Lorindól

This. I’ve been using a 2 Gen 8GB iPod Nano since 2008. They’re not hard to find and installing a new battery is not that hard, if you have any experience at soldering.

I also have a Sansa Clip+, it has a far better DAC than iPods and can take a 32GB SD card. Runs Rockbox without any problems.

There’s one for Firefox, too:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/microslop/

I felt the same. The actual detention got postponed for several weeks, since she had more important duties to attend to. When it finally happened, we played chess together and talked about movies.

She made me promise I wouldn’t tell anyone, but since she passed away over 25 years ago I don’t feel binded by it anymore ;)

In the sixth grade I got my first detention ever because I picked up my baseball cap.

We were on a field trip and we went to visit some museum in the capital by train. While we walked back to the train station, our teacher stated that “no one is to step out of the train before her permission or they will get detention”. I was the last to get on the train and my cap hit the backpack of the classmate in front of me and fell out of the train doors. I instinctively turned around, leaned out whist holding onto a safety bar and picked my cap. And stepped back on board.

I was a calm kid and had never broken any school rules or gotten into any trouble whatsoever. So when my classmates saw me putting one feet outside the train they simply flipped: “TEACHER, LORINDÓL STEPPED OUT OF THE TRAIN! YOU’RE GETTING A DETENTION!”

I was utterly dumbfounded. My “friends” had betrayed me and the teacher was approaching and looking angry. With tears in my eyes I explained what had happened and reminded her that we still had more than 10 minutes until the train doors would even close. Her face went from angry to sad and she silenced my heckling classmates with a few strict words. She told me that we would discuss this when we were back at school.

When we got back, everyone else got to go home and the teacher asked me to our classroom with her. “Lorindól, I’m very sorry. I have to give you detention because you did step out of the train, even if it was for all the right reasons. I understand you acted instinctively and did not mean to break any rules. But I must keep my word or it will lose it’s meaning. As stupid as this sounds, the purpose of this detention is not to punish you. It’s purpose is to show the others that my word is the law in this classroom, with no exceptions. I hope you can understand why I must do this.” I thought about it for a while and said that I did.

When I told my parents about the detention my dad couldn’t stop laughing. “You finally get a detention and it’s for NOTHING!”

Mom was so angry that she wanted to call the teacher and make her call the detention off. I managed to talk her out of it and didn’t hold any grudge against the teacher. I learned a lot about the world of adults that day.

Lasr summer I asked ChatGPT about Liberty Caps - just to see how bad advice it would give me. It showed me pictures of Death Caps and Destroying Angels and claimed they were Liberty Caps.

After that I was certain that someone was going to die just like that poor guy.

I remember reading that ammonium chloride / “sal ammoniac” / salmiakki was probably first discovered by ancient egyptians. They found natural deposits of it condensed in a ceiling of a cave or something similar. And naturally someone just had to taste it.

Primer is excellent low-budget hard scifi. Few years ago I read Shane Carruth’s script for his scrapped project “A Topiary”. It is wild, no wonder he couldn’t get the funding for it.

Jupiter Ascending is a remarkable achievement.

I’m a bit of a film freak and I have seen quite a few. The only things I remember of Jupiter Ascending are that Mila Kunis and Sean Bean were starring in it and that bee DNA was somehow involved with the latter. I think there were also lots of chases?

No. I shall thank you now.

How can one learn such power?

This is a classic.

A few years back in a HiFi - fair there was a seller who pushed these fist sized wooden blocks that were meant to raise the cables off the ground and therefore “prevent the Earth itself from tampering with the signal”.

So he was basically trying to sell very expensive magic wood.

https://www.radiotimes.com/tv/fantasy/good-omens-season-3-michael-sheen-teases-finale-newsupdate/

Yes and no. The third season plan was scrapped and reduced to one final episode to wrap the story up. We’ll see how it goes.

During my military service I constantly fought against idiotic traditions and doing things the stupid and inefficient way. I had read the regulations manual carefully to back me up and presented my cases respectfully with proper conduct.

I always started by quoting the relevant regulations, so they had to hear me out and could not officially punish me for my “disobedient queries”. This got many of the regular staff royally pissed off at me, some just found my resilience amusing and a few younger offiicers even showed occasional support for me. I knew very well that nothing big would change, but I actually did manage to get rid of a few small things that were just hassling disguised as training.

My service friends thought I was crazy for stirring things up in vain, but I took good care that I never got them in any trouble. The only “punishment” they could give me was that I was always given the assignments that were considered most unpleasant and I was regularly sent on long range recon excersizes with my men, so I would be out of sight for most of the time. I loved those long trips in the woods.

I also quit my first real and well paying job out of principle a week after we got a new manager. I had been there for 5 years and really liked the work, but after the new manager gave us a list of changes he wanted, it became clear to me that it was time to leave. It would have been entirely impossible to fulfill my duties properly with the allocated resources and time. I could have done the work badly, sure, but this would have led to the customer leaving us for other services. I did point this out to the new manager when I was cleaning my desk. “Just because you cannot do doesn’t mean that someone better couldn’t” was the only response. They promptly lost the customer and 3-4 others also quit the team in the same year.

With the help of an old friend I landed a new, little less paying job but with vastly better benefits. Been there since.

TOS had the “Eugenics Wars” / WW III start in the 1990’s, but the later series made alterations to the original timeline due to several time travel shenannigans. An easy way for the writers to explain why we aren’t currently living in a post-apocalyptic hell. All the major events will happen, just delayed accordingly.

Star Trek is supposed to happen in our future, so it’s hard to address our modern problems if they had to skip everything that happened after mid 90’s. Especially when the last 25 years have had a lot of mental stuff happening almost non-stop.

Yes, I mean to try running them with VM. The software I need are old and light, so there’s a good chance that my laptop can run them.

I installed Fedora last Friday and I have no regrets. Win11 was never an option for me, my laptop is “too old” and I have no desire to touch that horror in any

~10 years ago I had a Win7/Ubuntu dual boot laptop, but I dropped Ubuntu when I upgraded to SSD and needed all the space I could get. Ubuntu was OK, but there was something with the UI that just didn’t click with me. I meant to try other distros but never found the time, so I just stuck with Win10 until now.

I have several legacy software that I need, so I went with dual boot again. If I can get them to run smoothly on Fedora, I’ll do a complete clean install.

The only challenge in installing Fedora was Windows’ crappy partition manager, which would not let me minimize C: for more than 54MB. I did every trick I knew and learned a few new ones, nothing helped. Then I just flashed Gparted to a USB stick and it worked instantly.

After that everything went smoothly, with the exception that Fedora didn’t recognize my Bluetooth device at all. I’ll dig into that single issue tomorrow, I’m fairly certain that a fix can be found easily.

Nowadays, definitely.

But a few decades ago in my backwater country this was reality. It happened to me twice on different regions and one of my friends who also had long hair told me it had also happened to him. I only got pocket change, but still enough to buy a can of beer ;)

At the time we deduced that there had to have been some broadcast TV show which had given them this bizarre idea, since widespread Internet access was years away at the time.

But as if this was not enough, the wierdest heckling I got was when I walking the dog with my girlfriend and a group of guys about our age passed us and called us “fucking gay”. My girlfriend was feminine, pretty and I was very far from both.

It was a very, very strange time.

Without any hesitation.

I had long hair (blonde, very thick and curly) in my late teens. Back then men with long hair were pretty rare outside the larger cities, so I usually got a large variety of insults nearly every time I went to countryside.

Sometimes people would throw money at my feet and yelled “Go to a barber, freak!” I always thanked them out loud and then I picked the money up.

Free money is always nice.

Our national broadcast company showed the execution live. I do not know why my parents allowed then 10 year old me watch it, but I remember it well.