Sounds like you’re lucky enough to not have any sensory problems - you probably don’t get overwhelmed by textures, flavours or smells. Not everyone is like that. You also don’t seem to have any particular cultural or ethical concerns about your food choices. My family is vegan and very neurodivergent; none of us would ever consider steak or shrimp, for ethical reasons, and most of us have texture and flavour sensitivities that mean that certain foods are off limits for some of us. We generally buy within those parameters, but some of us really like things others really hate, so cooking can be a nightmare. In many cases, it’s the texture of food that causes this - often borderline textures going from firm to soft, too granular, “wrong” like soft when should be crunchy etc.

But I bet you have some things you wouldn’t try, based on cultural or texture preferences, which some people love. What about…

• Soft biscuits (cookies) - baked crunchy, but have gone damp and soft?
• Dry, stale bread - baked soft, but just dried out and stale?
• Witchetty grubs - moth larvae from Australia?
• Dog meat, eaten in some Asian countries?
• Fermented shark meat, stinky and rank, eaten in some Nordic states?
• Reindeer poo - traditional Finnish cuisine sometimes uses it?
• Natto - stringy, slimy soya beans fermented by a bacteria, very strong flavour, popular in Asia, especially Japan?
• Tempeh - soya beans colonised by a particular edible mould fungus, eaten widely in Asia?
• Tofu - bean curd in various textures, but very little flavour, eaten widely by vegans and in Asia?
• Furry tofu - tofu colonised by another edible mould fungus, eaten widely in Asia?

Can relate, it’s heart-rending. Had to do the same with my 18 year old mackerel tabby, Macro, about a month ago. It hurts so much, but it’s the kindest thing to do when they aren’t going to recover. Solidarity.

Me. I am typing this without looking at the keyboard. Learnt at college on an old school electric typewriter as part of my computer science course in the mid 1980s.

Yes as far as I’ve found so far, the features track quite well, and I’m really aiming to get proficient with the standard interface. I’ve found a few minor differences, but I tried stock Mint (which is Ubuntu 20.04 based) for a while, and I didn’t want to go backwards from Trixie (the current Stable Debian version) so I opted for LMDE which is based on Trixie. I use Debian Stable because of the “2-year cycle” (that’s why it’s called stable); Because stock Mint tracks the latest LTS release of Ubuntu, it’s actually a fair bit more out of date than Debian at this stage, and the next Mint version, based on the new LTE Ubuntu, isn’t slated to come out until December.

So far it’s not been too bad for a hybrid system - I have had a couple of issues, but this is most likely attributable to being a hybrid. I’ve found that I like Cinnamon, which stock Debian does not (as far as I know) support yet - I have used MATE for about 15 years because I don’t get on with Gnome 3 or KDE. You get all the nice things about Mint that I found impressive when I tested it - the printer and scanner support is very good, and the configuration utilities are quite reminiscent of Windows ones (good for new users, but I personally don’t care). Still not sure if I’m going to stick with it long-term, but happy with it for now - I largely stopped distro-hopping when I switched to MATE.

I know right. I had a right game reinstalling Win 10 on a lenovo netbook - I had to put a supported, unmanaged version on it for installing lenovo dock firmware updates. For some reason, the default graphics mode was totally corrupted - almost unreadable, and rotated 90 degrees. Once the installer had finished, I had to manually install the right driver for the graphics hardware, and that fixed it. Took hours - total amateurs. For shits and giggles, after I’d finished with with the firmware updates, I installed Mint on it - and it was flawless, and done in half an hour. This is the way to do it!

Favorite: Debian Stable (For my uses, it was the least trouble)

First: Slackware (1995, installed from floppy disks, also a short stretch in 2009)

Current: Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE) (Using because I need to support users on stock Mint)

Distro you liked the least: Novell SuSE (Used in a corporate setting)

Distro you want to use in the future: Unknown

Distro you used for the longest time: Debian Stable (15 years)

Distro everyone likes but I don’t: Ubuntu

Honorable mention: DietPi (RaspberryPi and SBC focused OS)

Over time, I’ve used quite a lot of different distros: Red Hat, Red Hat Enterprise, Scientific, CENTOS, Fedora, Mandrake, Damn Small, Puppy, CrashBang, Raspbian, Bazzite, to name just the ones I can remember off the top of my head now.

After a quick listen and skip, can confirm, that would do the job :-)

Interestingly, the music I prefer to listen to is more rocky - Punk/Grunge/Ska/Folk/Dub.

I acquired my love of psytrance in the early noughties when I used to do henna art at festivals in the UK. We got friendly with a couple who ran a psytrance CD stall, and were very often pitched right next door, so I spent many a weekend doing henna art with their music blasting out of their PA as a backing track. One CD that was popular at the time was Virtual Memory by Alchemy, but I seldom knew who I was listening to - it never seemed to matter. Worked well for getting into “the zone” though, and it’s not distracting because I don’t find myself trying to listen to the (usually non-existent) lyrics.

Psytrance or Dubstep. Something without much (or any) lyrics but with a strong bassline, maybe a bit glitchy.

Not used graylog, but if that’s what it’s for, it should be a lot better than manually checking logs.

Interested to know if this is for international travel, or just within your country’s borders? I would be concerned with this going through airport security, whether in carry-on or checked luggage - x-rays can damage electronics, and the potentially suspicious appearance of electronics to the non-technical could cause problems.

Monitor your logs with a network monitoring tool like Nagios, Icinga, etc. You can set filters for alerts you are genuinely interested in, and email the alerts to your ticketing system or sysads.

Can confirm. Do not recommend.

Everyone who uses O365 is pushed to use the web versions by the O365 ecosystem. When you click on Word/Excel/Outlook/whatever from your menu, it opens the web version; to use the locally installed app, you have to go to File/Open in Desktop or similar. The Open and Save dialogs default to using OneDrive - saving to local filesystem requires extra steps. The locally installed ones are becoming increasingly hard to use, by design, and the new features seem to be going into the web versions first and the local versions “eventually”. For example, the new excel “matrix” functions did not work in local excel the last time I tried to use them, though they might now, but there were a few features (special formatting I think) that only worked on the local version. Templates for word do not work on the web version.

Interestingly, the web 365 apps seem to work on Linux Mint, but I’ve not used them extensively, or on another distro. I did a migration from Win10 to LM last autumn, and I was genuinely shocked to find that web Outlook and OneDrive work on Firefox on LM. Confirmed that web Excel and Word worked enough to allow display and editing of documents - not an extensive test, but definitely worth a look. Obviously, there are still differences between the web and desktop versions, but it might even be possible to run them under Wine, but I have not tried that, and woudn’t expect it to go too well tbh.

Can confirm. I used Linux and Unix almost exclusively for about 20 years, and when I more recently had to use Windoze again for work, this is pretty much what happened.

Could be QOS or packet shaping going on at your ISP, or just throttling or congestion. Speed tests only really test for typical traffic patterns, so will give you a warped view: it certainly disagrees with your observed measurements. There are lots of factors that can affect how quickly traffic passes between two hosts on the internet, but domestic broadband is generally the worst of all worlds - you usually share bandwidth with other subscribers, and although the throughput can be quite good, the latency and error rate can be quite bad, and you can get fragmentation as frame sizes can differ between network segments, causing buffering especially when congestion is occurring. Your ISP might also have deprioritised your type of traffic, or they might be dropping packets, which causes retries, and thus slows your connection down.

Came here to say exactly this. Played it for years and it keeps getting better and better. It’s based on a game called Pixel Dungeon, which the original developer open sourced when they got bored with it. There are several other forks of PD, and I’ve also played most of them too, and SPD is definitely the best, and possibly the only one still in development.

Yep can confirm. I was a computer technician in a UK university throughout the 1990’s, and we had 8 labs with PCs and Macs, and at the very beginning, BBC Micros, Atari STs, and even Sun SparcStations. Not sure I miss it - certainly not the hassles with configuring interrupts on expansion boards, getting CD-ROMs working on “older” PCs, juggling conflicting DOS config.sys and autoexec.bat configs, or self-combusting mice. I did enjoy it, though - being right there as the World Wide Web was born, and each new year brought faster CPUs, better colour graphics, and progressively worse versions of Windows…

Yeah it was wild, but I suspect few orgs do things that way any more.