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unpixer

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I was curious (but also lazy) so I went and checked Wikipedia. According to that source, the newest model of Ford F-150 is the fourteenth generation one, so let's look at the numbers for the top-of-the-line Raptor (or what I assume is the top, I'm not a pickup person). Assuming largest manufactured dimensions in all cases for the truck and smallest for the tank:

Ford F-150 Raptor length 232.6" width 118" height 80.7" curb weight 5,540 lbs.

Sherman Tank length 247" width 103" height 108" mass ("curb weight") 66,800 lbs.

So in terms of size, sure, they're kind of comparable, although in a head-on collision I think I'll still take my chances with the F-150.

Can confirm that I experienced a similar problem with my DIY order, and I reviewed my selections multiple times to check that I had in fact selected everything that needed to be selectable before giving up and starting again. (I missed out on Batch 1 <sniff>.) If it helps with debugging, I'm happy to send my current order number to that support address for comparison (my final choices were identical in both cases).

Infinite Mac 4 years ago

Found another greybeard Mac user! I learned this trick under System 6 and used it religiously until just recently. (My clock keeps perfect time, but seconds don't update, under MATE Compiz. Go figure.)

I don't know if this is what you're looking for, but I use the system76-power extension (https://github.com/pop-os/system76-power) to toggle between the integrated Intel Xe unit and the dedicated Nvidia GeForce GTX 1650 in my Galago Pro. While at first glance it might seem that it's a System76 utility for a System76 distribution on System76 hardware, I'm currently using it on Fedora, and the hardware itself should be pretty standard despite the System76 branding. Using the glxgears graphics demo, I can invoke 'glxgears -info' to use the Intel GPU, or '__NV_PRIME_RENDER_OFFLOAD=1 __GLX_VENDOR_LIBRARY_NAME=nvidia glxgears -info' to force use of the dGPU. You don't get the fancy-shmancy menu that you do under Pop!_OS, but it has a perfectly workable CLI.

I don't really care so much about half-height left and right keys versus full-height ones, but I've discovered that what I really hate is when half-height PgUp and PgDn keys are on either side of a half-height Up arrow key. This means I constantly hit PgUp/PgDn with my pinkie when reaching for Left or Right (and ultimately on my current machine I had to override this with a keyboard remap).

In my experience there's been an inexorable decline in Google search result quality over the past few years (not to mention a corresponding increase in reports of tracking and privacy infringements). Having tried a variety of alternative front ends and engines (Startpage/Ixquick, Ecosia, DuckDuckGo, Qwant, Mojeek), Runnaroo delivered consistently enough to become my browser default.

And now it's gone.

MkLinux 5 years ago

Some of them were rare even when they were new; I have a Radius 81/110 in my basement, built by a company that was in the Mac clone business for about three and half minutes. Not even sure it could run MkLinux.

Eh, I don't know if you can exclusively blame Apple for this one. I've observed the same behavior in the MATE environmment, both on Fedora and Pop! OS. I'd install Teams, it would autostart on login, I'd remove it from my list of startup items, then the very next time I fired up Teams it would reinsert itself. The only way to disable it was inside Teams' own preference dialog, which I found to be an extremely tone-deaf mechanic.

Plugging 'Jollo' into Wikipedia gets me a page about a defunct machine translation engine. This reads exactly like a simple license that went through several rounds of machine translation. Making some allowances for usage and spelling errors, as well as some outright guesses at meaning, here's a somewhat fractured full-English translation:

See, far wanderer, confronted with raw, programmatic instruction in the most pure form. A hesitation, troubled to the terms that this license affirms. By a voyage to explore the mechanism and ponder the making. Ta da! The remedy: an egress without risk.

Leave No Trace via seven principles:

0. Modify language in advance. Attach the Jollo LNT license with copies to distribute.

1. Not responsible for negligent coding of the program.

2. Not sympathetic for negligent coding of the program.

3. No permission to modify it under any circumstance.

4. No permission to distribute under any circumstance.

5. Respect the programmatic instructions.

6. (Do) not interfere with the harmony of a friendship.

Edit: jollo.org is kind of trippy.

Long ago, Ambrosia Software had a booth at one of the major tech conferences. Contests, trivia questions, t-shirts to win, the usual. Also, they were at the end of a major push to fix bugs in their games, and to celebrate they'd cooked up a bunch of food with bugs in it, and--somehow--convinced their marketing guy to eat the stuff in front of a bunch of attendees. (Maybe he lost a bet?)

And yes, I mean actual bugs. Insects. I'm talking roach pizza, worm casserole, that sort of thing.

Anyway, he shilly-shallied a bit, and finally agreed to do it, as long as he got to wash the stuff down with wine. (I'm assuming this part was staged as they'd brought a bottle.)

There was just one problem.

No corkscrew.

An appeal went out to the couple of dozen attendees: "Does anyone have a corkscrew?" Bunch of nerds at a tech conference, and nobody had a corkscrew...what are the chances?

Well, nobody except me, because I'm so ragingly dorky I never go anywhere without a Swiss Army knife of some sort.

I offered it up, the bottle was opened, there were cheers, and the guy standing next to me began lobbying the employees to give me a free t-shirt. Other attendees around him took up the chant, and the Ambrosia Software employees, to their credit, handed me a t-shirt when they returned my knife. It was a really nice one, black cotton with that big square maroon Ambrosia Software logo on the back, and the single word 'thaumaturgy' on the front in white lowercase monospaced font.

I wore that shirt for years afterward, until it somehow got lost in the shuffle of dropping laundry off at the laundromat. I'm still sad about its loss, because I was wearing that t-shirt the first time I talked to the woman who later became my wife. It was the shirt that initially caught her attention. We're still together to this day.

So thank you, Ambrosia Software. Thanks for the games...and everything else.

I tried using Mobian as a daily driver, and found it usable but not necessarily ideal. Audio calls were comprehensible but sounded tinny, and people I was calling complained of an echo. Text messages worked, although I would have preferred Signal, and voicemail notifications came through as semi-cryptic text messages. As a portable terminal and web client though, it was perfectly acceptable albeit a bit pokey.

My first exposure to Perl pattern-matching was a magic regex for parsing CGI input handed down to me by a more experienced coder. "Don't ask how this works."

Gather 'round, young 'uns: the 1998-vintage Powerbook G3 "PDQ" officially supported only 192 MB of RAM. Unofficially it was possible, if you bought the right DIMMs, to upgrade it to 512 MB. Which I did, just for laughs. (It was also possible, using XPostFacto, to upgrade it past the official OS X 10.2.8. maximum to 10.4.11. But it was so slow it was practically unusable.)