I got a big fat BLOCKED screen today trying to post a comment. It had no links, no profanity, and I didn't even use the b!zx word or the Naz! word. Pack your shit, folks

You can tell this place has really gone to shit because the people trolling me keep coming up with dumber and dumber arguments.

It's slow as fuck and it doesn't work worth one.

Normally I'd post an article like this to my own blog, but since I've not bothered to bring it back up since my web host died this is, sadly, the most reasonable place for me to post. In the past I've done detailed howtos and this will not be that, because all I really need it to be is just a record of more or less what I did. To wit, I got Ubuntu installed and working correctly on my antique potatoe, an FX-8350, 990FX-based system with nvidia graphics, NVMe storage, and UEFI with BIOS compat.

I installed from vmware on Windows. Created my VM with 3 out of my 8 cores and 8GB RAM. I added the physical NVMe disk to the VM config as an NVMe disk specifically. Install went off smoothly. But after updating my Firefox snap was already broken, so I decided to blow away snap and install normal firefox. I also installed kde-plasma-desktop and kde-full in order to get away from Unity, and because gnome is in a snap too. I could have just installed kubuntu, but I wanted to see what the process would be like with the normal Ubuntu CD.

Unfortunately, after the install, the USB3 doesn't work. This turns out to be a problem with IOMMU settings. It also causes the boot to be extended while things fail. Short form, in /etc/default/grub: GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash amd_iommu=on iommu=pt"

On boot I was using Nouveau and needed to install nvidia drivers (sudo ubuntu-drivers autoinstall). Sadly these driver versions only support "Mosaic" "SLI", which is where your display spans monitors. I may try an older driver to get SLI working again. Getting nvidia-settings working required running nvidia-xconfig (as root) in order to produce a working xorg.conf, and also fixing a polkit permissions issue (sudo chmod u+x /usr/share/screen-resolution-extra/nvidia-polkit). Even worse, the screen stays dark after resume from suspend. This is of course because of systemd.

sudo systemctl stop nvidia-suspend.service
sudo systemctl stop nvidia-hibernate.service
sudo systemctl stop nvidia-resume.service
sudo systemctl disable nvidia-suspend.service
sudo systemctl disable nvidia-hibernate.service
sudo systemctl disable nvidia-resume.service
sudo rm /lib/systemd/system-sleep/nvidia

Finally, part of the use case is being able to boot Windows from Linux and Linux from Windows, both in vmware player. The Windows stuff is trivial, clicky clicky. The Linux stuff isn't because vmware doesn't bother to keep their vmnet and vmmon modules updated for modern kernels. After installing vmware but before launching vmplayer, install the right version from the above repo for your vmware and kernel versions. You have to be root in order to use physical devices on Linux (or maybe you can solve it with group perms? Haven't tried this yet.) Windows is on SATA on my system so I added the SATA full disk as a SATA disk and it works fine.

In order to install a modern Linux on my PC I have to write out TWO pieces of installer media because neither latest Ubuntu or Pop! OS will successfully boot the installer otherwise. Once installed, Pop! OS can't resume from suspend on my desktop, not even a laptop. Had to install a bunch of patch crap to get vmware player to run on a modern kernel. As long as all these basic things are gotchas, Linux can never reasonably even have a year of the desktop. Not enough time and effort are spent on actually making things work, it's always the new and shiny that gets the attention. I've been using Linux for decades now and the quality has decreased even as the functionality has increased. What a shit show. Just a couple years ago I could write out an installer from Windows and expect it to work, things are actually going backwards. WTF?

As Lithium-Ion batteries, isolated "islands" of lithium form in the battery, inhibiting its ability to carry a charge, and decreasing its capacity. Researchers have discovered a means of restoring that lost capacity (paper) by rapidly discharging batteries after fully charging them. This causes migration of the isolated Lithium, and in experiments with cells designed with such islands they saw increases in voltage as the cells were rapidly discharged.

I lost a good friend today. No, he didn't die.

He's white, he votes Republican, he's an evangelical, and he supports Trump. I should stress that he's not a dumb guy- he's highly educated, speaks multiple languages, has traveled the world and he's lived abroad. He's married to a Taiwanese woman. He's not your typical uneducated Trump supporter.

In fact, I respect him quite a bit (or used to, anyway).

Due to all the Trump inspired-nonsense the last 4 years, I've distanced myself and withdrawn from him in the last year. I finally decided it was time to talk with him and see where we both stood. To make a long story short it was a total disaster. TOTAL. FUCKING. DISASTER.

I asked him if he was going to get the vaccine. He said no, and I asked why. Here's where the conversation went. The following are all things he told me:

1) The vaccines are fake, none of them are real and none of them work. He "knows" this because his dad used to be a doctor. (Apparently he inherited the doctor gene and knows all about stuff like this without having to go to med school. Plus there's "lots of stuff on Youtube" that proves it.)

2) There's no racism in America, just maybe a few "isolated incidents". Basically his position boiled down to, "If Black people just listened to the cops and complied...."

3) The election was stolen. Dominion stole it, Smartmatic stole it, Communists stole it, democrats stole it, there was "widespread fraud everywhere", etc etc etc, and Joe Biden is not the legitimately elected president.

4) The earth is only a few thousand years old, not billions of years. He knows this because he researched it.

5) Evolution is completely false, and he knows this "because he checked."

6) Hilary Clinton sold all our uranium to the Russians. (She didn't, even Fox News debunked this.)

7) The people who stormed the Capitol were antifa/BLM/socialists etc etc. "Only a few" Trump supporters were there and they were "helping the police" to keep order. All the crazy, violent people there were pretending to be Trump supporters "but we know who they really were."

8) Everyone's DNA traces back to one woman in Bethlehem. (No, it doesn't.)

9) The pandemic was "mostly fake", and it was totally "planned" by the democrats, the Chinese, and the Deep State. Sure, some people died but not 570,000.

10) Trump never lied about anything. Maybe he exaggerated "a few times" but he never lied.

11) He voted for Trump twice. He voted for Trump this time because "the last 4 years went pretty well" and he didn't see any problems with Trump's presidency. None, zero, zip. "Everything went great under Trump."

12) Universal healthcare is "a communist/socialist plot to destroy the country." If we get universal healthcare, no one will become a doctor because they won't be able to make any money and healthcare will become virtually non-existent.

13) Despite what it says in Exodus 21 and all the other pro-slavery passages, the Bible doesn't actually advocate for slavery because "in the old days some of the Hebrew words meant something different" than what they mean now. Yes, that was his explanation.

14) Kids in cages? It their fault or their parent's fault and Obama started it anyway. It's too bad but if they have to be put in cages, so be it.

There was more, but the sad fact is that he and I don't share enough reality to be friends anymore. Honestly, I was gobsmacked. I wouldn't have been a bit surprised if he had said the Earth was flat. I thought I knew him, but obviously I didn't.

He wants to still be friends but I would have to just ignore allllllllllllll the crazy shit he believes, and not contradict him on any of it or push back. That's not something I can agree to, sorry, no fuckin' way.

It would be okay if he didn't vote (and thereby affect public policy), but he does and I can't be okay with that. In the end, political differences are moral differences, and despite his claiming the moral high ground as a believer and an evangelical, he's a monster. A friendly, well-educated monster who would put your kids in cages if Donald Trump told him to.

So, we're done. I don't hate him, I'm repulsed and disappointed in him. I can't hang out with someone like this, I just can't. It's like you know a guy for years, and then one day you show up unannounced and find him wearing a Klan uniform while raping a little kid.

He traded his country (and my friendship) for a red hat. I hope it was worth it.

I need a new webhost because my old hosting service deleted my database for being over quota. I have backups, of course, but they're slightly old, so this is irritating. The quota was very small.

MARTIN ESPINOZA
2277 GLENROSE AVE
ALTADENA , CA , 91001
(480) 516-7385

This person has given my email address to Jiffy Lube so that I would get spammed. Obviously it would be inappropriate to call them and tell them they're an ass. "Please" "don't" DO THAT.

When "you" (or your OS) upgrade[s] Firefox it opens a new welcome screen. This one says "Your privacy respected, automatically". Yeah, no. I configured my home page to be my most visited sites, not some page you decided I should visit so that you could collect statistics. Gaslighting much?

This thing on?

When I submit a comment, the resulting page usually doesn't load. It just spins for ages. Now it works. If you can see this, the journal is also fixed — I haven't been able to post to mine for months. Is this a nginx fail or something?

Trumpâ(TM)s latest brain farts when he had to make shit up after the TelePrompTer failed during his July 4th speech makes it pretty obvious that heâ(TM)s got dementia. Taking over the airports in the war of Independence isnâ(TM)t just another blooper to be laughed away. The man is not aware of what heâ(TM)s saying!

The Republicans arenâ(TM)t stupid - at least not THAT stupid. They know that Trump is vulnerable to attack by Democrats on his record, his persona, his lies, his sucking up to dictators, etc. They will wait till the last moment, then use Article 25 to replace him.

Makes the whole impeachment thing go away, since they will make the case that heâ(TM)s not competent, not mentally fit to stand trial by the Senate.

The knives are not out yet, but they are being sharpened. The national nightmare will be over - but Pence can be even worse. From kleptocracy to theocracy. It really does end with a whimper, not with a bang.

This decade has been difficult. Broke my T6 at the beginning of the decade, the break was only detected in February when I broke the attached rib a few inches from the spine. Same doctor also found that I had broken my C5 5 years ago. Explains why my back hurts, my neck hurts, and I have lessened range of motion for my head.

Iâ(TM)m classified as low vision, with a 60 degree field of view, 20/400 in one eye, and last time it was checked, 20/70 in the other. Extreme colour blindness, night vision is like going around with sun glasses, cataracts that canâ(TM)t be operated on ... and I keep breaking bones in weird ways, same as when I was in my 20s, thanks to osteopenia.

I was seriously depressed because I could no longer do the job that I loved because using a computer was too much of a pain

But now Iâ(TM)m taking back control. Once Iâ(TM)ve finished retraining my eyes to adapt to current limitations, Iâ(TM)ll start doing what I think is worth developing. And if I canâ(TM)t, Iâ(TM)m not going to stress about it.

After all, if someone had told me when I was a kid that Iâ(TM)d retire early and be able to spend all day with my dogs, I would have thought that was amazing. And it is.

It puts stupidity like Facebook and Google surveillance capitalism in perspective. I donâ(TM)t need Google, and dropping my Android in a bucket of bleach was a blessing in disguise, I avoid Facebook like the plague, ditto all other social media, donâ(TM)t use webmail, and limit my online activity to The Guardian and, for now, slashdot (which has continued its descent into irrelevance - but I feel like slumming for a change).

It gives me a concise summary of just how dumbed down the Disunited States of Trump and Bozo BoJoâ(TM)s Brexit have fallen, as well as insights into their crazy self-destructive thinking.

Of the two, Brexit is the stupider - and exposes the lack of democracy in a country that still has hereditary Lords and Peers who arenâ(TM)t accountable to voters.

And yes, I think itâ(TM)s past time to abolish Canadaâ(TM)s appointed senate - itâ(TM)s not needed.

âoePlus Ãa change, plus Ãâ(TM)est la mÃme merde â" it must be slashdot!â

Going through the story comments, looks like slashdotâ(TM)s âoecommunity âoe has taken a hard turn to the alt-right.

Pretty much reflects what is f*cked up about the larger tech world in the USA - and the USA and the UK. The two predominantly English-speaking countries that are determined to go down the shitter pretty much in lock-step.

Government is broken at the very top in both countries. And in both cases, itâ(TM)s due to people getting the government they deserve - you voted for it, you wear it.

In both cases, it was people who are right-wing who are to blame. In the US, it was the fault of the DNC rigging the convention to try to force a right-wing neo-liberal down voters throats, in the UK it was conservatives putting party over governance.

Throw in global heating, private industry (Facebook, Google, etc) running surveillance capitalism that is more intrusive than the government of China, xenophobia and leaders who are clueless liars, and reality beats any novel of a dystopian future.

And tech is an integral part of the problem. And the only certainty is that tech will continue becoming more toxic. As will the people working in it.

But anything for a buck, right? Racism, homophobia, xenophobia, misogyny, chemtrails, antivaxxers - the people maintaining the social media infrastructure could bring it to a halt quickly by simply refusing to enable it, but that toxicity makes their pay packets, and f*ck the rest.