This might just be the push I need to switch to Linux desktop.

Teacher here.

My favourite “lesson” I ever gave was in a grade 9 technology class. It was a pretty small class, about 10 kids. I split them up into two teams and made a competition. They chose their own teams — it ended up being boys vs girls. I never would have made it that way on my own but that’s how it worked out.

The school had a bunch of old, decommissioned PCs that were headed to the junk yard. I sorted through all of them to get two exact sets of working parts for the competition.

The goal of the competition was to recover a jpeg from one of the hard drives. Each team had a computer with the ram removed and two hard drives. One was blank and the other had the jpeg on it. They also had a Linux Mint installer on a usb stick.

I don’t remember exactly how I had set it up but it was points based, something about getting to different stages first. Like 5 points to be the team that turns the computer on first. One of the big ones was that they got an extra 10 points if they did the whole thing without a mouse.

I told the other classes about the competition and asked some other teachers if it would be okay for them to watch and cheer on. It ended up being the nerdiest and most exciting class ever. Students were literally cheering each team through a Linux install. One team got stuck and had to pull out the mouse. There was booing. It was so epic.

The girls won, being the first to recover the jpeg and they did it all without a mouse. It was so awesome. The jpeg was the meme about how would a dog wear pants.

It was about 5 years ago, my first year teaching. I really miss those days. I only teach math now, and while I like that, there was something magical about showing kids how fun computers can be.

A lot of people use “folks” for plural.

I feel like “guys” is fairly un-gendered but people disagree with me. Personally, I haven’t used the word “guys” to refer to anything male in what seems like forever.

“Bud” and “fella” are good singulars.

It’s perfectly possible to have a smart home that does not call home. Home Assistant is an amazing piece of software that can allow smart devices from different manufacturers talk to each other without connecting to a cloud service — all done locally.

I use Arch btw.

As a teacher, I have to say I do get a lot of thank you’s. I get Christmas presents, gift cards, coffee, and hand written letters/cards. Sometimes my students reach out and/or visit me after they graduate. I feel quite valued and thanked. I live in Canada, if that makes a difference.

My wife who is a social worker spends her days slaving over people’s cases and is repeatedly harassed, and has been assaulted countless times. Now that is a thankless job.

I was wondering what was going on with that post. I’m glad it resonated with people across the fediverse. Cool!

Now I’ve got to figure out how to log into Mastadon with my Lemmy account. I didn’t even realize this was a thing.

If they finish working on PC support then they’ll have no problem clearing their stock.

Yeah but sometimes you want a circle in a bitmap.

I’d rather wait, or pay to see it in a theatre. Every time.

I would pay someone who rummaged through my trash and decades later I realized I shouldn’t have thrown it away.

I dunno. I game less and less every year. I think I’ll probably just play the odd n64 game by the time I retire.

I think a lot of people also misuse the word and use it as a catch-all for companies doing something they don’t like.

Raising prices is not enshittification, that’s inflation.

Not paying employees well is not enshittification, that’s under-compensation.

YouTube putting more ads in their videos including when the video is paused isn’t enshittification that’s… wait no that is enshittification.

Enshittification refers to offering the same service (often free, or at least with an option to pay more) but making it worse in order to squeeze you onto a paid (or higher paid) tier of service. This sounds good to shareholders but ultimately it alienates their customers and often leads to a company dying.

I, too, am a seeder.

For anyone wanting to contribute but on a smaller and more feasible scale, you can help distribute their database using torrents.

https://annas-archive.org/torrents

Are competitive FPSs intended for handhelds?

Maybe I’m missing something, but hasn’t this been the case since forever?

I mean, Google is an advertising company. I would be surprised if they didn’t serve ads in their free email service.

Meh, I pay for Usenet and donate to some of my favourite private trackers. My NAS, network switches, firewall, and drives cost probably more than 10 years of subscriptions to services I would otherwise use. I don’t pirate because I’m cheap, I pirate because I hate DRM.

Honestly I don’t run pirated software at all anymore. The risk is too high. If it’s a game then I’m happy to pay for it, and open source software covers pretty much everything else for me.

The only exception is switch games but they run through an emulator which is quite safe.

Most media files are safe but I’ve heard that PDFs of all files can be vectors.

You’re not dumb you just haven’t needed that use case before.

Here’s an example of the last time JDownloader saved me. There was a website where people were posting archives of old skateboard videos. There were hundreds of links across dozens of pages in a forum. All links to sites like mega.

I was able to view all pages in one document and extracted all of the hundreds of links and put them in JDownloader. Over the course of the next several weeks JDownloader was able to manage those downloads without clogging my bandwidth. If a download failed it would notify me and I could retry it.

Can you imagine trying to do that in Firefox?