Years ago, I was driving through NY city-ish. We pulled over in a rest area and I saw a sign about turning your engine off. I thought it was the stupidest thing I had ever seen, as did many other people apparently as their cars were idling. Then I got out of my car. I was wrong. The heat was insane. I couldn’t wrap my little head around it. I started doing the engineer math thing because it didn’t make sense.

Doesn’t surprise me at all these massive data centers are creating little heat domes. The cars were bad enough, and they are a fraction of the energy.

The crazy part is the true beauty of this game doesn’t reveal itself until such a long time. 3 hours in - literally nothing has happened yet. Keep playing, don’t stop even if you think you’ve seen it all - you haven’t.

100% this. Intentionally being cryptic here - even if you think you “get it” after two, you are wrong and know nothing John Snow. Keep playing…

Fedora is a great distro. IMO it and Mint are the “it just works” distros. Mint just works, unless it doesn’t - usually a result of bleeding edge hardware. That’s where fedora comes in - newer stuff but without the downsides of something like arch.

The thing with fedora is that it’s “pure”. You have to install codecs and whatnot. Once you realize that there’s a team (rpmfusion.org) that is dedicated to making these things easy - fedora becomes much more tolerable for a newcomer. While it’s a bad idea to copy commands and jam them into the terminal - in this one particular case, I tell people to just copy and paste the commands and just do what they say. Boom nvidia and codecs installed and everything just works.

Rufus like tools are becoming a near necessity to install windows these days.

I recently wiped my drive and performed a clean install. I started with fedora and about 15 minutes later I was 100% back together - programs and all.

Then I moved/installed my RETAIL copy of win11 pro to a virtual machine. It took like 4 hours, and I swear I’m not dumb! :)

• getting the iso onto a flash drive without a windows machine was way more difficult than it needed to be. Ventoy ftw.
• then you have to either: bypass the tpm stuff with Rufus, or set up a vm based secure boot/tpm module via vm additions. Not too hard, but annoying. Why it can’t be a normal option to install in a vm without a tpm module is beyond me.
• the install took forever. It asked SO many questions and shoved so much crap in my face “subscribe to 365”. “Turn on one drive”. “Try this syncing thingy with your phone.” “Here let me turn on all the telemetry - oh you don’t want that, here’s more screens to click through.” It was endless and annoying.
• activation was surprisingly difficult. It of course detected the hardware change being moved to a VM. Then I had to pick some obscured hyperlink to get to a screen where it showed literally dozens of machines (like every install I’ve ever done over decades) to pick the install I was transferring. It was not as easy to find the right install as you’d think. It kept complaining “that copy was already in use”. Or “already transferred” but they were all the same pc installed with the same retail license. I realized right there how screwed up it all is behind the scenes. I eventually clicked on one that activated thank god.
• mind you, it was REAL EASY to skip the above step and PAY for a new license. That screen is shoved right in your face.
• once it was finally installed and booted, then the worst part came - updates. It literally took like 2 hours to update. No my internet connection isn’t slow, and no, the VM isn’t resources strapped. I couldn’t believe how many times it updated and rebooted and started another update. Why a freshly downloaded iso required so many sequential updates is beyond me. It was connected to the internet during install, why didn’t you grab the latest then? /facepalm.

The whole process was extremely painful. And I gave in years ago and I login with a Microsoft account - you’d think the ONE advantage I’d get for that would be: “oh hi sir, I see you are installing your one and only retail copy of win11, HAVE A NICE DAY!” NOPE.

I’ve been installing OSes since the days of dos 5.0 and I couldn’t believe how low Microsoft has fallen with the shovelware and bad updates process.

And after all that - I don’t even use the win11 VM. I just installed it because I had a valid retail license and “why not? I can move the VM around I the future if I want”. My software runs just as fast, if not faster in Linux - but I’m much faster because my OS gets out of my way, doesn’t shove ads and crap in my face, and I’ve tailored it to match my workflow.

Windows is dead folks. If you’re stubbornly hanging on, you really shouldn’t.

TLDR - try slowing down “bad” ram

RAM is tricky these days. When you buy “fast” ram - in my case 6200 dominator sticks - what you really are buying is ram that the manufacturer says can be overclocked to 6200 speeds. But this is shady at best. It is entirely possible for that ram to run fine in your rig, and fail miserably in mine - showing itself as errors in memtest. This can be a result of the motherboard or say your cpu - and nothing is broken. Not the chip, not the mobo, not the ram - they just don’t work together at those speeds. Two sticks can work just fine, and then fail when you add two more (for a total of four). I’ve even had sticks that were on the edge, works for a year, and then started giving me trouble.

Most people just RMA those sticks - which I support - if it’s marketed to run at those speeds, then they should run at those speeds everywhere. But if you have “bad” memory laying around that was out of warranty, and given today’s prices - it might be worth pulling them out and trying to run them a little slower. It’s not like you have to take them all the way down to 3200 and turn off the overlock. For example, on many amd rigs, 6000 is the sweet spot. My “bad” stick of 6200 immediately fails a memtest at 6200 (even running that single dimm), but infinitely passes at 6000 (even with 4 sticks plugged in). I can’t even tell the difference between 6200 and 6000.

So ya - try slowing those bad sticks down manually. It might only be a little bit of a performance hit, but at today’s prices, could save you $1000

I used an HP RPM calculator through college. It could do cool stuff like graphing and solving equations. Very helpful for an engineering student, not so helpful later in life. I used that calculator until about a year ago when it died (got about 35 years from it). I didn’t use the super fancy stuff anymore, but for a scientific calculator it was pretty solid.

So when it broke, I had to find a replacement for a device that I’ve used for my entire life. Needless to say, I was kind of picky. I tried emulators, and newer TIs, and there’s a bunch of knockoff crap like the article points to. Only one made me happy. A silly little iOS app “PCalc” (it has an icon of “42”). It was like $5, runs on my phone, and honestly I probably should have switched decades ago.

I’m not associated with that app or the author or anything, just a recommendation for anyone old and stubborn like me - I know I’m not alone here with calculator attachment issues :)

‘Channels the inner Bostonian’

• Expensive? Hell ya.
• Freezing? Gimme a break, don’t be a pussy.
• Difficult to navigate? T is always fuckin broke and late, driving blows. Don’t know where you’re going - just ask dipshit, we’ll set ya straight.
• Unfriendly? Fuck you. We’re wicked nice.
• Food? You must be fuckin blind son. Food here is pissa!
• Did you mean the original Boston? I think your tea is done brewing in the harbor.

;)

Yup

Par for the course in Boston and southern New England generally speaking. You can have my firstborn if you really need it, but I reserve the right to break your balls forever.

We’re not nice but we are kind. It’s how we keep each other sane when the fuckin sun goes away at 4:30, and the plow just un-shoveled what we just finished shoveling (cue the ice storm to make that snow extra wet and heavy only to later freeze into a foot thick block of ice).