monovergent 🏁

QR code reader and generator on both phone and laptop

• Phone: SecScanQR
• Laptop: ZBarCam and Zint

But I’m glad to have learned about LocalSend here so I’m no longer limited to short text snippets

School is where the passion for learning goes to die and the desire to cheat is born

In this day and age, hobbies are the last bastions of passion and curiosity. One who is engaged in a hobby is intrinsically motivated to learn and apply what has been learned in novel ways, just as the scholars of old have done. School, reviled by many a student, has earned its reputation by perverting the concept of learning and exploiting students’ passions. The desire to cheat is most unnatural among students, a telltale sign that one’s passion and curiosity for the topic at hand has been extinguished, replaced with a desire to rid oneself of a burden, the burden of learning only for the sake of becoming learned.

Makes me wonder how far the closest alternative, glim, could be upgraded to match Ventoy given the confines of GRUB.

Someone had mentioned that Fedora fails to verify when booting from Ventoy. Now I’m thinking if I could dd the media loaded via Ventoy and compare with an original copy to see what changed.

TIL what happens when the thermometer maxes out

Middle mouse click is indispensable but it seems to be first to fail on my mice

On a file share, a notes directory with each category as a subdirectory, and plain text files for each note. Accessible from my computers and phone.

On my laptop, the launcher for my text editor (Pluma) points to a bash script that creates a blank text file YYYYMMDD_text in ~/.drafts and opens that file with Pluma. If it already exists, YYYYMMDD_text_1, or whatever increment is created. That’s mostly to take advantage of Pluma’s autosave feature, which only works with already saved documents. Then I save the document to the file share if it’s worth keeping.

ThinkPad X230 with 9 cell, 16 GB RAM, total 1TB storage, and an Atheros NIC. A bit limiting at times, but I ‘outsource’ heavier tasks to my much more powerful desktop. I’m quite uncompromising with laptop design and ‘ergonomics’, so I’m trying to piece together a custom laptop based around the Framework mainboard before the X230 no longer meets my demands.

For testing stuff on Windows and work stuff that requires it, an X1 Carbon Gen 7 with 16GB RAM and 256 GB storage.

First experimented when Windows 8 took away Aero Glass and other customizations. Committed when I had to fight with Windows 10’s twice-yearly feature updates that messed with my settings and wasted space with new programs I didn’t ask for. I now keep a separate laptop just to run Windows when I have to.

Distrohopping was mostly confined to my first year using Linux. Deepin (kept crashing) -> UbuntuDDE (went unmaintained) -> Arch Linux -> Debian. Settled on Debian Stable since it just works, I haven’t been using bleeding-edge hardware, and I don’t like things changing around too often (see my Chicago95 rice).

• Room phone: A clear 90’s phone

• Cell Phone: Some sort of non-folding T9 phone, it wasn’t a Nokia though

• Smartphone: Knockoff iPhone 6

• Computer: Pentium III desktop with 256 MB RAM, 30 GB HDD, Windows Me. It was also the family computer. Later upgraded to 1GB RAM and Windows 2000

• Computer (my own): 10.6" notebook with a 1 GHz Celeron, 512 MB RAM, 60 GB HDD, and Windows XP (later upgraded to 2GB RAM)

Wondering if anyone else is in the opposite boat. I don’t recall the name of any Kardashian except for Kim but I’ve known about Yuri Gagarin since primary school.