lattrommi

In 1900 on March 14th the Gold Standard Act was ratified in America, forcing the dollar to be redeemable by the Treasury on demand for a fixed value in gold. It was abondoned in 1933 during the Great Depression (which really was not all that great from what I’ve read).

In 1943 Kraków Ghetto ceased to have prisoners. Less great than that depression.

1964 Jack Ruby was convicted of assassinating JFK.

1879 Einstein’s birthday.

1883 Karl Marx’s death.

Threat plan.

Ask yourself the following:

What do you have that you want to protect?

Can be a person, place, thing, animal, mineral or vegetable.

A hierarchy of importance is good to develop.

    Is your wife more important than your cat? 

    Is your fireproof safe full of legal documents more important than your computer?

Who do you want to protect it from?

Threats 

    Consider:

        Actions taken by humans

        Acts of nature (acts of your god?)

        The passage of time

How likely is it that you will need to protect it?

Remember:

    Privacy is important

    Everything breaks down eventually, both man and machine, society and civilization

        Will a hurricane demolish your mountaintop resort? 

        Will a landslide destroy your yatch? 

        Will looters ransack your home during an insurrection?

    Historical weather and earthquake data is useful to know

How bad are the consequences if you fail?

What do you have to lose beyond possessions and people?

    Reputation, freedoms, integrity, etc.

How much trouble am you willing to go through to prevent these consequences?

Will you go through worse if you don't prepare?

Will you have the courage to act when the time comes?

How many security cameras are needed to track a single cat? What about a married cat?

After you feel you have answered these sufficiently, you can begin to prepare to protect yourself!

If you are technically inclined, there’s QGIS. It’s a steep learning curve but it is capable of doing ANYTHING as far as maps are concerned. Okay, maybe not anything, I admit it’s above my skill level to use effectively. You can import data sets with it, effectively it’s more of a map aggregation and editing tool. It’s far more capable than OSM and you can work offline once the data sets are imported.

There’s also Marble, not the same thing as the other suggestion I see commented. It’s got a version for QT and GTK and some appimages out there. It’s not as polished. In fact, it’s kind of like MS Encarta Atlas, just not really modern. It has a bit of the ‘old internet’ feel to it, if that makes sense.

The person asking the trivia question needed to know the answer, so they could determine who was correct.

Phones, as I understand them, average about 30 pings per second. That’s 30 times per second the phone is checking for signal strength with the nearest tower, among other data.

They also work with any device that has wifi or bluetooth to help with location triangulation. So anyone at trivia that had their phone on them and powered, had their position noted as well as their proximity to others. If the location has smart TV’s on the walls, those were picking up the pings as well. If they have internet available to customers, there’s another point picking up the info.

It’s already been shown that a few companies have listened to microphones. The data being extrapolated is so large, listening to the microphone would be counterproductive and redundant. There are devices everywhere, security cameras, billboards, inside each row of shelves at your grocery store, in every car that has a computer, lights at intersections, smart watches and other IOT devices, even appliances these days have wifi and bluetooth like refridgerators, coffee pots, robot vacuums, treadmills, i could go on.

It’s scary that some company might be listening to your through your phones microphone but the real scary thing is that they don’t need to. They knew people at that trivia game would be searching for that answer before the question was even asked, without needing to listen in.

Excellant write up, thank you.

I’m not exactly sure what ‘opinionated’ means in terms of software, could you (or anyone who sees this) define it?

Well, I’m stuck on a Verizon plan, so my SMS don’t send anyways.

i go to https://www.timeanddate.com/astronomy/night/ which is not really an app and it can be a bit wonky at times but it works better than every mobile app i’ve seen.

the desktop version of stellarium is the only worthwhile open source program i know about.

i think qgis might have the ability to do everything you require, however the learning curve is somewhat steep.

it allows you to import data from various maps, including openstreetmap, NASA and many more.

i believe there are free/open source topographic layers that can be imported or ways to add specific data.

it can draw layers, lines and shapes on top of each other with varying translucency and colors.

it can show non-mercator map projections such as stereographic, othrographic or even more obscure ones like the waterman butterfly or some of the ones from the list at the bottom of this page: http://www.quadibloc.com/maps/mapint.htm

if you are doing this for a fantasy world map and not earth, it might add even more difficulty but i’ve read people on forums claim they could do it, using another program with qgis and on windows only. i don’t recall much else since the windows requirement was a block for me. it’s probably possible to create the shapefile from scratch.

it has the ability to customize aspects of maps and mapped datum in many more ways that i am incapable of properly explaining, describing, using or understanding. i also have cognitive/developmental disorders, so it might be easier for others, however for me, it’s a map creation program i get lost trying to use.

There isn’t anything you need to know. It’s the opposite actually. You can now forget about graphics drivers entirely if you want. Unless it’s like, a job or hobby or something.

I’ll throw in my vote for Manjaro because while it’s not perfect, it hits all of OP’s points nicely.

• arch based
• hard to break (but not impossible)
• biased a little towards Gnome but runs KDE and XFCE great too
• uses a curated rolling release

The last point is the most important. Rolling release means it updates regularly, so your packages will be mostly up to date. Curated means they do testing in an unstable repository. If an update breaks something, those changes aren’t pushed to stable.

I ended up with it after trying other distros but having trouble with my nVidia card. Manjaro’s MHWD tool installed their drivers easily (although slightly confusing with its unnecessary checkboxes) and more recently, I’ve upgraded to AMD and never had a single issue.

It’s not perfect but almost every issue I’ve had was located between the keyboard and the chair.

I am using Manjaro as well.

Are there Debian apps that you want to run but are unable to because Manjaro is Arch-based? I have read that it is not recommended to install programs compiled for Debian, that it is difficult to run them. Using a virtual machine is the recommended way to use them. Asking just in case but I do not think this is what you want.

Computers can only run one operating system at a time, unless you use virtual machines and hypervisors. Most operating systems are launched after the system uses a bootloader to get the system ready for the operating system. This is usually done by the BIOS/UEFI/firmware starting a bootloader, which then launches the operating system.

If you want a USB that you can plug into a machine that is already running, that has an active operating system like Manjaro or Windows or whatever, then have it start running Debian, like you would an Appimage or a Windows .exe program saved to a USB, that is not possible except maybe with a virtual machine program like Virtual Box or Qemu.

USB drives were not intended to be used as drives that run operating systems. It can be done, but it is not simple and can cause a lot of errors.

What do you need the USB for? If you can explain what you are trying to achieve with more detail, there might be ways to do it differently.

directly onto my USB

directly without having to reboot to run the installer?

You use “directly” three times. Remove all instances of the word from your post and reread it. Does the post make sense to you still? Does it have the same meaning?

I am not trying to be a dick, I want to make sure the word does not have a meaning I am not aware of in this context or if Linux is installable to a USB drive ‘indirectly’ but that does not make sense to me.

Can you rephrase what you are trying to do?

One way to allow for this would be a license that says if you sell them through an LLC or corporate entity of some kind, that should require financial support but if it’s you selling them in your own name or as a single owner business, with your reputation and liability on the line, then you should not be required to provide support. The other thought to include in a license is actual money earned from sales. Once a company earns, for example let’s say $1,000 or 1,000€ a month in profits, that’s when the financial support license kicks in and requires payments to the open source authors. Of course, that would require high earners to report their earnings accurately which is a different can of worms.

Because I am terrible at writing, most of this was painstakingly generated using LLaMA 3.1 70B & 405B. Believe it or not, this was actually a lot of work.

The LLM ruins your presentation in my opinion. I do not mean that you disclosed the use of a LLM, I personally appreciate that honesty quite a lot. The short version is that there is too much elaboration.

That’s the first thing the LLM provided for you: It elaborates too much and gives a massive wall of text. One that you spent a long time painstakingly editing. If you had started from scratch and formulated it yourself, you most likely could have come up with a far more readable essay for the average stranger on the internet (I’m assuming that was your intended audience. I’m frequently wrong about things.) Look for the redundancies. LLM’s seem to love saying the same thing in different ways. Just an observation I’ve made which I have no backing for. Many of these points could easily be combined in my opinion.

The second thing using AI did to your detriment, is that the sections are not human-like. They are formulaic, each one having several clauses or thoughts strung together with commas. Sure, each sentence might be grammatically correct but I bet I could read this to my nephews as a way to quickly get them to fall asleep. Not only does every sentence have multiple thoughts and concepts, there are few intermediary sentences to break up the monotony.

The third and final thing I will point out is that page breaks and spacing things out are absolutely critical to keeping people engaged. Twitter became popular because of the character limit. If your point takes longer than 7 seconds for someone to read in their head, you’ve lost half your audience. Tell the AI to be more succint if you continue using one.

I think you might do better if you took out all of the text that isn’t bolded/strong or a header. Link to the full manuscript somewhere else at the end for those who are interested. Those 2-4 words starting the numbered points are all most people will need. If they do need further clarification or specifics, visit that’s when they can visit a link at the end.

Just my two cents.

yeah that looks exactly like what i wanted, thanks! i probably should have asked my question a couple years ago but i was still very new to linux and didn’t quite know the lingo. i’m still not quite sure how < works in general but i get the pipe and other redirects at least.

putting it in .bash_logout doesn’t always work. something involving login shells i don’t quite understand yet but i’ll read more about it. i saw mention of putting exit_session() { . "$HOME/.bash_logout" } trap exit_session SIGHUP in .bashrc to make it always work but i also don’t understand trap yet either so i’ll look into that too.

thanks again, your reply helped point me in the right direction of things i want to learn!

is there a way to save commands from history? i tried to figure this out when i was starting to use linux regularly, to help learn commands and to make a reference for myself as to what the commands do. i’m familiar with things like man, info, tldr and others but i wanted to put things in my own words since i remember better that way.

what i’m wanting but can’t seem to automate: -save commands from bash history to a file with only the command and arguments used, no line numbers or time stamps. -filenames can be kept, but if filenames are removable easily, that would be better. -file saved in should have the list sorted with any duplicates removed and happen after any terminal session ends. -i’ve read about changing the prompt but not done it correctly and not sure if possible or the safest way. -i’ve tried using .bash_logout but it doesn’t seem to do anything and i’m not sure why.

this isn’t too important anymore, as i’ve grown more comfortable with linux and bash but it bugs me that i never got it to work. i can copy and paste more detailed notes of what i tried but i’d need to redact a bunch of cursing and frustrated whining.

This setup isn’t what I use, i had wanted to try as many monitors that i had ports for and this was one result that worked.

2 Sharp 18" tv’s at 60Hz, different models and one can’t do higher than 1280x720p so it was scaled 125%

LG ultrawide 34" 100hz

Asus 27" 75Hz

Samsung 42" tv scaled to 75% but I couldn’t get its refresh rate to change. it’s supposed to do 120Hz but i only get 60 Hz

since switching to wayland, i rarely have monitor problems and i love it, especially after switching to an AMD GPU. i had constant issues from my previous nvidia card.

side note, i’m super poor and all of these except the LG were given to me by friends who no longer had use for them. many of these friends do website design and ask me how their sites look occasionally. they can emulate different screens i think but they’re probably trying to show off or they know i have a huge variety of screens i can test things with. I have at least 6 other monitors from 4 different brands in 3 sizes and 3 different native resolutions with 2 that do rates other than 60Hz. two are CRT’s. now i’m probably trying to show off.

tl;dr: if you think this is too long, don’t read it.

near the end of 2004 i was given a computer that cost $100 at a garage sale. it had windows xp installed but it was not activated. i had also just gotten out of jail for amateur botany (growing weed) and was on probation. there were strict rules with probation and commiting any illegal act would have meant far worse sentences if i were caught. since i could not afford a windows key and did not wish to illegally pirate one as that put me at risk of prison (at least, in my head it did but this was unlikely) i looked for alternatives to windows. that led me to linux.

i should add that my memory of this time is not the best and any or all of this could be absurdly wrong but it’s how i remember it, however incorrect that may be. my brain’s memory does not work right.

at the time my only access to the internet was one hour at a time per day, through the local library. it was there that i tried to download linux onto a flash drive. i thought it could be installed like any regular windows program. i don’t think there were linux distros that even had USB installation support back then, although that might have been a motherboard limitation. i used a 1gb flash drive and saved a .txt file to the drive which i had copied and pasted man pages into, like ‘man man’ among others.

i don’t know what it was i downloaded for sure anymore but i believe it was a linux kernel, as in just the linux kernel source code. no DE or bootloader or anything else, i think it was a .tar.gz of source code in text files but i never figured out what to do with them. i didn’t understand what a .tar.gz file was until years later. i believed they were linux somehow, that’s all i understand. needless to say, i failed in my endeavor and that $100 computer ultimately became an oversized media player, forever in ‘you need to activate this copy of windows’ mode.

fast forward to 2009. i had completed my probation and finally was a rehabilitated citizen. i had established friendships with more tech savvy people than myself (but still not very tech savvy, they just played WoW a lot) and with their help, i built a computer from a tigerdirect barebones kit. one of my coworkers installed a copy of windows xp on it that did not need activation. i doubt it was a legitimate version but i was still too ignorant to care. i was reminded of linux at some point and to show off my newfound knowledge of computers, i decided to upgrade my system to a dual boot of windows 7 (courtesy of a local college) and linux mint. it was successful but i had also made friends with several gamers by then. linux gaming was fairly nonexistant at the time. i did log into the mint installation occasionally but i never did much with it and none of it involved the command line. i soon forgot about it entirely.

i built my second computer in 2012 and upgraded to windows 10, for free because i had started classes for computer science. i quickly learned that where i lived, IT jobs were non-existant unless you had military base security clearance, which was impossible for me due to my previous life of criminal gardening. i gamed heavily instead of attending classes and soon dropped out entirely. i spent a few years drinking heavily in a haze of depression. i quit drinking in 2016 and worked a minimum wage job a few years in a haze of depression.

by 2019 i had saved up enough to upgrade my computer. in the upgrade process i changed enough parts to trigger windows to believe i had an entirely new computer and it demanded i purchase a new copy of windows. i’ve learned since that there were ways around that and that i probably did not need to buy windows again but thanks to that and to my cheap, frugal nature, i decided to revisit linux once again. i installed linux mint. two days later my apartment was hit by 2 tornados, frying my power supply and bricking two of my three harddrives. one was a data drive with all my important personal files and the other drive had mint on it. i was left with a plain install of windows. this is when i learned how important backups are. it took me until nearly the end of the year to be able to afford a new power supply. early 2020 i spent a lot of time trying to recover accounts. because my landlord is a slumlord i was fixing a lot of my apartment as well.

in march of 2020 my mom gifted me my first smartphone. it was an android phone which reminded me of my linux journeys in days of old. i bought an SSD and a couple flash drives with a tax return. i started downloading distros while also downloading all the apps in the google play store. i rather quickly acquired malware on the phone which in turn spread to windows i think. within a couple days time, the pandemic lockdowns began, i became unemployed, my internet was shut off, my phone wouldn’t work and all i had was a flash drive with a few iso files of 64 and 32 bit linux distros. without internet, i had to rely on man pages to learn things. i couldn’t download anything. i couldn’t search the internet for help. i had lost my drivers license back in 2004 and while i had gotten it back, i had not been able to afford a car so i couldn’t drive to friends houses or the library for help. it was not a pleasant experience. there is no direction to the man pages. if i didn’t know something, i probably didn’t learn it. it did not help that i had an nvidia gpu.

i’ve been mostly using manjaro kde with moderate success since winter of 2021. i tinkered with a few other distros and made all the rookie mistakes. i really enjoyed puppy linux and always have a version or three on a flash drive and play with it from time to time. i’ve learned a lot and unlearned some bad behaviours. i quit videogames entirely as well as tv and movies, so i could focus more on learning. i still barely know what i’m doing and i make mistakes often. they aren’t critical mistakes at least now and i have a backup system that’s almost good enough.

last year it was determined that i am developmentally disabled. my memory, meaning the kind in carbon not silicon, doesn’t like to work properly. i tend to use repetition to force it into long term memory. numbers don’t process well either but i’m not counting that. the previous sentence should demonstrate that my sense of humor is also probably affected.

this became far longer than i expected. my linux journey has not been conventional. it has not been positive until recently but mostly due to my own mistakes and ignorance. if i could change something, i would have asked people for help more. i hope you enjoyed reading it and thank you for your time. have a nice day.

That’s a lot of information, for me at least. Short of searching for what those mean individually, is there a recommended way to learn more about these? Like how they ultimately effect people or could be used maliciously or effect security or privacy?

I have no usable programming skills and my knowledge in this subject is limited to roughly what I’ve learned from https://amiunique.org but those two links seem to be on a whole different level.

Maybe better questions to ask would be: How could a layman understand these things better? Is it feasible to learn more without extensive college level classes on programming and/or computer science? Should the average person need to worry, assuming they have nothing more to hide than a less-than-average bank account balance or habitual browsing of adult media which to the best of their knowledge is legal and consensual where they live and who have no social media or social life or ties to political movements, major corporations, news organizations, critical infrastructure or charities?

now is my chance to brag that I’ve been running HML on a eee pc netbook that’s mounted on a wall in my bathroom, for about 4 years now, as a music player and in case of emergency internet searches when showering and it does its job wonderfully.