My roommate is rebuilding his Volkswagen 2012 Golf R’s engine right now. We were watching on YouTube, you can get a whole engine on Alibaba for like $500. Seems like it’s 50/50 of it working and being like a brand new car, or just a huge clusterfuck that won’t run and turns into a shitshow disaster

I’m an electrician and would do it myself if I wasn’t covered by trees with a house facing north in one of the least sunny parts of the country lol

You can on Instagram. Click the big logo on top of the page and click “following”.

It’s the only way I interact with a feed. The default one shows me a bunch of stuff that I’m not following, which still feels foreign to me on any website. Maybe I’m just too old. I only want to keep up with friends / family on social media

Lol I just found my burned CD-ROM of windows 10. I seem to remember asking on reddit how I can get a disk copy when they were offering a free upgrade from windows 7 to windows 10. Everyone clowned on me and downvoted and saying I was ridiculous for asking such a thing. Looks like I figured it out somehow.

Is asking for a physical copy such a ridiculous request lol? It gives me peace of mind that I can reinstall whenever.

Whatever, I’ve since moved onto Linux only for the last 5 years or so. The days of dual booting are long behind me. Funny enough in that pile of CD-ROMs was Ubuntu 10.04, the first distro I ever used. I remember doing a bunch of convoluted bullshit to get Oblivion to run on WINE haha.

Oh idk. It’s rare I don’t have service. I meant 4G I guess

The only subs that kept me around for years was r/electricians and r/askelectricians, which admittedly does usually have pretty accurate answers and info, and sometimes I just like to riff about work. Wrong answers get downvoted and removed at an almost scary speed.

But finally after like years of the same exact questions from homeowners that are just like “how do I wire a smart switch? What’s a switch loop / what do you mean my white wire is not a neutral? I took apart this mess of wires and didn’t take before pics how do I put it back together?? Do I need grounds???” I could go on lol. But I just realized how much a huge waste of time it all was. I wouldn’t call any of the troubleshooting or commenting “fun” it was just a way to pass time. I guess it’s better people get real answers than trust AI because a lot of time they try that first and post some of the answers these chat bots gave them and wheeeewwww boy are they some schizo hallucinated bullshit haha

I’ve been off all social media other than Lemmy for a while now. Since it’s not as active here it’s been better for me personally. It’s easy to refresh reddit and get a new thread every few minutes. On here I notice I’m seeing the same articles a couple times in a row and that’s my cue to hop off and read manga or play chess online instead or something.

Also yeah caps can go bad lol. We had these giant 18" tall ones on the solar industrial sites I worked at. This was 10 years ago so I forget the value I just know we had dozens of them each on 6 AWG wire. Part of our maintenance was to check for leaky ones. Because they’d leak then they’d eventually fail and then without the proper filtering for the system, usually the cabinet would catch on fire.

I went to the doctor’s yesterday and I always have really bad service there, I can barely get 3G. When I was there was when the total nationwide outage happened. I just assumed I lost service but I drove all the way home and was like hm my phone just can’t reconnect for some reason.

I troubleshooted it for like over an hour before I realized it was down for everyone haha. I had no data and couldn’t call/text.

I have mint mobile which uses T-Mobile towers. I literally live like within 100 feet of a cell tower which is why I was so perplexed

It was mostly a quip about replacing the convenience of something that fits in your pocket and is handheld. I like the idea, it could work for some people. Definitely not me, I’m not in front of a screen / PC for almost all of my day. I do stay in touch with people via texts / calls throughout the day however.

“Therefore, you can now throw away your mobile phone and use a laptop only!”

Lmao

All good! You sound like you’re on the right path. I have like 3 or 4 flatpaks installed hahaha

All that a flatpak is is a distro-agnostic release of a package. They contain all the binaries and libraries to run on any distro. They’re also sandboxed from the rest of your OS unless you give them permission to interact with it. Being that they contain everything for all of Linux means slightly larger file size, but that’s not so much of a problem as it was in the old days.

I install flatpaks via terminal, same as I do for official repos stuff and the AUR. I was never a fan of GUIs for really anything on Linux other than my file browser, but especially not for updating or installing packages. There’s too many prompts and dependencies.

I’ve been doing a lot of reading online tonight about this whole ordeal. Someone mentioned CachyOS “makes it easy to install apps” or something in that vein as in it utilizes one click solutions for installing, so to speak. If these point to the AUR without checks and balances then yeah I could see that being quite a disaster.

I’m not sure I follow what you mean about better flatpak integration. Arch and flatpak play pretty nicely together as it is. It’s just my experience that a lot of the more random and niche software I want is only available via the AUR and not flatpak.

Ultimately though, the AUR is the arch user repository. As in, it’s maintained and contributed to by users, not the Arch Linux team that develops the distro. They provide plenty of warnings about using it at your own risk, and while it’s certainly a big part of the appeal for the distro, it’s no surprise that something that’s basically the wild West will get a little unruly at times.

Yeah I’ve ran a few, including that one. Also manually checked all my AUR packages against the list and there are a few that are close, but not explicitly called out. Like filebot47 is an orphaned package and was called out as malicious, but I have regular filebot which is (I hope) ok. It seems the attackers were taking over orphaned packages and claiming themselves as a maintainer, which they were automatically granted after 2 weeks. I understand the idea of being able to contribute and work together in the Linux development world but this can be a recipe for disaster if left unchecked. It sucks people will take opportunities like this to inflict some real harm.

The only AUR packages I have are some of the more popular ones, and it’s only because that’s the only place I saw them available. I might look and see what I can install via flatpak if not in the official repos from now on.

I did and it returned two hits for clang19 and compiler-rt19. They were on my PC for about a month from March to April. I’m not gonna lie, I don’t even know what those are, probably a dependency for something.

Fortunately they installed from the official repos according to my log. So I think I’m ok

I updated last night fuck my chungus life

I 112%'d hollow knight this past winter and even beat the final patheon that’s like 50 some bosses, although on that one only was the single mod I ever installed which was being able to save at benches because I was not going to try and do 50 in a row without dying lol.

But I did everything the game can offer, first time I’ve gone that far in it since it came out, and then immediately started silksong over again. I got into act 2 when the game came out and kinda fell off it. I didn’t actually get stuck I think I just got distracted with other games

Anyway even after playing HK to death, yeah silksong is a lot harder. But I am at like 16 hours approaching act 3 whereas when I fell off it last year I was around 40, so that’s worth something I guess. I’m not getting stuck as badly, but the game can be pretty punishing.

I’ve always played HK and metroidvanias with an 8bitdo sn30 pro, it just feels better with a D pad to me. Highly recommend it if you’re looking for a better control feel than the steam deck. Although I did beat that crazy hard carnival boss on the switch handheld mode back in the day lol

If you really want to use a chromium-based browser, Vivaldi does all this and for free. It’s not bad, definitely a bit faster than firefox but that’s the nature of the beast for the web these days. I also like having my tabs on the side rather than the top. I think you can do that with Firefox via an extension, I’ll have to play around. But I much prefer using Firefox in my daily life

Man this bullshit seems to have gotten so much worse since I last looked for a job in 2023

Prior to my current job, I worked at one for 7 years. I’m an industrial electrician, so maybe the demand is higher. But in 2023, I applied for 12 jobs, got 3 interviews which resulted in 2 offers. All cold applications on indeed. I was picky about which jobs I even applied for. For one of the offers I did not want the job and it paid too little so I strung them along as much as I could before I finally turned it down as I had a feeling I was getting my current job, but it took forever for some management to come back from field service for my second interview.

I live in Pittsburgh. They don’t call it the rust belt for no reason. If you go to a junkyard you’ll see tons of perfectly working old Toyotas and Hondas as far as the engine and things go, but they’re all rusted out to the point of not being worth the repairs. This part of the country sucks for owning any car. Tons of potholes, snow, ice, salt, etc. A lot of roads are just fucked in this state. Can’t even avoid the potholes when your whole car’s suspension rumbles down the road the whole time. Highways are a little better but not much. There’s plenty of uneven roads on them too.

Sucks tryin to stick to older cars considering all this. Unless you get something out of state I guess

Yeah. It’s the same thing Uber did with pushing cab services out of business.

Not only that, but AWS is the real money maker for them. Not that retail and gaming and prime and whatever don’t also make boat loads of cash, but it doesn’t even graze AWS. The scale of these data centers is unreal and most of the internet runs on AWS.

I’m an industrial electrician with background on what they’re ordering and installing in terms of control panels and if you saw the weekly shipments it’d make you sick. And we’re only one supplier, they have others.