No, the goal is to sleep in silence. When I’m able to put aside my worries and truly rest I don’t need any noise or background hum to be completely out.

I only use a short video (under my pillow at mom volume so I can barely hear it) to get to sleep and then I’m usually out for a long time.

I’ve always felt that much of getting to sleep and what makes it easy to rest is training to some extent. Changing the ambient noise (especially if you move homes) can really screw things up until you get used to the normal noises of the new location. While that happens I’ll use something to fuzz the ambient sounds, but I’ll actively remove the white nose or background video over time so I acclimate to the new normal.

I consider it a worthwhile goal to be able to sleep without aids, if possible. Most of the real trouble is in my head (or a neighbor with fucking loud music at 2am to be dealt with), so when I have control I seek silence and a mental even keel when possible.

As a kid? Nothing. Just silence.

Today? My tinnitus, quietly humming away.

Now,.if I’m in a very weird mental spot and just can’t spin down to rest, I put on The Might Jingles’ World of Warships gameplay videos. His English voice just puts me out in moments.

Except the Duchy won the war against the US and brought back a hydrogen bomb. They then used that threat to make the league of micro nations. The bomb didn’t work, but the threat of it allowed a tiny nation to gain leverage on the geopolitical stage.

Tom’s Root Boot.

One floppy disk, one Linux machine!

I haven’t had time to seriously game in a decade now (single dad killed my free time), so I’m by no means well versed beyond a few things. My kids do game a lot and most of them are on Linux machines. They use a combination of Steam and standalone installs to get things working.

I don’t run into a lot of complaints. They’re well aware that not all games run on their Linux setups, so they pick and choose games a bit more. I’m fortunate that they’re not always jonesing for the latest AAA games, but they’re also getting new ones with some regularity.

It also does it so that you no longer hit the bootloader. My one last dual boot machine is normally a Linux setup, but every so often I have to use the real MS Office tools (some collaborator or publisher demands it), so I boot windows. Then windows patches and stops actually hitting grub so it acts like a windows only machine until I fix whatever Microsoft fucks up yet again.

It’s time to move to a VM for this garbage. I just don’t neet it more than once every other year so I never seem to get around to nuking it.

I am by no means the right person to ask about music instruments from a critical eye or critical ear perspective.

The one that picked up I got off of AliExpress and it is pretty reasonable for sound and durability. I’m sure there’such better choices for someone who wants to have a nicer one.

I hear you. I’m a ukulele player at times, so we’re in the same weight class.

It’s also very portable and basic ones are very inexpensive. It’s also nice to explicitly see the relationship between music and the notes when you’re learning.

Banjo’s got a general bad rap from it’s portrayal in many movies and shows. It is also a very different sound than guitar which a good number of people find discordant (it’s also easier to make it be loud and discordant, which happens with new players).

Well done banjo is just fine, but there’s a knee jerk negative response to its name.

That explains the noises at night! If they could just shore up our one sagging foundation corner in the back while they’re at it, that’d be great. After they do some serious manual labor in the summer sun for me, then they can go back to their country until I need more work done. Oh! Actually, no, we need them to do the harvest. And there’s this thing with some construction… shit. It turns out that hard workers are actually really needed everywhere and we shouldn’t be such xenophobic/racist assholes all the time.

I do actually need the foundation looked at, though but I can’t afford it despite having a pretty decent and high experience required job. All the money is going to billionaires instead. Strange that those same billionaires are funding lots of media telling me to be afraid of people all the time… no relation to the whole immigration thing, I’m sure.

Percentage wise, Pakistanis and other peoples living in equatorial regions definitely aren’t the major contributors to this catastrophe, but they’re going to be the spearhead of the FA phase. It’s going to be one of the most unjust repercussions of the actions by the most industrialized and wealthy nations upon the less wealthy ever in the history of mankind (and maybe the end of mankind in the process).

So very true. The vast majority of the climate damage has come from the US, China, and Europe, but more equatorial regions are going to be crushed by the heat for an unknown time. The cost to humanity is likely going to be beyond anything our models have projected.

Very much so. It’s completely unjust and we (me included) have been beyond wasteful in spending the Co2 (and other climate altering materials) irresponsibly for far too long.

Hey look, that FO stage of FAFO is well underway. Hold onto your butts people, there’s going to be some serious self punishment for our generations of polluting the world for personal convenience and money.

It sounds like some enterprising capitalist should be building out energy storage to be paid to take the surplus and sell it back when the sun’s not out.

That’s the Mint classic option and a great one. It’s an easy mainline go to for users with all the basics baked in.

I’m a die hard Linux user. I don’t spend much time telling people about it outside of actual tech conversations that should include the topic. I did raise my kids with a lot of Linux desktop use on their machines. They uniformly find the Windows 10/11 experience to be horrible, so I guess I’ve managed success on that front.

Mint is my go to Linux desktop distribution. There’s plenty of solid choices, but it’s served me well ever since Crunchbag Linux closed up shop.

I used WSL for a job and it worked fine. It’s kind of a weird VM that doesn’t really integrate with the host OS fully, but it works for many use cases.

Git BASH has more direct system integration and hardware access than WSL, though it’s been a couple of years since I had to look at WSL at all. Hopefully they’ve improved the integration over time.