I get that it’s a meme, but what’s the problem? I’m vegetarian/flirt with veganism; it’s purely for moral/ethical/environmental reasons.

Indian food is delicious. An Impossible burger on a pretzel bun dripping with grilled onions, avocado, vegan aioli and mustard with a side of steak fries? That’s also delicious, in my opinion.

Meat is delicious, and that’s not at all incompatible with my reasoning for being vegetarian.

Lot of comments about RTGs, but I don’t think that’s what OP is asking. RTGs convert heat to electricity, same as a conventional power plants — they just do it in a solid state way instead of steam. In RTGs it doesn’t matter where the heat comes from; they are not really analogous to solar cells, as the title asks.

In fact, there are consumer products that use the same technology — you can buy a little electric fan that sits on top of a wood stove and, once up to temp, will start spinning. The electricity is generated by the thermal gradient using heat from the stove, essentially the same as an RTG.

Just because something is available for free doesn’t mean it’s better for all use cases. There are cases where Oracle will perform better than Postgres (and vice versa of course).

And there’s a business case for finger pointing — security issue with your open source DB install? It’s either your fault (configuration), or the fault of some possibly volunteer engineer (bug). But if you pay enough, the whole thing is Oracle’s problem, and you can tell investors with a straight face that it’s not your fault. And Oracle are big enough that it’s an easy decision to defend should something go wrong (which is something of a self fulfilling prophecy, but that’s the way it is).

But yeah, whenever I need a database it’s Postgres :)

Maybe they are the probe though

One practical thing I like about Linux is that you can control the GUI/window manager independently of the rest of the system. So I can use i3wm, a tiling window manager, and my interface to the computer will be the same — I can upgrade my computer, I can install a new distro, whatever, and I’ll always have the UI I want.

“Snow White, take it easy…”

I thought Foghat were singing about a nympho fairy tale character.

I have a similar vintage Air, 4GB. I run Debian+i3, though that’s not everyone’s cup of tea. Machine feels quick, except for bloated websites.

ETA: In case you’re not familiar, i3wm is a lightweight, tiling window manager that is very keyboard-driven. I love it, and you might too! But it takes a little getting used to and definitely isn’t a Windows-esque experience.

As others have mentioned, a few possibilities (I’m in the US, not sure how specific this is):

• Payment isn’t always monthly, it is often every two weeks. So sometimes you get two paychecks in a month, sometimes you get three.
• Compensation isn’t just salary, even if you’re salaried. Bonuses, stock grants, etc. might be done yearly/every 6 mo./every quarter.
• Expenses aren’t always monthly. If you own a place, you probably pay property tax which isn’t due every month AFAIK. If you budget for vacations, holiday travel, etc., these are costs that vary wildly month to month, but have some stability on a yearly basis.
• ETA: taxes are based on annual income, too.

Looks awesome! I’d put a big emphasis on piping/IO redirection (maybe move it further up the curriculum?). I find this video, when Kernighan explains some basics, just amazing: https://youtu.be/tc4ROCJYbm0?si=3l48F_Ci9FYDkNEi

I’d also maybe move shell script basics up a bit — like the really basic stuff. I think it really hammers home the point that the command line and a script are doing the same thing — telling the computer what to do!

Restaurants have notoriously low profit margins. Not every restaurant of course, but there’s a reason that restaurants regularly fail, especially in cities, and I don’t think it’s because the owners are spending it all on yachts.

I could be wrong but I thought that there are only two channels (left, right), and that the output device (speakers, headphones) are a separate concept, meaning you can’t have different audio. Similar to most cars — left right are different, but front and back always mirror each other.

Surround sound/multichannel audio sounds like it might be what you want?

I could be wrong about this of course.

Kissinger was on the board of Theranos, which feels a little anachronistic to me.

For software, something that plays nice with Linux.

For hardware, the M2 Air is a divine machine.

Ah, TIL! I was looking for that setting in the WiFi settings, since I only wanted it on one access point (to avoid loopback NAT issues).

I’ve had way more plug-and-play success with USB-serial devices under Linux than Windows. Maybe just me though…

I think an issue is that people tend to think of Linux as meaning “all distributions.” So if something is compatible with X distro version yy.zz, the general idea is “it’s compatible with Linux.” This, in my experience, is one of the things that leads to mandatory command-line usage — it definitely is possible to get it to work under a different flavor of Linux, but it’s not necessarily easy if you’re uncomfortable with a command line.

Another is drivers — if it’s mainlined, it will Just Work, but if it’s not…well, it may work, but you might have to jump through hoops and get busy with the command line.

In short: if you view your distro the same way you view a particular Windows release, then I really don’t think you need the command line for desktop Linux. But you need to accept that some software isn’t “compatible,” in the above, user-friendly sense of the word.

For wifi, I was pleasantly surprised that I could set a custom DNS on iOS while still using DHCP for other settings. Can only set DNS on Android if I use manual IP (or just use Wireguard).

Edit: not true, Android can have custom DNS with DHCP, see below.

My favorite systemd moment was when my (headless) box hung at boot…because I didn’t have a USB drive plugged in. The drive was listed in fstab, which was never an issue before. But without nofail, it was suddenly worth stopping the boot process.

I see kernel panics at shutdown most often on Arch-based distros after updating system packages.

When I tried Arch, upgrading kernel would delete the kernel modules of the running kernel — somewhat unimpressive upgrade process.

Linux and Mac users can hold on to a little piece of that history with the wonderful xscreensaver suite (its author, jwz, was a Netscape dude).