Ahh, the maps were so good. I remember using the extremely detailed hand drawn map to help me locate the Cavern of the Incarnate, and other cool locations. I am sad that I didn’t keep them.

I loved reading through the manual for Morrowind with the copy we got on the original XBox. I read all the class descriptions, details about the schools of magic, and had a whole character planned out before starting the game. I didn’t get into tabletop gaming until much later, but looking back, that manual really captured the same feeling of reading through the D&D players handbook and picking out a race, class, background, etc.

I think that feeling is why it’s still my favorite PC game.

Or kids who have trouble remembering that kitchen cabinets and drawers are actually not indoor climbing walls

Yeah I’ve never had a missing driver problem with a windows install since maybe windows 7. I even moved a hard drive with a windows 8 install from an Asus laptop with an Intel cpu to a custom build desktop with a ryzen cpu without having to change any drivers. I did have to reactivate windows because of the hardware change but that’s it.

The included drivers are often providing less performance than updated ones from the vendor though, so it is recommended to download those in some cases, specifically nvidia. But most gaming laptops will have a vendor provided update center to manage all of that for you.

I like Linux over windows for a lot of reasons but this post is a bit silly.

If that’s for a whole pie that’s dirt cheap. If that’s for a slice then that’s some expensive pie.

Debian on a base model 2013 MacBook air checking in. Runs better than it ever did on Mac OS. Battery life is still fine. I did have to use proprietary drivers for some things (wifi and webcam) but other than that it was pretty much plug and play.

Lots of replacement parts are on ebay for cheap, and there are a lot of repair tutorials on YouTube (and piped.video) I replaced keyboard and trackpad cheaply, and some of the internal cables.

As far as drawbacks, if you have to replace the storage or or logic board, those are expensive. I have a sound issue which I haven’t been able to fix and from searching around it looks like a logic board would be required. Bluetooth headphones work fine though so I’m just dealing with it.

Inspiring

Oh sweet! I haven’t heard of that one. I’ll check it out

Draw is great, and I’ve been able to use it for most of what I used Acrobat for before, but it has issues with converting certain documents, especially when they have special fonts. Also there’s the issue of not being able to just fill out some fields and then share it back as a PDF

I’m not opposed to paying for software, especially if it’s good. I’ll try that out and see how it is. Thanks!

Are you talking about the adapters that let you run network through your electrical circuits? Because that’s different from PoE. PoE is running power through the network cables so you get power and network with one plug, so kind of the opposite of that.

I can confirm that using electrical infrastructure for network is really not great.

Similar situation here. I was raised home schooled for all of my education. Got a GED, good score on the ACT, got a 4.0 in the community college where I got an associates degree. The problem is parents who homeschool because they don’t want their kids to turn “woke” or be “converted” by exposure to the fact that non-straight, non-cis people exist. A lot of the time, the emphasis is only on indoctrination, and there is little or no actual education involved.

I have been to homeschool conferences - there are some good resources there, and a LOT of really pretty awful stuff like this article mentioned. People like the author are so incredibly impactful, even if they don’t realize it. They may never see results but those seeds matter. Even if the parents don’t get it, the kids will.

At a conference last year, there was a speaker talking about parenting difficult children (Kirk Martin with Celebrate Calm). He was presenting very much a solid gentle parenting approach (though he didn’t call it that) that is very contrary to the culture of a lot of homeschool groups. He spent a lot of time unpacking his experiences as someone who grew up with really strict physical discipline, the impact it had on him, his experience being a parent - kind of leading people on a journey from where they might be to where they should be as parents.

He also spent a bit of his talk on how the Bible doesn’t teach us to raise our kids to fight in a culture war and just really pretty clearly calling out a lot of the toxic far right christian-nationalist talking points. Sure he made a lot of people uncomfortable, but those thoughts will stick with them.

After his talk he was spent over an hour talking with people outside of the conference room answering questions. His next talk was packed as well.

Anyway, all that to say - I know it can take a lot out of someone to deal with people in those environments, but it is absolutely impactful and so desperately needed.

I feel like this video (link below) does a good job of explaining why a lot of current third places aren’t quite meeting the need, or just don’t really fit the definition of third places.

https://piped.video/watch?v=MD_CMrCpBMc

I can think of a few places that meet most of the criteria near me, but there’s very few. The closest ones are probably the gaming shops, where you can show up and just hang out playing games with friends for free - but those are kind of geared towards specific activities, so you can’t always show up and just hang out with others whenever, as there are usually only regulars on certain days of the week, and often they are involved only in playing a game, not casual conversation.

I have issues with FireFox running YouTube on windows 10 - it gets super laggy - the issue is nonexistent if I used the Piped frontend. I think it depends a lot on what website you are using - some don’t play well with FireFox.

That being said, I did not have issues with FireFox on Mac when I used that, or on Linux, though I don’t use my Linux laptop a lot for web heavy stuff

Yeah it doesn’t seem too difficult to me to see when reviews seem fishy. I have never tried fakespot myself.

Another thing to check is that the reviews match what the product is for - I have seen a lot of Amazon listings where the seller will have a product up for a long time, get a lot of positive reviews, then change the listing to something else. So it looks like the listing has been up for a long time with good reviews but it’s really a different item. Then note the seller and don’t buy anything from them lol.

Per the article, they are integrating Fakespot into Firefox, so it won’t be different. Hopefully the tool can be improved

Probably my favorite RPG - Such a rich environment and a totally unnecessary amount of lore and background information in all of the included books and dialogue. Really set me up to be severely unfulfilled by everything else Bethesda made after that point.

How’s the performance / system requirements compared to Debian 12 with xfce? I’m on pretty old hardware and lower system requirements was why I installed Debian over Ubuntu. I don’t see CPU mentioned in the requirements on that link, just RAM and disk space

Thank you for the help @[email protected] @[email protected] - I believe the issue with the audio is hardware related. I reinstalled Mac OSX using the built in recovery tool and that does not detect the sound card either. So sometime in between it being used last and me installing Ubuntu on it the hardware failed. I don’t think I will bother replacing the logic board as it is a 10 year old laptop and is otherwise working just fine.

Regardless, it’s good to be using Linux again!

You download them directly from thr Humble bundle website. They appear to be DRM free.

They are all available in PDF but only some are available in all formats, and the rest are either only PDF and MOBI or PDF and ePUB, if that matters to you