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Cake day: June 30th, 2023

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  • Oh yeah, the bit where SSDs move sectors around for wear evening is important. Because of that, it’s possible to completely fill up an SSD after deleting files and still have those files recoverable from the flash chips themselves. Without that secure erase, as I understand it, if a sector gets marked “bad”, whatever data is there might stay there forever (or at least as long as the cells hold a charge).

    So there’s no benefit to writing multiple passes over deleted data on SSDs as far as the flash is concerned, but multiple passes might make it more likely for the controler to actually direct those extra writes to a sector actually storing the data (though the odds might be low unless you’re overwriting all free space, though even that depends on how much space is free vs how many “spare” sectors there are, and even then it might be impossible to get it to write to a sector marked “bad”).






  • Don’t forget the first response that always gives the steps to solve a simpler version of that issue, almost like the responses are being copy/pasted from a guide by people who barely understand anything about it themselves.

    Plus these days the number of solutions that refer to some setting that no longer exists in the location it did at the time the solution was written.

    Meanwhile on Linux, I haven’t even had to search as much for solutions. Yesterday I installed a new desktop that I’ve never used before (KDE-Plasma) and was quickly able to figure out the changes I wanted to make because it’s designed to be discoverable and obvious. Whereas I’d say that Windows seems designed to make people either feel tempted to pay for a solution or give up and just do it the way MS wants.


  • Some tabs are for ongoing things that I keep coming back to, though I don’t have as many of those these days. Like back in the day, I’d have a facebook tab, a few reddit tabs, etc.

    Other tabs are for things that I’m not done with in general but was done with for that moment because something else came up or I just wanted to do something else and the task wasn’t urgent enough to stick with it.

    Sometimes I get back to it, finish the task, and close the tab. Sometimes I’ll later see the tab and just close it because I decide I am done with it forever (or done enough that I can find it again if I want to go back to it).

    I like it better than not keeping my tabs. Though I did disable the inactive tabs thing on mobile firefox because those were too out of sight and just piled up (along with the ambiguous behaviour where sometimes backing up closes newly opened tabs, sometimes it doesn’t, or I don’t back up all the way). Mobile tabs feel a bit more like bookmarks, which are more likely to just disappear entirely from my mind. Visual tabs serve as reminders of the thing.


  • Yeah, I’ve got a logitech mouse but didn’t want logitech’s software on my machine, so I just used the mouse by plugging it in. Which worked, but I had no way of knowing the battery level until the mouse itself started blinking low power.

    When I installed fedora, I was confused a bit because it had a system tray icon saying the battery was charging. I was thinking it thought it was a laptop until I realize it had just picked up the battery information from my mouse. A feature I had written off under windows just worked without me even considering it or needing to install software that was partly about using my hardware and partially about advertising more ways to get my money.


  • Considering all of the comments saying that a big part of this is people not wanting to buy new computers and choosing linux because it will run on their old machine, I’d like to add insult to injury and say I built a new PC before Oct and windows was never even a consideration.

    And despite it being my first Linux install I planned to play games on, everything went smoothly and I’d even say the “setting up the PC to my preference instead of the defaults” step was better because there wasn’t a “figure out how to disable the shit ms really wants you to run for them” substep, or a “figure out what new shit ms added that I’ll want to disable” discovery mode that, with win 10, lasted most of the time I was using it and included “figure out if a recent update reset settings to annoying defaults”.

    I bet this is why people are so vocal about switching to linux whenever there’s another complaint about ms. It went way better than expected, like I was about to do something that would cause ongoing pain and frustration to get away from something even worse, but there’s been nothing at all that has made me miss windows.









  • To elaborate on the “go for the fit, not the name”, there’s a common belief that shoes need some time to break in before they feel comfortable. This is only true if you get shoes that don’t really fit your foot. There’s more to feet variations than just the length. I learned that the first time I got lucky and one of the few shoes I was trying on in my mad dash to get shoes and go do something else asap fit my foot properly. It immediately made me realize that I need patience when getting shoes and to never buy a shoe that doesn’t feel great right away.

    If you’re going for a designer shoe, I bet the odds of it perfectly fitting your foot are low, unless maybe you have the same foot type as Michael Jordan or whichever athlete’s name they are putting on the shoe, assuming that athlete’s foot was even part of the design at all. For all we know, they rip those shoes off as soon as the cameras aren’t watching because it was purely a marketing thing.