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’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.

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.

maintain eye contact with yourself in the mirrored shower door.

Yeah typing “apt install firefox” and getting the Snap version does loudly and obnoxiously disqualify Ubuntu from any devices owned by me or my family.

I’m in the US, Ball jars and their accoutrements are literally everywhere along with their parts and accoutrements. I own several dozen and I use them for lots of stuff. I am aware of a European system that uses reusable rubber seals and glass lids; I don’t like those for canning because I like the metal lid that pops down to indicate the vacuum seal, plus they’re kind of pricey in the New World.

As for casserole dishes, I’ve got them all. My late grandmother owned everything Corningware ever made, and she left them to me when she passed.

Go get some straight-sided canning jars. Look for jars with no shoulders, like the half-pint size normal mouth lids or the pint size wide mouth lids.

Jars with shoulders are not freezer safe; the necks prevent the contents from expanding as they freeze so the jar cracks. Straight sided jars are tapered on the inside so the contents can expand up into the head space of the jar safely.

Canning jars are quite thick, they’re intended to be handled and used for years on end. They aren’t indestructible but they’ll survive handling that would crack a grocery store pickle jar. They’re specifically designed to be repeatedly boiled and even pressure cooked.

The lid specs for these jars is a LONG running standard, canning lids are probably carried by your favorite grocery store at least some of the year, and you can get reusable non-canning lids to fit these jars in a variety of materials and styles.

Home canner here:

It’s not a great idea to re-use commercial food jars for home canning. You are correct in that you must use 2-piece lids for the home canning process, and the jar must have one of the two correct diameter mouths and the correct threads to engage with the ring. Most pickle jars have multi-lug lids (you only have to turn them a fraction of a turn to release them) so they aren’t compatible.

They’re also not meant to withstand the rigors of repeated home canning. Assuming you have a jar with lids compatible with Ball lids, you’ll notice they’re thinner than canning jars. They’re more likely to break during the process.

Finally, heat penetration is a factor. The size and shape of canning jars is important, processing times are calculated to guarantee the entire contents of the jar have reached a high enough temperature for long enough that the contents have been sterilized. Commercial jars may not conform to those size or shape standards, so especially with solid foods like fruit or vegetable slices you can’t guarantee the entire batch has been preserved in strangely shaped or sized jars.

Canning jars are widely available and inexpensive, just buy a set.

Re-using them for leftovers like tupperware is perfectly fine; I actually use salsa jars to mix wood finish in instead of buying the buckets they have for that purpose at the hardware store.

my RX7900GRE doesn’t have any issue pushing 1440p ultrawide.

I swear I still get letterboxes on a 16:9 television watching at least some movies. And of course I get pillarboxes for days watching “fullscreen” pan & scan DVDs or anything shot for TV before 2010.

16:10 is a pretty good laptop aspect ratio, but on the desktop I don’t think I’m giving up my 21:9 monitor. For gaming it’s simply majestic and having enough real estate for CAD and a spreadsheet open side by side and actually get stuff done is something I won’t give up.

There are political, practical and aesthetic reasons to choose GNU/Linux as an operating system.

Political Reasons

The Linux kernel, various components from GNU, a large part of the software library etc. are released under Copyleft licenses such as the GNU Public License (GPL), which cannot be revoked. This prevents a lot of evil shit the corporate world likes to do with software. It also menas it can’t be taken away; My license to copy, examine, modify and redistribute the Linux source code is irrevocable.

The kernel and much of what goes into a Linux OS these days are largely developed by larger corporations (Red Hat is now owned by IBM) but a lot of the app ecosystem is community driven. A lot of applications in the Linux ecosystem exist because someone wanted the tool to exist, not because someone begrudgingly accomplished something to increase shareholder value.

Practical Reasons

The vast majority of Linux distros are provided free of charge.

The majority of Linux distros are lighter on system resources than Windows; Windows’ system requirements have forced a lot of perfectly functional hardware into retirement where they run just fine with Linux.

With a few notable exceptions the Linux ecosystem is free of the ads and spyware built into Windows these days.

Microsoft has a habit of rearranging their UI kind of for the hell of it, meaning constant retraining for users. In the Linux ecosystem, only Gnome is in the habit of making drastic unasked for design changes, and it’s very much not a user’s only choice.

Microsoft has a lot of monetary incentives to be user hostile. Not a lot of people use the Microsoft Store to search for software because much of the software the userbase wants competes with a Microsoft product, so they aren’t found in the store. For example, Edge is the only web browser found in the Microsoft Store. Microsoft will not distribute a product that competes with one of their own. A typical package manager on Linux is full of actual useful software and is the preferred way of managing software on Linux. In fact, Windows is basically the only platform that hasn’t managed to make a package manager or app store the default way of handling software.

Microsoft has been eroding the end user’s ability to control or even own their devices. Linux does not become unusable for several minutes due to updates the way Windows does. Linux doesn’t routinely take away features the way Windows has been doing lately.

Aesthetic Reasons

Windows is becoming less customizable as time goes on. Linux is only getting more impressive. It’s not difficult to make the experience YOU want on Linux. Windows doesn’t let you put the Taskbar on the side of the screen anymore. Get a load of this, I’m using Fedora KDE right now. By default there’s a thing that works very much like the Start button on Windows; icon in the lower-left corner that pops up a menu from which to launch applications. I can right click that, click “Show Alternatives” and I can have a full screen thing similar to the MacOS launcher, a smaller cascading menu type thing that works like the Windows 85 Start menu, or by default a two-pane thing that’s more typical of Linux systems. It’s just so much more flexible.

Can we go ahead and get the rapture over with so the rest of us can get some peace and god damn quiet?