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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 28th, 2023

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  • Install Ubuntu and be done. I’m able to print to my brother network printer with no special drivers. I installed a gnome tweaks package to do some minor tweaks in gnome, and I did rip out the Firefox snap thing to install Firefox from a package so I could use my kpxc plugin, but that’s the only major change I made. Hell, Dell (laptop) even provides firmware updates via the package manager so your bios gets updated properly. Best Linux desktop experience I’ve ever had over the past 5 years and I’ve been daily driving Ubuntu since 2004.









  • I played a lot of Sierra games in the 80s. I grew away from computers for a while and at some point in the 90s, Sierra sold out. They were basically drug through the mud, canned all its devs and became a brand rather than a software company. Sierra was also the first publisher of Half Life.

    I was reading the history of Sierra there other night on Wikipedia and was sad because so many great games came out of that company and most were memorable. Hard to see that in any gaming these days

    Back to my point, I started thinking that Valve saw what happened to Sierra and Newell decided fairly early on that they would be a software company and publisher and not sell out to a third party or take the company into the market. Pure speculation on my part, but they got their start sort of at the end of life of a bunch of 80s software companies. EA is certainly a shadow of what it was but it’s still around at least as a brand.









  • Generally there is a centralized “tracker” that creates a torrent on the fly specifically for your user. I’ve you load the torrent and connect to the tracker via sometime like transmission or rtorrent or deluge, the tracker provides you with a list of peers (as far as I understand it). There’s usually some settings you need to change on your torrent tool, like disarming different, DHT, etc - the sure usually has instructions for beginners. The communication between you and your peers is encrypted, so deep packet inspection at the ISP level is not possible. It also significantly reduces, but not eliminates, the risk a particular torrent is a honeypot.

    I’ve been doing this for 20 years and I’ve never received a notice about torrenting from my ISPs. However, people I know that got stuff from open places like Pirate Bay and the like did get notices. The difference being I always used private trackers.