BananaTrifleViolin

Well first off have Taco Bell stopped providing napkins? One person couldn’t find napkins in one store and suddenly it’s greed driven corporate policy according to OP?

It seems unlikely that a food chain would completely abolish napkins. It is possible they’re no longer freely available because people were taking them “for their car” whatever that even means!?

Yeah the GUI is horrible with Gimp but it is very powerful software. I’m used to it’s idiosyncrasities but it really needs a GUI refresh. It’s powerful software held back from it’s full potential.

Are there bigger versions of the same communities elsewhere? One of the problems at the moment is duplicates, and finding the one where people have coalesced can be be hard, sometimes just dumb luck.

Yeah I was surprised they took it down. I think it’s a foolish knee jerk reaction and is patronising towards readers.

Ironically there is know nothing to put the current spike of interest in context as you can’t read the letter on the guardian website.

I’m actually really unimpressed with the guardians action - they don’t respect their readers and clearly no longer believe in freedom of speech. They could have modified the article to put the letter in context themselves rather than link to a 20 year old article criticising it. It also makes it hard for those who want to push back against the letter and answer those who are pushing it.

Almost the whole of black Friday is a nonsense. The only things worth buying are things you would have bought anyway but know are on discount.

Many items prices go up for a period before black Friday so they can then be discounted, and manufacturers even have cheaper versions of models of their products that they supply to discount chains and companies like Amazon for black Friday.

The only things I’d buy on sale are items I’m watching via camelcamelcamel which have hit discount, or software on discount. There are a few specific items I need to buy that I might buy if they’re genuinely on discount but most of the stuff thrust in your face during the sales is cheap tat or lies.

I’d go back and prevent the 11th Sept attacks.

The world would be a different place because so much happened as a knock on of that but at the same time it’s hard to imagine what the world would be like. Probably very similar but also different in substantial ways.

Like obvious things like no war in Iraq or Afghanistan (at least not those wars), and less obvious things like how the attacks have reshaped liberal democracies like the US and Europe (for the worse imo), and how they empowered right wing politics in many countries (also bad imo).

Yes - because the future of gaming is probably VR spaces so games on a 2D screen will become nostalgic to an extent.

The nostalgia may be loading up a space with a virtual pc and playing an old game on a mouse and keyboard or controller.

VR headsets aren’t yet there but but when they’re light weight and high definition enough, it may make more sense to play a game on a virtual screen which can be 40 inches or room scale, than your desktop. If I could see my hands and the mouse and keyboard I’d probably already be doing it. It already works with virtual desktop and controller based games.

So, alternative take. If you have a home PC would you be better upgrading it and getting a cheaper laptop for more basic use?

Basically do you really need a mobile work horse? If you’re doing video work then you may be better with a graphics card or CPU upgrade £ for £. Do you really want to be editing videos on your sofa or in bed? It doesn’t seem like the easiest or most productive way to work in that particular use.

You can also stream any game from your PC to a low power laptop (or other devices) using Steam or other streaming tech. The pc can be on but with the sound and screen off, while you’re elsewhere streaming a game.

So maybe a PC upgrade and a shared basic laptop for video and internet would be enough? The only downside is if you genuinely think you would want to do full on video work on the go - out of the home or abroad for example. Then it makes more sense. But a powerful laptop around the house when you have a PC that does the same seems a bit pointless. It also means work drifts away into the rest of your home, whereas now when you’re not at your PC you’re not working.

But if this is more talking yourself into buying an expensive toy, there may be better toys to be had for far less. Like a steam deck - under £400 for a decent machine, play games anywhere in the home (on the device or streaming to the device), get a dock and plug it in to your telly.

Edit: other way to think of it: do you really need the laptop? What could you spend that money on instead? There is an opportunity cost if you spend that money or take on debt for something you don’t really need. You could save that £42 a month and treat yourself to something else in 6 months or a year.

So big mistake here: NAC is not harmless. It does have side effects and it also has toxicity at high doses.

It has not been studied in long term use orally or IV, it’s main use bomg short term use for paracetamol overdose treatment. Inhalation is more studied but it is not absorbed into the body in the same way.

We think it is safe but we haven’t actually done human trials to be sure. What we have found in mice is that high doses can cause lung and heart damage and also when it comes to alcohol it is protective if taken before alcohol consumption BUT it amplifies the toxicity to the liver if about 4 hours taken after alcohol. All of this is summarised on the Wikipedia page which looks to be good quality.

Overall it may be a useful drug but don’t take it off label or self medicating. Medicine is littered with unexpected effects of drugs that only came out once it was too late. Thalidomide is a good example - a “wonder drug” for nausea used in pregnancy that was not tested and caused horrific birth defects which only became evident when it was too late.

Your body is not a lab, be careful experimenting with supposedly “safe” drugs.

Not sure exactly what you meant about the fonts but I do routinely install the Microsoft Fonts from my Linux repo whatever system I’m on. It used to be very important when browsing the net as Arial and Times New Roman were ubiquitous. That is less true now, and many sites use their own fonts.

But in office Times New Roman and Arial are still there. Microsoft has moved to newer fonts now like Calibri and Cambrea but this is proprietary. You could try and get your hands on copies of these (relatively easy if you already have windows).

When creating documents you can embed the fonts you used in Libre Office in it to ensure if you send it to someone else it renders as you intended. When you open someone else’s documents you can see what fonts were used and try and install those or ask libre office to substitute fonts you do have for the missing ones. A metric font is a font with the exact same size of characters in terms of character width and height (even if it looks different) - this preserves the layout so if you’re missing a font and have a metric equivalent you can subsitute that font and the document layout should then be preserved.

For Calibri there is a freely licensed Google metric alternative called Carlito. I believe that usually comes with Libre Office but double check. Also Cambria is another common Microsoft font with a free metric equivalent called Caladea that should come with Libre office.

The Liberation fonts commonly found on Linux and Libre office are metric equivalents of the Times New Roman, Arial and Courier fonts if you want to avoid Microsoft proprietary fonts all together.

Finally if you are sending documents to be read and not edited or just to print at another location, then save/export them as PDFs. PDFs will look the same on any device and OS and will print the same from anywhere.

Lastly I would suggest you use a sync service to keep your documents and keep your school docs in folders that sync. Something like DropBox. Microsoft Office uses OneDrive and it is fully integrated which was a game changer when it comes to accessing documents from anywhere but you can do the same with DropBox and Libre Office on other devices to ensure you can get your documents wherever you are and edit them in whatever is available (e.g. a school PC if you don’t have your laptop to hand or your mobile device). Lots you can do with synced documents but you don’t need Microsoft to do it.

In Australian slang a mob can just mean any grouping of people, not necessarily a criminal group or a group of rioters. It’s not uncommon for people to refer to their own ethnic or political grouping as a mob; at least from what I’ve seen when reading Australian websites.

And by local government I think they are referring to the states and territories governments.

Yeah as someone outside Australia I’ve been surprised at how biased and simplified the reporting has been. A complex constitutional issue is being painted as a simple “good people, bad people”.

When I read about the changes myself (after having to go hunting for some actual detail - the reporting is pretty poor on this) it honestly seems more like virtue signalling rather than useful or meaningful reform.

This is a link aggregator website and he’s posting links, I don’t understand the issue? The links are to legitimate news sites.

Everyone has a selection bias in what they post, but maybe you need to think about your own biases of you find it so offensive?

As for this specific link, it’s a legitimate news source and this is an actual news story which has not happened in isolation. There are multiple news stories about the social media claim and that Biden seems to have confirmed them just now seems to be walking back from that claim.

So the other 55% of the time it’s a Lemmy user? I.e. the majority of the time!? There is so much irony in your post.

That’s an interesting take on FOSS - that’s it’s a free buggier alternative to “mainstream” software?

Linux is ubiquitous across many devices (you won’t even know you’re using it) and servers yet it’s all based on FOSS. There isn’t an alternative for many of those usage cases.

Browsers like Firefox are FOSS. The alternative is not less buggy, but it is less private and sells you to advertisers. But even propriety software like Chrome is based off an open FOSS codebase from Chromium.

Other software has no better alternatives. Look at VLC (for video), OBS (for streaming and video capture), Calibre (for eBook library management). There are arguably all the best in their class and they all FOSS, and that is just scratching the surface.

Tools like WINE are FOSS only but they are revolutionising gaming having been repurposed into the Steam decknfor example.

Eveb the software that might be characterised as “alternatives” to thebincumbant proprietary software servers a major purpose. GIMP (alternative to Photoshop) and Libre Office (alternative to MS office) are free but also now increasingly important do not require any online subscriptions and data sharing with big corporation. For many people that’s hugely important - why pay money and subscriptions for things you can get for free at high quality?

FOSS is a huge ecosystem of software, all of it free to use, change and share.

I think we can be reasonably accurate on how many people are using Lemmy/Kbin, but not on how many people are not using Reddit. Even how many people are actually using Reddit is less accurate as the data is locked away and estimated from other metrics.

If Reddit is going to IPO then accurate usage stats is the last thing it once, like any company it’ll go for the most flattering numbers it can generate and push thatball the way.

Are you sure it’s cats?

Have you seen the cats pooping or just sniffing the poop?

Depends where you are, but foxes would be a more likely bet. Fox poop stinks too - really foul stuff. Cat poop generally is quite inocuos once it drys out, although a lawn mowing bot slicing it up would make sense for making it worse.

I have never heard of cats pooping in the middle of a lawn before. Normally they like private and safe spaces to poop as they’re vulnerable when pooping, and normally they’re fastidious about burying it where possible.

iF it really is cats, then maybe get a gravel section next to your lawn that they might prefer to go in? A litter box essentially.

A mesh has others have said. I use Google WiFi as it’s cheaper and gets the job done. But it’s a potential compromise as the more expensive mesh systems offer better bandwidth.

I tried Homeplug systems - they can work well on a well wired house, but mine was giving me about 10% of my bandwidth from the router downstairs to my home office upstairs.

For comparison Google WiFi is giving me 100% of my 250mbs connection. If you’re looking at much higher bandwidths or users, you may need a more expensive system. Alot of mesh systems have a dedicated back channel separate to the user facing channels but Google WiFi does not - that makes it cheaper but could be a bottleneck if you you’re at the very high ends of internet speeds and home usage. For most home users though I suspect Google WiFi is more than enough.

This doesn’t make sense. It’s more likely we’ll pack more into a high end device then say goodbye to them in tasks like gaming.

Computing power has been constantly improving for decades and miniaturisation is part of that. I have desktop PCs at work in small form factors that are more powerful than the gaming PC I used to have 10 years ago. It’s impressive how far things have come.

However at the top end bleeding edge in CPUs,.GPUs and APUs high powered kit needs more space for very good reasons. One is cooling - if you want to push any chip to its limits then you’ll get heat, so you need space to cool it. The vast majority of the space in my desktop is for fans and airflow. Even the vast majority of the bulk of my graphics card is actually space for cooling.

The second is scale - in a small form factor device you cram as much as you can get in, and these days you can get a lot in a small space. But in my desktop gaming tower I’m not constrained such limits. So I have space for a high quality power supply unit, a spacious motherboard with a wealth of options for expansions, a large graphics card so I can have a cutting edge chip and keep it cool, space for multiple storage devices, and also lots and lots of fans, a cooling system for the CPU.

Yes, in 5 years a smaller device will be more capable for today’s games. But the cutting edge will also have moved on and you’ll still need a cutting edge large form factor device for the really bleeding edge stuff. Just as now - a gaming laptop or a games console is powerful but they have hard upper limits. A large form factor device is where you go for high end experiences such as the highest end graphics and now increasingly high fidelity VR.

The exceptions to that are certain computing tasks don’t need anything like high end any more (like office software, web browsing, 4k movies), other tasks largely don’t (like video editing) so big desktops are becoming more niche in the sense that high end gaming is their main use for many homes users. That’s been a long running trend, and not related to APUs.

The other exception is cloud streaming of gaming and offloading processing into the cloud. In my opinion that is what will really bring an end to needing large form factor devices. We’re not quite there but I suspec that will that really pushes form factors down, rather than APUs etc.

Lens is a visual search tool. Take a picture, ask it to search or answer a question based on what’s in the picture. Like take a picture of a tree and ask it what species is it