Random Dent

Also even “Today” is not a happy song lol. From Wikipedia:

After the release and minor success of the band’s debut album, Gish, the Smashing Pumpkins were being hyped as “the next Nirvana”. However, the band was experiencing several difficulties at the time. Drummer Jimmy Chamberlin was undergoing an increasingly severe addiction to heroin; James Iha and D’arcy Wretzky had recently broken up their romantic relationship; and Billy Corgan had become depressed to the point of contemplating suicide and plagued by writer’s block. Corgan recalled that “after the first album, I became completely suicidal. It was an eight-month depression, give or take a month, and I was pretty suicidal for about two or three months.”

…

The dark, ironic lyrics of “Today”, describing a day when Corgan was feeling depressed and suicidal, contrast with the instrumentation. Michael Snyder of the San Francisco Chronicle said that the song is “downright pretty as rock ballads go” but that “Corgan manages to convey the exhilaration and tragic release he seeks.” Corgan told Rolling Stone that “I was really suicidal … I just thought it was funny to write a song that said today is the greatest day of your life because it can’t get any worse.” Corgan later compared writing the lyrics of “Today” and “Disarm” to “ripping [his] guts out”.

Not the above poster, but for me: it’s a slight concern but AFAIK the profiles are interchangeable so it’s pretty trivial to just switch back to Thunderbird if anything does happen.

For me it’s handy because I have multiple email accounts so I can just open Betterbird and check them all at once without having to log into several different pages.

I use Betterbird as my main email client so I tried out the attachment searching. Searching by attachment name seemed to work well, but it doesn’t look like it searches for the text within the documents, at least not for PDFs. Not sure if there’s like an OCR extension or anything that would do it, but yeah just the base Betterbird install doesn’t do it as far as I can see.

I use BorgBackup with Vorta for a GUI, and I keep the 3-2-1 backup rule for important stuff (IE: 3 copies, 2 on different media, 1 off-site.)

openSUSE is right there lol

Oh yeah same here, I’ve been using Linux in some form or another since maybe 2006 or so, and I still have a folder in Obsidian that’s just notes about Linux lol. Usually if I customize something or fix something or learn something new, I’ll chuck it in the notes along with the link to where I found it so I don’t have to retrace my steps looking for it again.

Yeah on my Linux desktop, it’s plugged into the TV for watching shows, so I sometimes switch between the PC Line Out and HDMI audio. The Linux audio logic seems to be “I’ll stay at whatever you last set me to, until you set me to something else”, which makes perfect sense.

On Windows, it seems to be some combination of whatever device Windows thinks was last plugged in (which is very rarely what was actually plugged in last) whether it’s an audio device or not, combined with the phase of the moon in whatever location Windows thinks it’s in (which is also rarely correct.)

As a KDE person, the random potshot at KDE for absolutely no reason is what got me lol.

I recently had a spare machine sitting around doing nothing and was feeling a bit masochistic, so I decided to install Windows 11 on it just to see what it was like. I’ve used Windows 10 a tiny bit but essentially haven’t touched Windows in years. A couple of the fun things I noticed:

• After installing, I was going to set a new wallpaper. I double-clicked on a jpeg file and instead of opening it, it popped up with a window asking me what I wanted to do with this apparently unknown file type. I literally said out loud, “what do you mean, it’s a fucking jpeg.” Then it did the same thing for a .zip.

• I also made a restore point once I had all the basics installed, so I could roll back when Windows inevitably fucked up doing an update. I then did the first big update and it fucked it up. “No worries” I thought, “I made a restore point!” I went to restore it, and discovered that for some unknown reason Windows only saves one restore point. This wouldn’t have been a problem, except that Windows had decided to fuck itself up, and then automatically overwrite the manual save point with it’s own save point from immediately after it fucked itself up, leaving that as the only thing to restore to.

I then quite sensibly formatted the drive and went back to using Linux.

IFYOUREMADENOUGHEVENSPACESANDLOWERCASELETTERSAREBLOAT

Assuming you mean the “weirdly Japanese” part - it’s hard to say exactly, but it’s made by a small team in Japan and just a kind of vaguely Japanese vibe to it somehow. Sorry I know that’s not very helpful lol

I use Floorp as my main browser! I like it, it’s very customisable and kind of weirdly Japanese lol

My secret Linux shame is that however much I try, I just can’t understand Docker at all. Like I get the general idea of what it is, but I can’t visualise how it works if that makes sense.

I have an app that runs in Docker, that I installed by just following the instructions, but I don’t know where it is on my computer or what exactly it’s doing, which I don’t really like.

Yeah I’m writing this from an Ideapad 5 with a Ryzen CPU & integrated Radeon running Arch (btw) with no troubles. This is my second Lenovo laptop, the first one also ran Ubuntu, POP, Manjaro, Arch & Nix with no worries too.

Seems like a pretty solid update! The only downside for me was that it broke Klassy (apparently because 6.3 uses KDecoration3 instead of KDecoration2), but that’s not their fault and I’m sure it’ll sort itself out eventually.

Yeah the problem I had with Manjaro was that in trying to protect me from breaking it, it also made it difficult for me to fix it when it broke by itself. I much prefer regular Arch where you can just get in and pull all the important wires out lol.

I’ve been thinking about doing this too! I have a RPi 4 that’s not doing anything, and I don’t really have a great offsite solution for backups and I have family in another country. Maybe next time I go over there I’ll see if they’ll let me set one up lol.

There are also charities that take donations of old laptops and use them for things like education in places that don’t have access to a lot of technology, so I guess you could recycle them in that sense.

It’s kind of bittersweet being a very tail-end Gen X person. On the happy side, I got to do my childhood and teen years in the “fuck about” era, but on the unhappy side my entire adulthood has been in the “find out” era, and I get to remember what it was like briefly living in a world that wasn’t entirely going to shit.