I'd like to do this mainly as an experiment. To see how well the web works without anything served by or data sent to Google. Is there a list of IP ranges I can just block in my hosts file? A Firefox extension? A script?

I'm currently applying to jobs. I'm using Libreoffice to write my CV and cover letter, export them to PDF via Libreoffice's export function and send them out.

Will those PDFs look the same when opened in Windows? Or can there be issues, for example if the installed fonts on the recipient's system don't match, or due to some proprietary fuckery in Adobe software?

credit: https://linktr.ee/danbertwalsh

Sounds like a stupidly easy question to find out with a quick internet search, but it's not.

I don't want to know the average surface temperature, or the average ocean surface water temperature, or read another article about climate change. But that's all I found in the past hour.

I'd like to know the average temperature of all molecules that comprise earth, or a best guess scientific estimate.

Sounds like a stupidly easy question to find out with a quick internet search, but it's not.

I don't want to know the average surface temperature, or the average ocean surface water temperature, or read another article about climate change. But that's all I found in the past hour.

I'd like to know the average temperature of all molecules that comprise earth, or a best guess scientific estimate.

This shitpost will conclusively show how the Erfurt Latrine Disaster lead to the George W. Bush Shoeing Incident.

May you drown in a Wikipedia hole like a noble drowning in shit.

The Erfurt latrine disaster occurred on 26 July 1184, when Henry VI, King of Germany, held an assembly in the Petersberg Citadel in Erfurt. The combined weight of the assembled nobles caused the wooden second story floor to collapse, and most of them fell through into the latrine cesspit below, where about 60 drowned in liquid excrement.

Heinrich VI. who presided over the assembly of nobles in Erfurt had his belief in god's favor shaken to its core by all the lords he invited literally drowning in shit inside a church. He later became Holy Roman Emperor after his predecessor Frederik Barbarossa had drowned in shallow water while on crusade, shortly before reaching Jerusalem - another proof that god wasn't on the Holy Roman Empire's side. His lack of faith, on which his own power as god-appointed Emperor was founded, was noticed by everyone around him. So the lords and the church denied his attempt to instate a hereditary monarchy and removed themselves from his court, putting them in a position where they could deny or demand payment for following his commands. Driven by a deep longing to prove he was still in god's grace, and to regain absolute power, he believed that his role on earth was to reunite the Eastern and Western church and become the prophecized "Emperor of Peace" who would bring about the end times. To this end, he started campaigning and preparing for another Crusade that would not only reconquer Jerusalem, but also the Byzantine Empire. His death from Malaria while besieging Messina as staging ground for his crusade put an end to those plans for now, but not to the ideas behind the crusade he had popularized. When the Fourth Crusade was launched just 5 years later, the most experienced crusading knights would have been veterans of his misguided campaign, and when it became clear that they couldn't pay for the passage to the Holy Land, they would have been the ones to propose to conquer the Byzantine Empire instead as another valid target, just as their former Emperor had proposed. As we all know, the following Sack of Constantinople destroyed the will of the church and the Christian states to unite and put any real effort into another crusade from that point on. The next German Emperor Frederik II. didn't even participate in the Fifth crusade and delayed participation in the Sixth for so long he got excommunicated. The following crusades were called by individual kings, not the pope in the name of all Christendom, and the time of a unified Christendom threatening to conquer the Holy Land were over. The Muslim rule over the middle east was secure for the coming centuries, the Byzantine Empire never recovered, and the Ottoman Empire rose into the power vacuum and eventually conquered it.

Which leads us to Baghdad. The center of Islamic culture during its heyday and for centuries after, a shining beacon of civilization more developed than the attacking Crusader states. You have to understand what such a history does to the self-image of the inhabitants. And at the crossroads between Europe, Africa and Asia, it was easy to see the region as the center of the world. Due to the aforementioned rise of the Ottoman Empire and its incorporation of today's Iraq, the land became part of one of the greatest Empires in history. Until after a period of declining importance and influence, the British conquered the Ottoman Empire as well as Baghdad and drew their own borders in the sand, the US-lead League of Nations sanctioned the new borders imposed on the people, and called the cobbled-together country "Iraq", an entity with no regard for its history or former glory, and under western rule for the first time in a millennium. It's a logical conclusion that Iraq would eventually unite with their neighbors and throw off the British rule, but also that without historic precedent (due to being part of a Muslim empire for so long), they wouldn't have the experience to establish a stable democracy. One coup d'etat followed another, which always pushes the most ruthless leaders to power. And that was the Baath Party. They promised freedom and a new, pan-Arabic union that would end western rule, which the pan-Islamic unions of the past had failed at. But also within the party, the most ruthless used the chaos to rise to power, and Saddam Hussein solidified his position by first killing those Baathists that didn't support him, then thousands of his own citizens, and then starting a war, which threatened US influence in the region enough to eventually topple him - in a war that created so much anger and suffering that one man, Muntadhar al-Zaidi, saw no other way to vent his anger than to throw his shoes at the leader of the western world.

to be published in the Annals, awaiting þeer review.

Whenever I search for questions I have about Android system apps, ADB, flashing, etc. I noticed all the search results are really scammy-looking websites with instructions that sound like they were translated from Chinese by an AI. It doesn't make a difference if I use Google, Duckduckgo or Bing.

Also, there seems to be hardly any official documentation for Android available. Even finding out what the preinstalled system apps even do, what exactly is needed for push messages to work, or what the different permissions do is impossible for me.

I know of xdaforums.com but when I look there I usually end up in a thread with 30+ pages full of users asking questions that get no helpful answer.

How come there is so little good information on Android? Or am I looking in the wrong places?

Comic by MrLovenstein

Source: https://twitter.com/FntasticHQ/status/1734265789237338453

Today, we announce the closure of Fntastic studio. Unfortunately, The Day Before has failed financially, and we lack the funds to continue. All income received is being used to pay off debts to our partners.

We invested all our efforts, resources, and man-hours into the development of The Day Before, which was our first huge game. We really wanted to release new patches to reveal the full potential of the game, but unfortunately, we don't have the funding to continue the work.

It's important to note that we didn't take any money from the public during the development of The Day Before; there were no pre-orders or crowdfunding campaigns. We worked tirelessly for five years, pouring our blood, sweat, and tears into the game.

At the moment, the future of The Day Before and Propnight is unknown, but the servers will remain operational.

We apologize if we didn't meet your expectations. We did everything within our power, but unfortunately, we miscalculated our capabilities. Creating games is an incredibly challenging endeavor.

We're grateful to everyone who supported us during these difficult years. It's been a fantastic journey over the past eight years: 2015: Opening of the studio 2017: Release of The Wild Eight 2018: Release of Dead Dozen 2018: Release of Radiant One 2021: Release of Propnight 2023: Release of The Day Before

I'm looking for a program that can cut video, adjust exposure levels, color correct, stabilize and encode. I've never done anything like this before, so ease of use would be great. But if there's an established standard program (like Gimp for photos), I'll learn it. Any suggestions would be helpful.

I used to think I found the perfect, stable, boring system with Debian + KDE Plasma. I installed it. I left literally everything on default. I booted it. Everything worked out of the box. I was looking forward to a perfect, stable, boring computing experience. My cat walked across the keyboard and crashed the OS. It rebooted to a blinking cursor and nothing else.

So if you’re hiring a software quality assurance engineer, her salary expectation is 80k kitty treats, a corner office overlooking a park with squirrels, and an assistant who will pet her at work and doesn't mind getting their earlobes nibbled.

So my Windows work PC is connected to the company's AD. VPN Connection is done with L2TP with PAP and a Yubikey. I'd like to work from within a Linux environment if possible but need access to the files on the network drive and connect to a terminal server via VPN and RDP.

Is there a way to set this up? My first idea was, maybe a Linux VM could be configured to share the host PC's external network adapter so from the outside it looks like the Windows machine is connected? If there's no other way, maybe WSL can be set up with a full screen X Server running on Windows (or is running Wayland in WSL somehow possible?)

I'm fishing for ideas here, and really just need some fitting terms to google, any help is appreciated.

Questions about violating company policy can be disregarded at the moment. If there is a way to set it up, I'll ask my boss before implementing it, but it's a small shop so the need hasn't arisen for anyone else yet. To be clear, this is not about circumventing restrictions on computer use, just about working in an environment I'm more productive in.

Die Koalitionsfraktionen haben sich auf die abschließende Fassung des Gesetzes über die Legalisierung von Cannabis verständigt. Das Gesetz soll weniger streng ausfallen als bisher geplant.

Die Fraktionen der Ampel-Koalition haben sich abschließend über das Gesetz zur Legalisierung von Cannabis verständigt.. "Wir machen Schluss mit der schädlichen Prohibition von Cannabis", erklärte dazu die amtierende Vorsitzende des Gesundheitsausschusses im Bundestag, Kirsten Kappert-Gonther. Sie bezeichnete das geplante Gesetz als "Paradigmenwechsel, für den sich viele Menschen jahrzehntelang eingesetzt haben".

Das Gesetz soll nach dem Beschluss weniger streng ausfallen als bisher geplant. Die Fraktionen einigten sich demnach unter anderem darauf, die Konsumverbote in der Nähe von Schulen und ähnlichen Einrichtungen auf einen Abstand von hundert Meter zu reduzieren. Vorher waren 200 Meter geplant.

Legale Besitzmenge im Eigenanbau wird verdoppelt

Ebenfalls entschärft wurden die Regeln beim Eigenanbau: Hier soll künftig der Besitz von bis zu 50 Gramm erlaubt sein - statt 25 Gramm. Die Strafbarkeit soll dabei im privaten Raum erst ab 60 Gramm greifen, im öffentlichen ab 30 Gramm. Darunter gilt der Besitz als Ordnungswidrigkeit.

Zudem sollen laut Kappert-Gonther Strafvorschriften und Bußgelder auf "angemessene Größenordnungen" reduziert werden. So sollen Bußgelder von maximal 100.000 auf maximal 30.000 Euro gesenkt werden. Einen THC-Grenzwert für den Straßenverkehr sollen Experten des Bundesverkehrsministeriums bis Ende März vorschlagen. THC ist der Wirkstoff der Cannabis-Pflanze, der hauptsächlich für die Rauschwirkung verantwortlich ist.

Für Minderjährige weiterhin verboten

"In den Verhandlungen ist es uns gelungen, praktikable Regelungen zu finden, die den Jugend- und Gesundheitsschutz gewährleisten und die Entkriminalisierung von erwachsenen Konsumierenden Wirklichkeit werden lässt", teilte Kappert-Gonther mit. Für Jugendliche unter 18 Jahren wird der Besitz und Konsum von Cannabis weiterhin verboten bleiben.

Der ursprüngliche Plan der Ampel, Cannabis auch in lizenzierten Geschäften zum Verkauf anzubieten, wird zunächst nicht umgesetzt.

Vorhaben aus Koalitionsvertrag

Die Cannabis-Legalisierung ist ein Vorhaben aus dem Koalitionsvertrag der Ampel-Koalition. Über den dazugehörigen Gesetzentwurf wird schon länger beraten. Eine abschließende Verabschiedung im Bundestag steht noch aus.

Das Gesetz soll im kommenden Jahr in Kraft treten. Ursprünglich war dies zum Jahreswechsel geplant. Gesundheitsminister Karl Lauterbach hatte zuletzt aber bestätigt, dass dies nicht mehr zu schaffen ist. Ein Inkrafttreten wird nun für das Frühjahr angestrebt.

Fußgänger haben auf Zebrastreifen natürlich Vorrang, Fahrräder nicht. Aber was ist mit Segways, Skateboards, Scootern, etc.?

The Internet Systems Consortium has stopped maintaining their DHCP client, which is standard on a lot of distros. Debian has updated its documentation and now warns users to choose an alternative:

https://packages.debian.org/bookworm/isc-dhcp-client

On Debian Unstable, I was already forced to uninstall it in yesterday's upgrade. If you're using network-manager, you don't need to worry, since it includes its own dhcp client, but for others, this might be relevant.

On Arch, this concerns the dhcpd package: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Dhcpd

I've been involved with Linux for a long time, and Flatpak almost seems too good to be true: Just install any app on any distro, isolated from the base system and with granular rights management. I've just set up my first flatpak-centric system and didn't notice any issues with it at all, apart from a 1-second waiting time before an app is launched.

What's your long-term experience?

Notice any annoying bugs or instabilities? Do apps crash a lot? Disappear from Flathub or are unmaintained? Do you often have issues with apps that don't integrate well with your native system? Are important apps missing?

So, I'm currently on Sid, because I needed several packages, including Gnome, in newer versions than what was in Stable. When I tried upgrading from Stable to Testing, apt asked to remove half the system, including Gnome. That's why I went directly to Sid instead, which didn't have that issue and worked beautifully.

Now that everything works, I eventually want to get back on a stable system. Would it work to point sources.list to Trixie, wait till it catches up to my installed package versions, then just stay on Trixie till it's Stable? I already checked that when I point sources.list to Trixie and run dist-upgrade, apt doesn't want to remove anything, it just says my system is up to date.

I'm wondering if a distro like the one I'm looking for even exists:

• simple as in KISS and vanilla. This excludes Debian where the package manager is too complex and packages deviate from upstream too much, as well as OpenSUSE, where systems administration relies on GUI tools too much and the package manager is even more complex.
• fixed release (excludes everything Arch-based)

So from the major distros, only Fedora is left as an option, where I really don't know enough about it. Is it possible to do a minimal install of it? Is it built around a GUI app store? Does it rely on Flatpak like Ubuntu does with Snap?

Or are there other distros out there that I'm not aware of? Basically everything from the past 5 years I have no experience with. I've heard good things about NixOS, but it sounds weird as a daily driver.