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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • Personally, I would not recommend diving into Linux headfirst by installing it as your only operating system. If you can afford an additional small drive (128GB should be plenty), I would suggest buying one and installing something like Linux Mint on that, while putting Windows on your main drive.

    That way, you can switch between them whenever you want to (when you turn on your computer, you can just use a menu to choose which drive to boot to), and get somewhat familiar with Linux before deciding if it’s worth your time to really dive in.

    (There’s a way to put both operating systems on the same drive, but it’s really easy for something to go wrong and end up with one of the operating systems inaccessible. Since you’re inexperienced, I would avoid going that route for the time being, and just keep both on separate drives.)




  • Same here. I only support those companies because they’re the best options for what they offer, and I’m not gonna let perfection get in the way of progress. Even though Mozilla is making some business choices I don’t agree with, I’m gonna keep recommending Firefox until some other non-Chromium browser comes along (which unfortunately isn’t gonna happen for a long time).

    Same with AMD- they are so much more friendly to the open-source community than Nvidia or Intel, so I will recommend them to everyone, until the moment they start being worse. At that point, I’ll start recommending whoever seems best at that point in time.


  • Start feeding it too, or get one of the neighbors who’s been feeding it to help out. Your best bet is a feral cat trap, which are kinda pricey, but if you call around to a few local rescues or “trap, neuter, release” programs, they may be able to lend you one. Then you can likely just use food to lure it into the trap.

    Of course, if this cat used to be someone’s pet, you could even just try luring it into a garage or, hell, a big cardboard box, from which you could put some thick gloves on and transfer it into a pet carrier


  • That’s fair, although I think that depends a lot on the type of car you drive. There’s an option to tell Maps what type of car you drive (electric, hybrid, or gas), which will change the results, because cars with regenerative breaking often get better “city” milage than “highway” milage.

    It also probably depends on factors like how aerodynamic your vehicle is, because it makes a huge difference above ~50mph (air resistance/drag increases exponentially with speed)





  • I’ve been running PiHole for awhile, in short it’s your own DNS server that’s configured to block DNS requests to known advertising domains. So when you load a website and it sends a DNS request to PopularAdvertisingCompany.com to load an ad, PiHole blocks the request so the ad can’t be loaded. It’s useful for devices that you can’t put an ad blocker on, like iPhones and smart TVs and such, but can’t block stuff like YouTube ads cause they come from the same domain as the videos themselves.

    It also has bonus features like DNS caching which can speed up web browsing.


  • Any router from a mainstream brand is likely fine, just don’t enable any of their “cloud” BS and don’t use their smartphone app. I’ve had good luck with Asus, they have an app but you don’t have to use it at all.

    For security, try to enable WPA3 on your Wi-Fi networks, otherwise WPA2 is probably fine unless you’re being targeted by a government-sponsored hacking operation. Choose a long password for your network.

    Once you get it up and running, then worry about DNS and PiHole and VPNs and all that. Don’t get in over your head.



  • The project started as an independently developed ZLUDA, meant for Intel GPUs. AMD started funding development of the project, expanding its scope to also work on AMD GPUs, with the condition that if AMD abandons it, the code would become open source. This happened a few months ago, but now for some reason AMD backtracked and pulled the open-source code for reasons we don’t know. AMD is usually pretty good with this stuff though, so I’m interested to find out what their motives are.