Luggage aplenty in the airport, just have to make yours more trouble to get into. Which is why I put a keyring through both zippers rather than a lock.

My bigger concern is being able to identify my luggage at a glance, so I paint all of the edges on mine neon yellow.

Not strictly, that was just a BIOS option. Can’t guarantee every laptop comes with it. The power button was situated on the lid though, so I had to bodge it into the lower chassis.

The halftop I used was a Thinkpad and Lenovo has an online BIOS simulator. I followed it to the display output settings and set it to default to HDMI out instead of the internal LCD. Which then let me do everything including BIOS configuration on an external monitor.

As useful as any mini PC. Unless it’s one that refuses to boot without a working battery or requires you to jump through hoops to get display out blindly.

Self-hosting aside, I had one during the work-from-home times. I wanted to easily move my setup from room-to-room, but not worry about the built-in screen being in the way of my nice monitors/CRT/TV or ruining the battery by leaving it plugged in all day.

A laptop that I use every now and then today was already manufactured when I was 10 years old.

My schools in the US:

Only English for all of elementary school. Starting in middle school, students can choose to take Spanish, French, Latin or German (in descending order of popularity). A bus would take you to one particular high school in the county for Mandarin, Greek, Russian, Japanese, etc. For the advanced diploma, you needed to take 3 years of a foreign language course. The full sequence offered for Spanish, French, Latin, and German takes 6 years.

It’s scary to think about it, but I don’t dwell on it since I can’t do much about it without really disrupting my life.

I should’ve known he was an iPad kid

The communities I’m interested in are already well-moderated. I’d probably also be super passionate for a few days then vanish until something sparks my interest again.

Until now, it did not occur to me that there are some who believe multiplication and addition come before division and subtraction, respectively. Order of operations clickbait arguments make a bit more “sense” now.

First ignoring everything outside my direct control.

Still no, but I know what I want in my personal life and I see the path to get there. If the world doesn’t fall into chaos first. It’ll just take time, but what better use of my youth? If the past few years have taught me anything, it’s that trying to get there too fast will wreck my mind and body.

I think a lot of it now comes down to having a ‘Platonic ideal’ for myself and not living up to it. Like strictly an internal matter, I’m fine with other people seeing me the way I am. Even if I lived in a secluded bunker, I’d still be bothered that my eating and sleeping habits suck, my time management needs work, my athleticism is lacking, I never finished learning German, and my screen usage is ruining my back and eyes.

Actually, that would be kind of nice. I’d like to think that if I could be minimally- or un-employed but still well-housed and well-fed for a year, I could finally take a breath and go fix everything that’s been nagging at me.

Well, that’s the thing. I wasn’t going to bow down to that app’s demands or put a band-aid on it, I had to conquer it.

There is a particular camera app that a few of my close friends and I have used for group photos since over a decade ago. It’s proprietary and tracker-infested, but there’s a certain humor and nostalgia to the filters and effects that I’ve never found a good way to replicate without the app. It’s sort of an in-joke that we insist on using it whenever we do get together. So I have it on my secondary device and painstakingly patched the apk so it can run without any unnecessary permissions.

Not yet, but everyone I know that were summoned, total 3 instances, never actually served.

All sorts of animals have superior application-specific circuitry. Like bearded vultures that, while in flight, can drop bones precisely onto rocks to break them open and get at the marrow. But they lack the general-purpose processing power needed to abstract such skills into mathematical representations. Same abstraction likely needed to apply one skill creatively to other uses or apply logic to analyze something.

I’m no neuroscientist/biologist, but I could see an ideal scenario and measurement setup where dolphins and orcas maybe rival our general-purpose intelligence. But whatever it is, it still isn’t enough for them to build any recognizable society yet.

Or maybe Meta’s walled garden is impenetrable to scraping?

afaik, that’s the case for Instagram. After scouring the internet for frontends, there are 3 archetypes:

• black boxes like imginn, gets you images and nothing else. no source code to audit, self-host, or build an API
• self-hostable frontends that get rate limited almost instantly, even for a single user
• proper alternative clients that got cease-and-desisted into the ground

They did a great job making a panopticon, closed to the outside, yet devoid of privacy

Admittedly it has affected my decisions, but to a lesser extent and not towards the people I meet in daily life. My paranoia is more focused on what an unexpected intruder could do, so I have fortified the entry points to my house a bit more.

Ice-cold Vöslauer Superprickelnd was the best I’ve had. I’ve never seen it in the States, but most generic sparkling water from the supermarket will do.

Sparkling water

“Are you human?”

I understand why it’s needed, but it’s damn annoying when every single website asks.