Canadian-American software developer living in Japan since 2015. Into gardening, DIY, permaculture, etc.

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • I will continue not using it. I was interested in Oculus until they sold to FB and then I nope’d right out of that. I really did think VR was neat, but various things kept me from pulling the trigger. If it becomes the only way to use chunks of the internet, I just won’t use them; I grew up still in the analog world (though we did have BBS and very early dial-up in the '80s), and I could go back to it. I’d honestly miss educational content more than anything else, but I can get books. In my lifetime, that strategy would probably still work fine.





  • Ohio Valley pizza is not what I thought it was. I grew up in Ohio and the only time I ate something that even reminds me of that was actually in Florence, Italy, oddly.

    I grew up on Central Ohio tiny-pepperoni’d, square-cut pizzas.

    Today, Detroit is probably my fave, followed by what is more-or-less a tie between NY and Chicago Deep Dish depending upon my mood. Ohio pizza still holds a place in my heart, but it’s definitely not in the top 3.



  • MSI has a Windows utility to control the fans as desired. I don’t think there’s a BIOS boot menu, but I will check.

    EDIT:

    Fan curves are apparently in “Hardware Monitor” because that makes sense. Blah. I still have to tweak more, or maybe Linux is just running hotter on my machine, but improvement has happened.

    I didn’t realize my BIOS could have a boot menu pop up because the splash screen disappears instantly. Problem solved. Thank you!


  • I bout a new HDD and installed linux mint. Works fine except for two major things. Related to the post, I cannot get the bootloader to find windows 10 no matter what I do. I might try to swap the windows drive to sata slot 1 and see if that (a) still works for windows and (b) gets grub2 working. For now, I have to go into the BIOS and mess with the boot order there to switch.

    The second problem, not related, is there doesn’t appear to be any fan control software that works for my MSI motherboard’s CPU fan (lmsensors doesn’t see any sensors related to it) so the fan constantly runs even when it’s fine in silent mode on windows with regard to temperature. I have trouble with certain sounds (and trouble hearing over background sounds in general) so this is actually more of a dealbreaker than the bootloader.


  • I actually got board, got a new HDD, and got linux mint on it. It doesn’t seem to have a bootloader installed and trying to install grub2 hasn’t changed anything. I’m also pretty disappointed in game support. Maybe I’m missing something, but Steam knows it’s on linux and a huge number of games in my library just say they run on windows or windows and mac.






  • I think your premise is flawed or maybe your reference frame is extremely narrow.

    As a whole, there’s basically never been a better time to be a human. There are fewer conflicts, higher standards of living, amazing medicine, etc. Yes, access to those things and damage to the environment are backsliding, but this is temporary. (Well, everything is temporary to a human if you want to go that route, but that’s not what I mean here). The trend line continues to go up, at least for now. The best thing that we can do is try to keep that trendline going up.

    Yes, I am angry, I am disappointed, I am heartbroken, I am frustrated, and I am just generally sad at the current wars, erosion of rights, and environmental issues. However, I vote for what I believe in and try to advocate for it where I can. I try to avoid getting trapped in social media bubbles and spend very little time on it (and mostly only here when I do; no facebook or anything here). I try to go outside and raise plants. I am buying a farm where I can grow food, plant more native species, and do a tiny bit to heal at least the land under my feet whilst reducing my carbon footprint. I try to volunteer where I can. I have hobbies that take my mind away from these issues.

    I can’t control other people. I can fight to convince them of something, but ultimately I cannot control them. Maybe the selfishness and contrarianism of some will destroy us all. If so, then I just know I did what I reasonably could to avoid it.


  • Normally, I would roast a chicken (Turkey is expensive and too big for my Japanese oven and Goose is also expensive and I have no experience with it), make dressing, roast some veg, make mashed potatoes and gravy, and probably make something like brownies for dessert. This year, we’re going to hang out with friends of the wife, so I’m not sure what the plan is.

    I am making oatmeal-chocolate-chip cookies, though, using my grandma’s old recipe. I actually put in a bit less sugar today and they turned out more like she used to make, so I’m guessing some things were left out of the recipe. I guess it’s also possible that the type of sugar differing is an issue (we don’t really have brown sugar that’s the exact same here in Japan as in the US, and we also tend not to use granulated sugar in a lot of stuff) as I’d end up with rather flat, crispy cookies rather than the more pillow-y type like I made this morning. Shortening could also differ somehow, I guess, from the Crisco she used.


  • I (US citizen living in Japan for most of a decade) took my wife (only in the US once as an elementary school student and only Honolulu) to DC for the first time a couple of months ago. I was pleasantly surprised. I had ridden DC’s subways once or twice on trips there. We were table to do everything we wanted on foot, by bus, and by train. Getting on the train from Dulles, though, we had some only-partly-clothed woman passed out with what I can only assume was a trail of partly-dried piss on the floor by her. Police took her off when we got into the city at some point, but it was a less-than-stellar start. That said, I’ve seen people puke and piss on trains in Tokyo as well.



  • And learn METRIC already you heathens!!!

    I think these days, most US schools teach it. They did to us in the '80s and '90s, though we originally planned to go metric until Regan I think killed it. We definitely were using it in the late '90s in all our science-related classes and I’m sure that’s still true today.

    The downside isn’t the learning bit, it’s that nothing else* uses it daily. I found the switch mostly painless (m/s for wind was a bit odd to me at first, but I like it at this point) and I think most people would be fine. I think older folks will have a hard time ballparking things in metric, at least for a while, as their minds are already using another system to estimate. That will fade, however.

    A huge problem is all the signs and stuff that need to be replaced. The US is huge and has many, many streetsigns including in small areas that really don’t have the money to do anything about it. On the whole in the longterm, going metric would have far more benefits than problems.

    * technically, I think all US government does use it in many regards and all US Customary Units are pinned to metric, but it’s not used by everyday people.