’t find a doctor who would see me. I was terminated and the reason they listed was that I abandoned my job.

My official last day with the company was 31 December 2019. I was ready to start a new year. 2019 had not been kind to me. I remember thinking to myself on New Years Day “At least 2020 can’t possibly be worse, right?”

I for one, am severely disappointed that i do not have relevent and targeted ads to view, while i am filling out online applications for jobs. i also still don’t see ads when i put the same information again on a paper application, as part of their company’s interview process or when filling out the tax paperwork if i get hired and i haven’t gotten ads yet when applying for food stamps due to the job not paying anything close to enough to survive off of and you know, come to think of it, i have not once seen an ad on any of my termination letters or paychecks either. actually, that’s probably because i never get either of those, they just tell me to stop ringing the bell and hand them the bucket of cash or tell me to return the wendy’s uniform within a week or i get a $35 fine deducted from my last paycheck and that i’m no longer allowed on the property after what happened behind the dumpster but that’s another story, i digress.

they should have ads on cash too. just because some people only use plastic cards and NFC to pay for things, doesn’t mean everyone does. poor people have a right to be bombarded with ads from their choice of currency, even if it is for things they cannot afford. it is a grave injustice of equal rights, that when i’m holding a cardboard sign on the freeway onramp begging for change, the pittance of coins i’m being pelted with aren’t blaring slogans from tiny built in speakers. when i’m dancing at the topless bar, the greasy singles being crumpled up and thrown at me don’t even play ads that sync up with the song i dance to and never, not one fucking time has my song and dance been interrupted for an important advertising announcement, it’s only ever interrupted by the strip club staff telling me to leave and never come back and that guys can’t dance to ‘touch myself’ by the divinyls no matter how flexible they are. i digress.

this is sarcasm mixed with weak attempts at humor. nothing should be considered truthful or accurate however some might be based on true events which have been altered or exagerrated for effect. This message was brought to by typing and no AI was harmed or used in the making of this comment.

But pretty much everyone who heard about their ebook scheme agreed it was an awful idea.

That’s a false consensus in my opinion. Assuming ‘everyone’ agrees, will rarely ever be correct.

You are correct in saying that IA is not a library. In my opinion it should be treated as one, if not better. it provides free knowledge, much like a library, but unlike a library you do not have to give back because of the ability to produce a nearly infinite amount digitally.

the point of lending has become useless for anything that can be digitized. i think copyrighting needs to end. creating and not sharing “intellectual property” is an attack on humanity. the arguments in support of copywriting are all rooted in the same concept that copywriting itself is mostly based on: greed. before it was a resources issue as well. it still is but with diminishing requirements that should and could be trivial in this digital world we have now.

Making new year resolutions and actually following through with them until i have succeeded. Each new year, if i completed my previous year goal, i will spend some time thinking about what i could do to best improve my life. i also very carefully word the resolution, so i am not able to ‘cheat’ in any way.

I started off by doing something i saw as a joke. the resolution was to watch every episode and movie of star trek, star wars and dr who. After accomplishing this goal (after 3 years) i realized that making the goal specific is more important. a vague goal that says “do better” in some way is bad. it is better, for me, to aim for a reasonable and achievable goal.

For example, “losing weight” is a bad. if i never stopped losing weight, it would be worse than if i never stopped gaining weight. if i make the goal “get to, then stay within 180-200 pounds”, it is a good goal. (for my height, this is a healthy range).

i started doing this in 2006. since starting i have quit drinking alcohol, quit illegal drugs and reconnected with family members i lost contact with, during the time i was doing the other two.

the most recent goal i made, in 2020, is actually the opposite of my first goal: quit watching tv and movies, quit playing videogames and educate myself as much as possible, until i get a college degree (this is difficult. i have developmental disorders) or buy a house. since they are harder goals than before, i gave myself a deadline of before 2030 begins.

now is my chance to brag that I’ve been running HML on a eee pc netbook that’s mounted on a wall in my bathroom, for about 4 years now, as a music player and in case of emergency internet searches when showering and it does its job wonderfully.

i used sweethome3d at first and then imported it into blender. it works pretty well although isn’t exactly accurate to scale. i started by recreating my current apartment and used it to plan rearranging my furniture but now i have two files, one for planning my apartment and one to buildout my dream home by expanding on what i currently have.

I simply use my credit card number for my password on every site. it makes it so much easier to remember both. back in the day i would use my social security number. thanks to that simple trick, i never get robocalls or spam and i’ve been removed from most mailing lists because no one will ever issue credit or do business of any kind with me. a hacker stole my identity once and my credit score quadrupled. he even gave my identity back a week later!

One important factor regarding submissives: 2 submissive people, regardless of how attracted they are to each other, are less likely to connect due to their submissive nature. in my opinion, people in general want a dominant person to take charge, excluding sociopaths/psychopaths, due to human laziness.

as for women specifically, from what i’ve seen the majority tend to be submissive, so that goes back to my first point, but also they usually don’t seem to care as long as the guy is over 6 feet tall, has immaculate teeth and they get some kind of benefit from it (money, free meals or rides, status, jewelry etc.) but my opinion there will probably get me all sorts of probably deserved hate. This is mostly theoretical. I’m speculating because I tend to be on the submissive side and i’m jaded as fuck, so take anything I say as worth a grain of salt.

In my area, a medium sized U.S. city, there are no male specific groups.

there are plenty of “women in (insert hobby)” groups and other groups that are designed towards what are considered minorities (in the U.S.), which meetup groups seem to exist for everything except for men, unless the man is also gay or racist or black or transitioning, etc.

i think many people in my area assume that any group which doesn’t name a specific minority, is a ‘male’ group but it’s not the case at all. i constantly have trouble finding social activities, because i’m a straight white male. i don’t fit in with any of the local meetup group demographics and don’t drink or care about sports or videogames.

so in my opinion and experience, i wouldn’t say it’s easier for men everywhere, just in certain locations perhaps.

i would compete in a race.

sl -alFc | lolcat -itas 819

rainbow snake train

sewing with a needle and thread. nothing complicated, the bare minimum is useful in a lot of ways.

i keep a small kit in my car because my pants waistlines keep shrinking mysteriously and i’m starting to randomly lose buttons and getting blowouts in the crotch. [likely due to far-reaching, nefarious, conspiracies and not b/c of the other kit in my car that’s full of snacks].

what used to be my crippling, irrational fear of inadvertently exposing myself at like a job interview or in an uber with a cute driver, is now an easy fix i can do in a minute AND it’s certain to make an impression.

old winter jackets with a lot of zippered pockets are especially great practice. try unstitching and removing a few of the pockets, then add them to other jackets or whatever you can think of.

I have a similar, but different setup for similar, but different reasons. Some call it ADHD. That’s a terrible term for it but that’s another conversation. I get sidetracked easily, so multitasking is risky. When that happens, I forget everything. If I get distracted, it can lead to hours, if not days, of forgetting to do critical things like: sleep, bathroom, eat, bathe, reply to texts from friends, family, bosses etc. An innocent wikipedia link can cause me to lose a day or two. So I use the virtual desktops as a way to ‘break away’ from whatever meaningless distraction has pulled me away from whatever i was doing. More on that in a bit.

Other important notes: I am left handed. I have rheumatoid arthritis. It effects both hands but my right hand is much worse. Keyboard shortcuts are not friendly to people who are left hand dominant. Keyboards period, are usually not left hand friendly. I have 2 monitors always and sometimes 3 or 4. I recently got an ultrawide and have been using just 2 lately. The 2nd monitor, the smaller one, is where I usually put things that are always running like chat clients, music player, daily agenda, timers for cooking etc. If I have a 3rd, it will have a text editor, firefox or things i read to assist with whatever i’m working on.

I have 4 virtual desktops. They are arranged and named like so: | Main | System | | Art | Porn |

Don’t let the names fool you.

“Main” is what it sounds like. It’s where I do most of my work. It’s also where I keep my ‘to do’ list. The list keeps me organized somewhat. It’s a shortlist of important things I need to remember.

The other 3 are where my biggest sources of distraction go.

“System” is where I put anything related to the tools I use. This is not limited to the operating system, it includes software and hardware troubleshooting stuff but also things like the manuals for my car, planners for building computers, electronic schematics, health related stuff like insurance crap or research papers and plenty more. Stuff that I need to be operational. It’s also a week/month/year planner and where I keep phone numbers, notes for projects, all sorts of stuff.

“Art” is mostly for image and video editing software. If I get frustrated by something, it becomes a vacation spot. A zen garden of sorts. Occasionally I will run “feh -rzsZFD 5 /path/to/my/shittyart” which starts a nice slideshow of images and watch it for awhile.

“Porn” is for anything that is not important. This is where wikipedia lives if it’s not related to anything important. This is where the youtube videos go, that friends/family send me that i’m worried they will distract me. It’s more of a ‘to do later’ section. That’s part of the choice in name for the desktop, ‘do’ sometimes used as a euphemism for sex. Another way of putting it, it’s the “fuck that for now” desktop. Also, I quit watching TV and movies and also playing videogames, as a new year resolution back in 2020. This is where those things used to go. Also, this is where I watch porn.

Keyboard: I remapped a lot of keyboard shortcuts. I wont list all of them, just the important/relevant ones. CTRL+[F1…F4] These switch to the virtual desktops. F1 is Main, F2 is System, F3 is Art and F4 Porn. CTRL+[top row 1…4] These send the currently focused window to the corresponding desktop. Most useful when I catch myself getting distracted by something. I can CTRL+4 to ‘throw it away for later’ Meta+top row 1/Meta+ top row 3 Moves current focused window left or right in regard to which monitor it is on. Meta+ top row 2 Maximize toggle focused window. Meta+4
Meta+WSAD Tile ↑↓←→ F1 Application Launcher (because I don’t need help lol) F2 Window menu F3 Krunner F4 Yakuake toggle

This allows me to use my left hand almost entirely by itself, useful when my right hand is locked and curled up in a clenched fist from the rheumatism. Another part of the reason I named the 4th desktop what I named it, because i’ve become really good at typing with one hand.

There are a lot of F row combinations that are unused. F5-F8 with shift, alt, meta and ctrl can be done with either hand once you do it a few times and understand how your hand can reach them. F5 alone is refresh. meta+f5 and f6 do mouse focus stuff i don’t really understand or use. I don’t use or know of any programs that use any combinations of them. To me it means there are 30+ shortcuts that could be made if i include shift+another modifer key.

I also made caps lock the 3rd level chooser, pause/break the compose key, mousewheel on the desktop switches desktops, mousewheel on the titlebar of any window moves that window and switches desktop, alt+menu (the keyboard menu button) and crtl+menu to open the emmoji picker and special character select dialogues.

I originally designed this with the KDE desktop cube switcher. It really helped the ADHD aspect of things. Something about being able to mentally ‘put stuff on the cube’ helped keep me focused. The visualization itself also worked as a distraction, one that I could use to help break away from my distractions. Convoluted way to do things, I know. Losing that silly cube animation really messed me up for awhile. I can’t wait for it to return, although I doubt it will have the same functionality.

Like you mentioned at the end, I am probably forgetting to talk about something.

This is a low quality gif I made, when I was first working out the shortcuts and stuff. Felt relevant.

https://imgur.com/SQsqa6C