TINSTAAFL, buy once cry once, and all that. I can mitigate all of those trade-offs. I can’t mitigate proprietary batteries. Oh, sure, there knockoffs (potentially or actually dangerous) and generic batteries (like CEENR). The performance of the generics just isn’t there yet, but for people messing around at home, it’s gutenuf. The battery is still an expensive consumable.

I have mostly cordless tools and regret having gone down this route. The cost of one 10Ah pack would get me a “throwaway” oil-free compressor that I can repair and rebuild. And once you have the air tools, you have them for life. Dropped you drill in saltwater? Clean it up, lubricate, back in action. For the price of one cordless nail gun, I got my nail gun, a long nose stapler, a drill, extra air line, and an extra tank for additional air volume.

Is pneumatic for everyone? Absolutely not. But that battery lock-in is terrible. Proprietary anything chaps my ass, and I avoid it whenever possible.

As an aside, I often wonder how long before TTI and Stanley Black & Decker start locking out third-party batteries.

Especially battery power tools.

Ditch the battery tool lock-in and go pneumatic. The tools themselves are more robust, more powerful, typically designed to be repaired, and less expensive when comparing performance.

I’m also in the process of moving my music production (composition, DJing, editing, a little bit of sound design for video) to Linux. Just curious: what software and interfaces are you using? What’s worked well for you and what hasn’t?

There’s so much I love about Aurora. Every time I boot up my video editing laptop or rendering desktop, it’s like… slipping into a hot tub on a cold winter night.

Funny you say that… my previous job was on Win 11 and a sovereign cloud version of Copilot, the latter of which we were “strongly encouraged” to use for everything. That went nowhere fast.

Designer’s Republic was the graphic design firm. Their work is so distinctive and, for me, the apex of 90s graphic design.

I feel like this says more about neuroscience than it does about LLMs. :D

But seriously, my teams’ and individual experiences with LLMs have been mixed, at best. Even with advanced prompt training, the tools are just not there yet for our work.

I’ll have some fever-dream solving a problem that has had me stumped

That’s happened to me enough to almost turn me to the woo side. :D “Answers Come In Dreams.”

I’ve had this run in both directions. Going through the repos a day later: “Holy hell, this solution is [utter shit || truly inspired || elegant AF || written by someone who should probably be fired]. Who wrote this? Me?! I don’t remember any of this.”

The compartmentalization/fugue state is real.

Gwenview is a new one on me. Thanks for the tip! Downloading it now.

Raster as background and marking up as vector graphics on an overlay.

There are lots of use cases for exactly that, like certain graphics tasks my partner does for her employer (flyers, t-shirt designs). with an existing raster image as background in Inkscape. For what I do, that workflow would be serious overkill.

Inkscape is for vectors and handles rasters poorly. I love Inkscape, but it boots slowly. Paint.NET is fast and light. Perfect for marking up screenshots for technical documentation. Pinta does okay in this role, but it’s no Paint.NET.

I don’t know, man… My Gentoo evangelizing coworkers… those dudes fuck. One is in a death metal band, the other is a kick-ass turntablist, and the third is a free-climber. They all wear Crocs with socks and have to beat back the admirers with a stick.

I’m sure it’s the Gentoo that makes them who they are . 😆

• Audio configuration: I just install DRS in Win10 and it works, as does all of the GPU integration*. My DAW also just works, no fiddling with the buffer to get rid of the crackling or to get it recognized.
• FL Studio: It’s not really FLS that I’m missing but rather I have a couple VSTs that absolutely won’t work in Linux, plus a huge amount of patches I built in those instruments. However, Bitwig kicks so much ass that it’s been worthwhile to try to rebuild those sounds inside Bitwig’s Grid.
• Inventor and AutoCAD: I hate Autodesk with the fury of a 1000 suns, but I know these apps cold and have a huge library of parts and assemblies. FreeCAD just ain’t there yet, and the new workbench menu has been an annoying learning curve. Inventor can handle enormous assemblies on my (previously running Win 10) laptop; FreeCAD still crashes when the object tree gets over a certain depth even on my burliest workstation. Assemblies in FreeCAD are a total mess too. I want to love FreeCAD and have great hopes for future versions.
• Suspend: one of my laptops won’t suspend correctly. Sometimes it reboots, sometimes it suspends, sometimes it goes into a weird middle state running at full throttle but the screen is dark and the keyboard is unresponsive even to REIUSB. I just always shut it down now, no BFD.

And despite all that, I don’t miss Windows at all.

*DRS was actually painless on Aurora Linux with my big workstation that only has a dGPU. All my computers with both iGPU and dGPU were more fiddly. I mostly blame Nvidia on this issue. I’m pretty sure the suspend problem is also an iGPU/dGPU thing and also blaming Nvidia for that.

Network effects and laziness are seriously heavy inertias.

Holy hell, I feel this viscerally. I recently inherited an enterprise codebase with a new job and that pic is exactly how I imagine the consulting company reacted after hand-off. The code is actually quite clean and mostly makes sense, but it’s completely undocumented (including a lack of specs and XML comments for endpoints). By and large, it’s mostly SOLID, but there are abstractions on abstractions, handlers for handlers for handlers. Configuring to run locally or against the dev environment is a huge rigamarole that I’m trying to simplify before trying to bring on any more SWEs. The bright spot here is that I’ve been given a long runway to come up to speed.

Casual AF. I’m here to get shit done, not take any shit from my OS, not pay permanent rents to run my computers*, and do things my way. Protecting my privacy, fulfilling the promise of general purpose computing, and lack of DRM are just icing on the cake.

*Totally happy to donate on the regular to the open source apps I use!

Are Crocs with socks Gentoo?

A handful of my co-workers are Gentoo loyalists, and they wear CwS year-round. Contrary to the stereotype of CwS being the strongest possible birth control, these dudes are beating back the female suitors with a stick.

Serious question: what are y’all’s methods to prevent/deal with spicy pillows?

noticed that I would end up moving the camera enough for a visible “shake” effect in most pictures I took.

Whoa, yeah, that would absolutely rule out a TG. Was that occurring even with image stabilization turned on?