Random Dent

Yeah I like my Kobo too. It’s never done anything sketchy as far as I can tell, plus you can sideload things, and if you plug it in via USB it just shows up like regular drive so you can do what you want with it. And also Libby is awesome lol.

I think sort of, although it won’t be as cut-and-dry and the first two. I think it’ll be somewhere between a traditional ‘hot’ war and a cold war, where the larger players (ie: China, the US, Russia, the EU) will engage in propaganda wars, attempts to destabilize each other, cyber attacks, trade wars etc. while in areas outside of those groups (eg: Ukraine currently) there will be physical wars fought by proxy between the bigger groups.

I think we’re seeing the start of it now, and IMO the US is probably doing the least well so far of the major groups. Russia is doing the destabilization thing, which is working quite well in Europe and spectacularly well in the US, China seems to be leading in trade and tech (both cyber attacking and just undermining the US tech sector with things like DeepSeek) and I think Europe’s strategy seems to be to just bunker down and see what happens.

I think the main advantage the US traditionally has always had is its military - it’s geared up very well for a big physical war, but I don’t think this is that kind of conflict. And with the Trump administration’s obsession with tariffs and the general disregard for education and soft power, I think the country is really heading in the wrong direction for what may be coming.

I have a Plaisir Platinum fountain pen that’s awesome. It was pretty cheap as far as fountain pens go but it writes really nicely and has a good solid feel to it.

For day-to-day disposable pens I like the Zebra Sarasa ones, or the Pilot P500 for drawing. I bought a big box of the P500s to keep in reserve in case they ever stop making them lol.

A Culture Mind. Because I want to live in the Culture and if you have one mind, it can make others.

I’ve been kind of liking Brave Search lately, even though I’m not really a fan of the browser.

I use Quickemu for mine, makes it really quick and easy to get a new system up and running.

For the Wikipedia part, it’s surprisingly simple. I just used Kiwix and grabbed a copy, it’s only about 100gb or so. You can also use it to get offline copies of other stuff, like Project Gutenberg.

Yeah same here lol. Already got Wikipedia and backup copies of all my books, as well as enough TV and movies to last a good long while. Also an entire offline copy of Project Gutenberg.

Same for the UK and Canada too.

I assume in this context the benefit using LUKS is that even if someone does recover data from the drive, they’d just get encrypted data which is unreadable? If so, I hadn’t considered that before!

I had a boss who asked me about a similar thing, their computer was going slow. I saw them checking their email by booting up their (quite old) Mac, launching a VM which loaded a full Windows installation, then opening Outlook inside Windows. I asked about it, and apparently they used to have a PC and Outlook set up for their email, then at some point had switched to Mac and somehow landed on that as the solution. I told them you can just install Outlook directly onto the Mac and they said I was being unhelpful lol.