Our silver cat is a huge fan of tummy tickles.

He specifically requests them, and he’s certainly gone over ten minutes without any hint of wanting to stop, he just “supermans” his arms out one at a time, and sometimes drools a bit.

Cat tax picture:

Sorry, I might have misremembered the exact process (this was probably three or four years ago), though no need for the nasty aggressive attitude (though my apologies if I offended you somehow).

Maybe it was version upgrades (e.g 18.04 to 20.04) instead of updates, or clean installs/new installs/reinstalls? I expect it was some of one and some of another.

At the time I used to (casually) maintain a bunch of Ubuntu computers for a few community projects, small organisations and older people who live nearby. I don’t remember the specifics, I just remember the phone calls of “the printer isn’t working” “Linux has broken my USB pen” etc, and the fix being “remove the snap version and install the deb version”. It caused a lot of problems.

If you were running a previous version of Ubuntu, where you had deb packages which worked, over the course of a few updates, they replaced half of your programs with snaps (without telling you), which were unable to see additional hard drives, USB pens, printers, scanners or cameras, couldn’t use plug-ins, couldn’t use 3rd party templates or presets, and didn’t respect any system settings for fonts/text size, icon placement and so on.

Snaps were fine for “aisleriot solitaire” or “calculator” (assuming you didn’t mind a 5 minute loading time) or other things which didn’t need to interact with any file or system or device, but for actual programs for people trying to do work? Bag of shite.

Now, I imagine some years later they must have fixed some of this rubbish, and I read recently they might have finally done something about permissions, but no, they didn’t ask anyone before they swapped working programs for completely broken snaps. They forced it on their existing users, and some of us bear grudges.

“YOU. THE ONE WHO IS MOVING NOW.”

Are you The Gatekeeper from the tv/boardgame Atmosfear?

Me “Hi, is that, umm… Phones, number four, uhhhh?”

Phones4u “Haha, yes, but It’s pronounced ‘Phones For You’”

Me “Oh, it’s it a wrong number? I’ve got it written down here, it’s a number four, not a word ‘for’ f-o-r, and it’s not the word ‘you’, but just a letter U on its own, which is pronounced ‘uh’”

Phones4u “yes, that’s how we write it”

Me “Why? Why didn’t you do it properly? It’s just like that argument with the 90s boyband Fiveive all over again.”

Etc etc

Is it a weird guilt thing?

I hated that song when the programme was new, but now I feel guilty about it, because someone was trying their best, and they wrote, re-wrote, edited and worked on that song and for every instrument and vocal, someone practised and practised and performed, and even if it wasn’t quite to my taste, it doesn’t mean it was bad, and I picture them still crying themselves to sleep at night, twenty years later, going “everyone hates the song I did for Star Trek Enterprise and now I hate myself”, so I make sure to watch the full intro so I don’t hurt their feelings.

That’s what everyone else does too, right?

I thought the pull-string light switch inside the bathroom was the standard in the UK?

I’ve only seen switches outside bathrooms in the last 5 years, in recent “having the bathroom re-done” cases.

It might be an age of house or regional thing though.

Here they still exist - they just make you pay if you want a new one. I (and seemingly most people) use them all the time still, but I guess more people reuse them more times now. I’m quite happy to pay 30p for one when the old ones get used up. I think they’re a bit sturdier than they used to be too - so less likely for the handles to snap when you’ve still got a mile to walk home.

I guess it mostly cut down on unwanted ones getting littered etc. Now they’re valuable, all the more reason to hoard them in a cupboard in the kitchen.

Where you are it sounds like they stopped existing - what do you put your food shopping in? Do you still have a thousand left that you previously hoarded?

I think technically it’s both, but it’s mainly focused on the former - the shop and supermarket ones. You now pay 20 or 30p for them - previously when they were free, they would sometimes force a bag on you, even if you didn’t want one (I guess to walk around advertising their shop).

Throwing pretend milkshakes at a pretend Nigel Farridge is disrespectful.

We should be burning effigies of him on bonfires.

… “étoile de mer”, which would roughly translate as “star of the sea” or “sea star” - the same as the Spanish “estrella de mar”, Portuguese “estrela do mar” or Romanian “stea de mare”.

I miss lovely, earthy, warm, friendly chocolatey Brownbuntu.

I always felt purplebuntu was a bit vile.

As far as I’m aware, in English, the punctuation goes outside the quotes, unless it’s part of the original quote.

In American, the punctuation goes inside the quotes, even if it’s not part of the sentence being quoted.

I’m unsure of the habits of other English-speaking countries.

Kup from 80’s Transformers

I was under the impression it was partially due to him feeling the ‘U’ made the words feel “too French”, and he supposedly really hated the French (apparently he was a bit of a fan of the ol’ racism), but mainly he wanted something new and uniquely American - and English spelling was even more regional, wild and inconsistent back then, so he hoped to simplify it, bring it some consistency, ideally whilst also telling the French to piss off.

In combination with the exercise it sounds like you’re doing anyway, have you tried a bit of Yoga and a bit of listening to meditative sounds before/during bed/sleep/end of day? You may have tried similar things already, but if not, maybe worth a go? It’s not going to pass/waste time as such, but might put you into a better position to stop your mind racing with negativity, especially in that crucial pre-sleep phase.

Particularly looking at “Yoga for Anxiety” or “Yoga for Mental Health” type things, moreso than general strength and fitness Yoga. You’ll find a bunch online. You might find something like this Yoga Healthcare Alliance 10 Week Course works for you (it’s promoted by the UK’s NHS for some conditions). It’s focusing on basic de-stressing, de-tensing muscles, breathing focus, and may help you feel calm and relaxed - which may give you a good nights sleep - which could potentially do wonders for beginning to recover.

I’d also suggest combining it with some “sleep headphones” - a fabric headband with some really flat headphone speakers inside it - then listen to a combination of “meditation for anxiety” or “8 hours deep sleep ambient soundscape” type things whilst you lie there.

Ideally you’d do the Yoga sat on your bed, then drop straight into something like “a nice man tells you you’re great and everything will be fine” followed by some sort of “inner peace meditation that lasts 8 hours or longer”. Obviously, you’ll find your own preferred voices/sounds. I’ve also used white noise style “starship engine sound” or “on a night train” audio.

If you watch them on your phone with “Newpipe”, you can save them as videos or just as audio files - which you can then set up as playlists in VLC. No point in downloading the same thing every night.

This whole set of things might not work for you at all, but if you’re up for hours anyway, what do you have to lose?

Personally, I found this process helped me massively on my way out of a similar patch (combined with exercising more, quitting caffeine for a while, CBT therapy - it was a multiple angle approach).

Regardless, I wish you luck and pass you my best wishes in your recovery.

Walwe

I might be wrong, but wasn’t Movit just for timeline preview, and hadn’t worked properly for quite a few versions and now you just use the NVENC/VAAPI etc export profiles to export with GPU?

I’m sure it’s not possible for everyone - but I essentially did this some years back - though more with Premiere than Photoshop - and therefore more Cinelerra/Kdenlive than Gimp/Krita.

I ran a dual boot system from about 2008 until about 2015. If it could be done in Linux/FOSS, it was. If it couldn’t, it was done in Windows/Adobe software.

I was self-employed, though I often did subcontracting work for a handful of media/umbrella organisations - so sometimes I had to use Premiere or Sony Vegas to carry on half-done projects I was handed.

Bear in mind this was when you bought Adobe software and didn’t rent it - and you could also keep running an older version for years.

Anyway, over time I used the Windows partition less and less, until I got rid of it entirely when I got a new computer.

I had to work a bit harder one year, and I did miss out on a few projects - but mostly, I could do everything I could do previously, but it took a bit longer for a while until I adjusted to a different workflow.

After that, you’re just saying “That’s a £2000 job”, “That’s a £200 job”, and meeting a deadline. Nobody really cares if it took 7 minutes longer to do, and I saved a lot of time not using Windows any more.

Editing (and other design stuff) is a far smaller part of my overall work these days, but I still do a good chunk of projects over the year, and I’ve been 100% Linux for almost 10 years. No regrets.

To a lot of laptop manufacturers, it certainly seems that way as of late - that’s why I’m ever hopeful that a modular laptop, such as the framework, might give us the option of how we want to control a mouse cursor.