malada

I just recently came across the phrase 'Nazi bar' and I thought I'd share it.

It comes out of the complete thought that, "If you open up a bar and let the Nazi drink there, no one else will want to drink there and it will soon be known as the Nazi bar." The writer was talking about social media in general but Twitter comes to mind very quickly.

Now, we already have Nazi bars: Truth Media, Parler come to mind immediately, and I'm sure there's plenty of forums filled with right wing nut jobs (The Federalist Society, NRA) but these aren't mass media outlets. Twitter still is. How long it will remain that way is in doubt. An easy to use complete replacement of Twitter doesn't seem to be on the horizon but the rot is in there and it's getting pretty deep. People will keep using it as long as it's still working (hahahahah), there's no serious replacement and as long as the Nazi's are kept out of sight of Mr & Ms Suburbia. They'll keep going to the Nazi bar as long as it's not in their face. And so, the Nazi bar seeps into the everything it touches.

It seems the iconic beer brand Bud Light has been slowly dying over the past few years. In a classic corporate move they try to rebrand the beer as more 'inclusive' and less 'frat boy'.
They got a trans 'influencer' by the name of Dylan to hawk the stuff. All the frat boy right-winger heads exploded.

Right wingers are such snowflakes.

Guys, I hate to tell you this but people aren't buying your beer because it tastes like piss water. It sucks. Let the brand die and brew better beer.

I don't drink anymore (or rarely do) and the last beer I had that I enjoyed was a locally brewed coffee stout. I don't remember if 'coffee' means it's dark as coffee (and it was) or it was brewed with coffee but it was *delicious*.

I saw Dylan's video where they introduced Bud Light. I was distracted by the fact that the beer cans are props (the cans are empty - listen when Dylan places the cans on the table) but the script was hilarious.

The makers of Bud Light are getting publicity - but I doubt if that will translate into sales that would save the brand. Mass produced piss water beer is failing all across the United States. Younger people are smoking pot and sipping wine and drinking local (real) beer. It's not a case of 'go woke go broke' but 'the brand is broke'.

Wake up and smell the coffee stout.

Don't be distracted when they say the Nashville shooter might be trans...

Don't be distracted when they say the shooter was seeing a therapist...

...the problem...

... is all the guns.

F*ck it. Ban them all.

Fortunately, this doesn't affect my main machines - but on oldie I pieced together several years ago.

It's "The Craiger" - a box I *mostly* put together with Craig's list parts. It's an olddie... a Rampage motherboard sporting 8 gigs of RAM and a Q9500 quad core CPU. An SSD makes it speedy and an Nvidia GTX660 makes it almost game worthy... for older games. It was running Xubuntu 20.04 - updated from 18.04 and I wanted to update it to 22.04.

I ran the update and everything seemed to go okay. The upgrade seemed to take so I loaded up Firefox to get some added goodies off the web... and the program failed to start. Okay, install Chromium. That failed to start. Then I get a warning that my APT/SNAP database was corrupted.

WTF?

A reboot later... and it completely hung on booting. Did SNAP packages bork my system?

Okay, let's start with a fresh install - but let's try Linux Mint Debian Edition. I take my USB stick with a fresh copy of LMBE 5 ... and the motherboard is too old to boot from a USB.

Darn, I forgot about that. But hey! I'm totally Old School and burn a DVD. Cool. It installs okay although Firefox did lock up the system when installing Duckduckgo security add-on. A reboot fixed that. And...

No Nvidia driver? Oh, darn. They're going to start allowing that in the *next* edition of Debian. I could fiddle with config files... nah... that's why I switched to Ubuntu... you want non-free drivers? Ubuntu asks you if you want to install them... and it does! Debian... eh, no.

Don't get me wrong - I loved Debian. Stable, reliable. I just got tired of having to fiddle with config files and newer hardware not being seen.

Hey! I was going to make this a spare Ubuntu Studio machine! And I've got a DVD already burned! Boot the DVD and .... SNAP deamon failed? CUPS daemon failed?

WTF?

Doing a little digging in the Ubuntu forums and it looks like they're doing away with DVD booting. It might still work... but it may take a few times. Well that sucks. Yeah, I get it... USB boot to install is faster and DVD drives are getting old. Still... that sucks.

So... I've burned a DVD of the latest version of Linux Mint Cinnamon. I've been contemplating jumping to Mint because Ubuntu has gone all in with Gnome 3 (which I hate) and SNAPS (which are slow) so this will give me another chance to kick Mint around a bit. It's too late to try it tonight so we'll see what happens tomorrow.

Is there a pill to cure mornings? I could use a 'script.

Every once in a while we'd smell a whiff of gas but only when the hot water heater was running. It was so diffuse I thought I was imagining it.

Ah, nope.

Finally got the plumber in and yep, the water heater is leaking gas. The heater is 11 years old, out of production, broke down over the summer and the parts are hard to get.

Estimated cost to fix: 4,000 dollars.

Estimated cost to replace: 6,500 dollars.

Thank dog we put money away for just such an emergency.

We're now poorer but have hot water.

-m

I changed my normal morning walk pattern (I hurt my back again) and coming up the sidewalk was Fluffy.

I don't know if it's the same skunk that has been stinking up the neighborhood lately but - they were a big one.

I stood still, feeling very calm observing Fluffy as it took a right turn into a driveway. I was able to watch it jump up a very low wall (it took a few moments) then disappear into someone's back yard.

I don't think should be out and about now - but it's been in the 30-40 degrees F locally.

-m

I'm a long time Linux user and I just installed... Windows 10 on a machine. It's a Dell Optiplex 990 that was destined for the rubbish. I got there first.

It took a little longer than it should have because... silly me, the BIOS was set for RAID and didn't see the fresh install at first. A few minutes puzzling over BIOS settings and things went okay. It did take a while to install on a 256 gig SSD - longer than a Linux install. The machine has 16 gigs of memory and an i5 clocking at 3.2 ghz with 4 cores/4 threads. I got a serious scare when I went to flash the BIOS and Windows took the opportunity to install some more updates and the machine seemed to hang - but everything turned out okay.

I should check the thermal paste. That was on the list but I just plain forgot.

Tomorrow I'm going to drop in a AMD RX580 graphics card and install drivers. After that I'll run some benchmarks. I'm hoping to flip this machine as a low end gaming system. I've got another Dell 990 that I might not put as much money or energy in and flip that too. I'm not trying to make a lot of money on this... just trying to make a *little* money to fee4 my habit of fixing up old systems.

I've got my eye on some mid-2010 Macbook Pros that they're talking about trashing at work. I haven't worked on Macs before so I'm eager to try them out. SSDs are a cheap update for the machines and I'll probably donate some to my church.

So... I've been looking into a different video editor: Davinci Resolve. It has a Linux version and it's free! It required a stiffer video card than the one I had (AMD 7700) so I bought a AMD RX 580 AU. It's a cut down version of the RX 580 but the performance is pretty close.

So I downloaded Resolve and followed the instructions.

And... nope, doesn't work.

Digging deeper Resolve only works with certain graphics cards and certain versions of Linux. That part *was not* mentioned on the website which is really dishonest. Picking through the forums some people have gotten it to run with Ubuntu (I'm running Ubuntu Studio) with Nvidia cards.

Deep breath. I can use the RX 580 on another build. I cruise E-Bay and got an Nvidia GTX 1060.

It arrived within a few days! And it's DOA.

Maybe the Universe is telling me to stick with Open Source software.

-m

So, a little more came out about the boy in Virginia who brought a gun to school and shot a teacher. From the latest reports there were multiple reports the child being either suspected of carrying a weapon and making threats to others - but the administrators ignored the reports.

I'll bet they would have taken swift and decisive action if the boy showed up in a dress. He'd been hustled off of the campus and *authorities* would be called. They would have come down like a ton of bricks on him but having a gun? *yawn*

Our society is sick.