I owe much of my career to trying to set up Linux From Scratch two decades ago. While it’s a much better experience installing Linux nowadays, there’s a lot to be said for the experience spending your weekend debugging a system will give you.

I’d swap out Roosevelt for Nixon - Teddy’s interventionism set us on a bad path, but at least we got national parks and antitrust laws out of it. Nixon was just pure shit show start to finish.

We once got a $250 lumber budget for building sets rejected (with the rationale that we could just reuse the sets from last year, even though that was a totally different play from a different time period, nevermind completely disassembled). Meanwhile, the cheerleading squad was issued matching tracksuits with their names embroidered, including on the duffle bag it came in. Sports sucks up huge amounts of money from school budgets, and everyone else is left to fight over the rest.

Normal rekeying is pretty easy, if you’re careful - push out the core (the “follower” will hold your spring pins in place), dump out the old key pins, swap to the new key, and put in the new key pins, replace the core. Even when I’ve completely screwed it up (pushed the follower too far so the springs came out, mixed all the key pins together so I had to work out which was which, and more) it’s not been more than a 10-minute job.

yy to copy, dd to cut, p to paste. Need to move 5 lines at once? No problem, move to the first line and use d5d, and p to paste it. Vim gets a bad rap for being confusing, but it’s so fast to move text around once you get the hang of it.

They moved Ctrl-Alt-Backspace behind a config iirc - too easy to hit by accident.

Having just finished up 6 episodes on G. Gordon Liddy, knowing nothing about him beforehand, I second the recommendation of Behind the Bastards.

A Strobe Tuner is fantastic if you play music. I’ve been using the open source one by Adam Foster for years, but heard the A4Labs version is good too.

If they hadn’t tried to claim the history as their own I don’t think it would have been nearly as controversial. Calling themselves “The Dons” and referencing 1889 as the founding date was just insulting.

There’s plenty of it in the UK too.

Iirc, the rough delineation is if you remember the challenger disaster = gen x, 9/11 = millennial, covid = gen z, after that = gen alpha.

Ilya Naishuller has some fun stuff - check out his video for Leningrad - Kolshik if you haven’t already.

Fantastic Planet’s score was also sampled heavily on Quasimoto’s “The Unseen”.

are you trying to say “exempted”?

“I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to space.”

Calcifer is the fire demon from Howl’s Moving Castle - I’d guess it’s a reference to that?

“on god” is just zoomer slang.

They do make colour laser printers - but in the past 5 years, I’ve needed to print in colour maybe 3 times, and I just took it to the copy shop where it’d be better quality than I can do at home anyway.

Almost all the printing I do is either stuff to sign like contracts or boarding passes / tickets, and those are moving digital more and more.

Cars have been all metric since the mid-80s IIRC, to better standardise them for international sales. The Ranger was really a Mazda B-series, so it’s definitely metric.

I always figured that’s what the pattern buffer is for - the replicator can make a person atom-by-atom from energy, but the buffer holds the ‘consciousness’, and that’s the unreliable bit. Thomas Riker happens because the transporter system copies Riker into the buffer twice due to interference, so when the replicator fires up it creates two Riker bodies and puts one copy into each, sucking down some extra power from the ship to compensate for the missing energy.