There was a time when Ubuntu was the distro for the masses. It was the one that “just worked.” It was the one you could use for school. They distributed marketing material with a bunch of diverse young people holding hands.

Now Canonical’s website is, by area, mostly corporate logos. They’re B2B now, we have lost them, and it shows in their engineering.

If the system you’re shopping for an OS for isn’t installed in a room with halon extinguishers in the ceiling, you shouldn’t even be thinking Canonical’s name.

My recommendation would be to find a local ham group and see if anyone will let you use their equipment. In my experience, hams are very often excited to do this, they have a new buddy to play radio with. Many radio clubs have club equipment for members to use and often gather and set it up during events, especially ARRL’s Field Day. There’s nothing like getting hands on with working equipment set up by an experienced user to see what you really like.

Licensed hams can supervise non-licensed users, so you can get on the air before you have a license if you have a buddy with a callsign willing to let you at the controls.

Especially since OP asked about having a “radio buddy,” I think this is the way to go about that.

1: I bet sometimes you do. If you’ve been driving on US-1-15-501, and 1 splits from 15-501, you may ask which highway to keep following. I know of several junctions like that where “go straight” is an ambiguous instruction, especially if one or more lanes just become an “exit.”

2: In many cases I doubt it’s about you. It’s a layered problem.

First of all, you have the United States Highway “system.” 50 state DOTs each doing things their own way with their own goofy ideas and quirks, some roads designed in the 1740s designed by British or Dutch farmers for pedestrians and horses, some roads designed by wildlife that used to walk through the forest that used to be where this town is now and the people put the roads where the tracks were when they put a village in the forest, some roads that are the way they are because they used to follow a railroad that used to be here, some roads designed by people in the 1950s who were going to revolutionize travel for the atomic age, so your nuclear powered car could whisk you down the highway at 190 miles per hour. And every single piece of this for over 3 centuries now has been done as half-assed as possible, each new layer connecting to all the previous layers as an afterthought.

Describe an entire continent of the above fuckeduppery in software please. Oh, and while you’re at it, there’s only 300 million people in the United States, please implement this for Europe, Australia and Southeast Asia while you’re at it in the same software.

And remember, you’re designing this software for EVERYONE. You’re designing a system to be used by my uncle who has a hatred of Sheetz that borders on religious fervor because you order food in there with touch screen menus. You’re designing a system for the idiot who drove into a pond because the GPS told him to “turn left immediately.” You’re designing a system for the professional driver who knows that I-295 is an auxiliary interstate that diverges from I-95 that will eventually rejoin I-95. And you’re designing a system for people who mostly know their home town and could get most of the way there but they haven’t been out to the warehouse district a lot so you’ll have to give them directions from the highway to the UPS distribution center.

Everybody from the iOS native zoomer to my 1960’s uncle uses Google Maps. You can’t design things that make sense to both of these people.

=====

So some drivers will want some information some of the time. So at the city limits of Daytona Beach, your phone will mysteriously tell you to continue straight on State Route 92 because that’s where it stops being called International Speedway Boulevard. Because the non-sentient algorithm deciding when to issue verbal directions often can’t tell the difference between a name change and an intersection of two roads. Or even when it can, it may still offer that change to prevent confusing drivers later, because “Turn left onto International Speedway Boulevard.” 20 minutes later “Continue following State Route 92.” “Wait! I thought I was on ISB! How’d I get on 92? *looks down at phone for 3 entire minutes trying to get the least optimized software in history to scroll the map in a way that makes sense, running over every single toddler in Volusia county in the meanwhile.”

So occasionally it will err on the side of caution and tell you something you might not need to know.

A bigger problem I have than occasionally hearing “Keep straight on Highway 20” is “Keep straight on US-20, US-94, US-1, US-15, US-501, US-99, US-98, NC-24, NC-27, NC-17, PG-13, PS-5, N-64, I-95, I-85, I-40, Bragg Boulevard for 1.3 miles.”

It puts the instruction at the beginning, and then it talks so long you forgot what it told you to do. It’s how you stack overflow a human.

I used to hold up Squad and Kerbal Space Program as the gold standard of early access campaigns, but Coffee Stain Studios blew them out of the water. The update trailers alone have been worth the price of the game.

I’ve seen it do that for decades now, and in at least two cases I see it happen is when a highway enters town and gains a name, like how Florida Route 92 becomes International Speedway Boulevard when you enter Daytona Beach. Or, when another route joins the corridor you’re on, like throughout North Carolina US-1, US-15 and US-501 weave in and out of each other a few times along with a few state routes joining and leaving.

So I think when it hits points like this, it sometimes interprets them as intersections rather than junctions, and its programming requires it to issue a direction for an intersection. YOU might not see it as an intersection but IT does.

Is that what that was? I got a grey box with no text in it that popped up over Satisfactory and my mouse control went from the POV to moving a cursor. I was building and it was a brief interruption. I got the actual text via email.

Linux for 10 years now.

I’m saying it now: Get an amateur radio license and pay ARRL dues. We’re going to need to protect that bandwidth.

As in, would type up a memo in Excel? Woof.

Sometimes I want a more free-form tool that can be a journal or a checklist or a spreadsheet so that I can plan and calculate and such. My personal journal sometimes reads like The Martian, “Okay, my solar panels make 165 kilowatt hours per sol, and I need 47 of it for my project, meaning I have 108 kilowatt hours per sol left over…” But I look at things like OneNote and fall right off them.

Hypothesis: Want chewy cookies. Try cookie recipe, they come out crunchy. Bake for less time. Cookies chewy now!

I have pretty thoroughly stopped caring about movies.

The only movie in the last 15 years I’ve wanted to sit down and just watch. By myself, not as a thing to do with friends or family, not as something to have sound in the house while I do something else, to sit down with a bowl of popcorn and a beer and WATCH, was Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World. So we’ll go with that I guess.

which is why I have a toaster oven. Way easier in the summer.

I think it’s a hole in education. Unless you go to school for IT or programming the most advanced thing you’re probably going to be taught is spreadsheet, and yet out in the world of business you need actual database software, and Excel can kinda sorta look like it’s somewhat accomplishing that for a while so that’s what gets used.

When the only tool society has been taught exists is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.

It is my understanding that Rush also hard-bottomed the sub (crashed into the sea floor) while diving to the Andrea Doria. And was a little piss baby about it the entire time.

That’s apparently a shorter version of the video I’d seen previously; eventually Rush does hand over the controls, by throwing the playstation controller at the guy’s head.

I know of at least a couple maintenance shops that will give their expired composite materials to a mechanic school for students to use in class projects. This usage is actually a good idea, completely unlike using it to build a manned submersible.

CDs like laserdiscs before them are read with an infrared laser.

DVDs use a red laser, and Blu-ray does indeed use a blue-violet laser. The smaller wavelengths, plus the ability to do multiple layers, are indeed how they cram more data more densely onto a disc of nearly identical size.

Yeah I would read “managed to burn the disc” to mean “managed to create a new CD-R copy of the original.” “Managed to rip the disc” would mean successfully created an .iso file.

CD-Rs and CD burners were first available in the early 90’s but they were “we’ll take the helicopter out to the yacht” expensive. By 1998 they were starting to become normal consumer-grade equipment. I had one as a teenager in the year 2000, along with a Rio CD-MP3 player.

I’ve still got the computer I had in later high school and college, a Pentium 3 rig that I plan on turning into a sleeper PC for my midlife crisis. It has a DVD-ROM drive and a CD burner. I wonder if they’re SATA or some older “we don’t do it this way anymore” buses? I remember that machien talking about SCSI during boot-up.

Idk why.

When writing to a CD-R, the laser literally burns a chemical in the disc which causes it to change optical properties, which will cause it to appear to be the same as the pits and lands on a manufactured disc. “Burning a disc” meant to write it. It’s not the original that’s being burned, it’s the new copy. In casual conversation someone might say “I really like this album.” “Tell you what I’ll burn it for you.” short for “I’ll burn a copy of it onto a new disc for you.”

The line “Jessup managed to burn the intact Half-Life CD”, in the context of “thought lost to disc rot”, I would extrapolate this to mean that the original old CD was thought to be damaged or destroyed due to age or mishandling, but he was successfully able to copy the data onto a new CD. Handling or using the fragile original my cause the data to be lost, so copying it to a new disc better preserves it.

The word “rip” is usually used to mean take all the data off of a CD and store it elseways. “I ripped the CD to my hard drive.” The nuance is, there isn’t a new optical disc, the data just exists on a computer’s internal storage. Which is probably what they actually did.

The term “burn” survived into the USB thumb drive age to differentiate writing the contents of a .iso file to a thumb drive replacing any file system or data that is currently there from simply storing a copy of the .iso among the existing file system. Often the same software you’d use for CDs would be used to image thumb drives as well so the “BURN!” button would be used to start both processes. Unlike on a CD-R nothing gets permanently altered on a USB drive.