bryndos

I second this. No one forced me. Even when work tried to force me to use smartphone 2FA it was easy enough to say “I’m not putting any f-ing micrsoft crap on my phone”, they found a workaround - magically they could just use the basic telephone network to do the 2FA.

I chose to get one because it’s more convenient than having phone, walkman, camera, book, torch , map, compass etc. I still carry many of those things from time to time when I want them, or when I want extra resilience. But I’s choose the phone most times because it is a cheap, lightweight, small, convenient alternative that makes so many things just a bit easier.

Bloody hell just faffing around with walkman batteries and recording compilation tapes was annoying enough.

It’s also very easy to just leave your phone behind and use the alternatives, they pretty much all still exist in some form. I mean that happens to me regularly whenever I lose my phone of when I forget to charge it or (partly) when I’m just out of range of the celluar network. I don’t remember either dying or having any police jump on me and force me to buy a new one or charge it up immediately.

“If you’ve done six impossible things today, why not round it off with breakfast at Milliways!”

The best salvation I can suggest is:

Edit - shit forgot to switch to my mrobespierre alt account before posting this, oh well . . .

I use CDs, Records and occasionally bandcamp - usually just for a free listen before I go to their concerts and buy from them there.

But just to be clear I also buy a lot of used records and cds; which I think can be seen as similarly immoral. Evil used record stores hoarding all the margin and never compensating the original artists. Again if they’re any good and ever play nearby, they’ll get a ticket sale and maybe I’ll by a record direct from them if they do a good show.

Mostly I only care about the morality for small/new/unpopular bands, first few albums and so on.

I couldn’t give a shit about compensating large successful artists like the Rolling Stones or Bob Dylan - or more accurately, whoever they sold their catalogue rights to.

Pretty much nothing i use my phone for can be done on a flip phone. Smartphone is no distraction for me - I just use it when I need it to do something for me.

maps - occasionally GPS. mp3 player
mp4s watching on long train / bus rides or when camping. large sd card (500gb) memrise/ language learning app. occasionally guitar tuner occasionally internet is useful for checking events, buying tickets, checking for hotels and stuff. occasionally checking emails. occasionally playing mindustry (when i want my battery to die).

I don’t carry a laptop most of the time that i’d need for most of that stuff above. TBH - I can’t use many other apps anyway because I don’t want GPS or microG installed - so I’m mostly just f-droid apps.

Edit - i’d also prefer something like simpleX to SMS, but I don’t actually know anyone else who uses it - so not an issue really. I just have to SMS.

If you don’t want portability, and do want expandability, then I don’t think Steam Deck is a good choice for you.
Much as it is a brilliant devicel it’s also a wee bit old now. And anyone who wants the anti-cheat games is still stuffed.

I disagree with any others saying it is openable and repairable. It’s better than modern slimline laptops - which is not saying much. I don’t think it’s as accessible asa Mini PC - and frankly if you want to upgrade, go desktop. If you can get a used old case with a decent PSU - then buy the rest of the guts - you’ll end up with something way better - and you’ll be able to make sure you can fully power your GPU and CPU for the things you want to do with it. And far easier to cool it properly and avoid throttling if you’re really pulling a load of watts into it. This probably does matter if you want to game at high resolutions with high frame rates for modern games. If you don’t mind dropping to lower resolutions or <=60FPS, or turning off some fancy GFX features, then the mini PC would be fine. Of course with a desktop you can adapt the components a bit to your budget, and maybe swap in cheap second hand stuff as a stop gap until you upgrade a component.

Fair warning - the rest of this post is pro-linux bullshit . . .

For steamdeck - the only reason i could think that remains is if you had a desperate need to get out from under microsoft’s thumb - and didn’t want to go for a full DIY linux install - then SteamOS is excellent in both gaming and desktop mode. It really shows how user friendly linux can be if you pay full time devs to maintain a distribution with a specific customer group and specific hardware in mind. And IMHO ( I only use MS at work so maybe I’m a bad source) it actually shows up how fucking awful windows is. SteamDEck really is just turn it on and get on with what you want to do , no bother; games console level usability. I think even computer-illiterate people would find desktop mode pretty easy to get on with.

But it’s only half-arsed “proper linux”, and half-arsed independence from big tech, as you’re just substituting Valve as the ones who you rely on to curate your OS for you. And if ever Steam gets bought out you might have to move to something else. So it doesn’t have the independence of full open source; though it’s a lot closer to that than MS.

It’s also quite a lot of money to pay for an old device just to try a different OS. To do that I’d get a cheap real PC and experiment - a used miniPC from 5-10 years ago with some of the retro gaming linux distros are a fun and cheaper way to do that.

… end of pro linux bullshit

Call the (US) police.

Well it means Arsenal FC supporter. So there’s certainly an overlap, but there are many other wankers out there. I mean there’s all the other types of football fans for a start, for example there’s a bunch for whom this type of thing would perfectly normal, habitual even:

“My condolences on you recent bereavement. Sincerely, A.F. Wanker COYS”

A yard of ale is a large beer glass, based on a glass that is quite long probably less than a metre.

I do woodworking a bit too, but I normally just do the slanty ruler/tape trick to divide any straight parallel face into n equal lengths. I hate all forms of mental arithmetic; I also avoid measuring as much as possible too. Maybe that’s why everything i make is so shit.

I guess if you’re mass producing things you can’t just manually mark off each and every part though - but even then I’d probably want to work to a template rather than to measure.

I think a mile is specified in terms of ‘chains’ not really feet or yards. Feet and yards are meant for measuring smaller stuff, like the size of a foot, or a courtyard.

The ‘chain’ was a specific surveyors tool for measuring larger land areas. I imagine defined to be a length of physical chain practically manageable by the surveyor - probably pre-dating optical / triangulation methods before lenses got cheap.

I think an acre was then defined as 10 square chains or something.

But go back in time far enough and different jurisdictions have different lengths of standard chain, so different miles and acres derived from it. But it doesn’t really matter because if you were buying land in Scotland, then you’d probably want to use a Scottish surveyor and his big long chain.

The nautical mile is then a whole other kettle of fish.

A yard is about 1.4 litres in my book, or 2.1/2 pints - imperial pints mind, not US ones. I’m not ignoring away that 20% difference; it’s bad enough with all the fucking “pint to brim” glasses these days.

Coprolite

That’s probably why risc-v is getting quite popular in embedded stuff - smaller companies wanting more supply chain independence. Hopefully it’ll start to get more powerful soon for more serious computing. Its nice that stuff like debian now has risk-v version too.

IIRC goruanga was the cheat code in gta. also it came up when you got all the hare krishnas in one and go and gave 1million points.

Did you try typing goru@n.ga as your email address?

IRL you don’t need an email account to do road violence. Simulator is worse than life. Matrix, confirmed.

Look a unicorn!

Love playing SuperTuxKart. I love the ability to change game files to make it my own experience. I love the ability to download custom content through

Sounds like it is not broken, better fix it until it is.

Meh it’s open source, fork it.

pigs are filthy cool