Hmmm, I wonder how this would affect things in the future where this is widely used.

I.E. if you had both widespread solar usage and some kind of large blackout, would it be hard to get all your solar back online because it’s all in the “waiting for the grid” state? And the grid can’t come back at capacity because all the solar it’s expecting is out?

I assume people smarter than me have this figured out, but just a random thought if anyone knows more.

I read through all the Reddit threads, and there’s only speculation.

All the videos are gone now, but apparently he had been acting a little strange in his recent live streams. You can find comments about it on Reddit even if the video is gone. In short, he seemed off.

There was also some evidence presented that the bullshit accusations levied against him were, unfortunately, really getting to him.

Still hoping it was all just some tragic accident. We’ll probably never know for sure. But it’s a huge loss to the community - gone far too young.

It says so much that every single creator had such wonderful things to say about him. We should all strive to be such a positive force in the world.

Relevant Video

An older article about it: https://www.militarytimes.com/news/your-military/2025/09/15/troops-with-medical-shaving-waivers-to-face-separation-hegseth-says/

In March, the Marine Corps ordered Marines diagnosed with pseudofolliculitis barbae, which leads to unwanted bumps and painful ingrown hair from frequent shaving, to undergo medical reevaluation within 90 days to determine whether they still required a waiver.

That administrative message outlined a phased treatment plan for Marines affected by the condition, with the ultimate goal of “returning service members to grooming standards and ensuring maximum warfighting readiness.”

About 60% of Black men are affected by the condition, according to the American Osteopathic College of Dermatology.

For all the people cheering or indifferent to this:

1. This would affect more than social media - this would affect ANYWHERE that has user accounts that can post content - blogs, wikis, website builders, hell, even email.

2. The summary states this is so it can be “renegotiated”. Considering the current authoritarian direction of the United States, now would be absolutely the worst time to rewrite online content policing laws - it will absolutely be used to silence dissent.

But surely one user posting illegal content would get blasted to all connected instances making everyone guilty.

So… Worse. Much worse.

Super cool project. FYI it does require converting your ebooks to a special format.

I suspected as much since it’s using an Arduino Mega - very battery efficient I’m sure, but very underpowered.

I don’t disagree that it could work, but I’m also not sure it’s that simple either.

There’s a big difference in trying to get people to protest for the threat that is over the horizon than the one in power for 40 years. People just aren’t good at conceptualizing the weight of that future pain against what they currently stand to lose.

And they could lose a lot - their job first, which also means their house and their health insurance. Not to mention plenty of laws criminalizing most protest already, where you are bound to be caught on camera or via other digital surveillance, and a single arrest on your permanent record means no future employment, and missed payments on your credit history means no future economic prospects.

And believe me I know the risk of that is worth it, and the risks you’d have in the future are even worse, but most people in the country still aren’t ready to make that trade - hell, most still deny the direction things are headed.

Yeah, people abroad are wondering why Americans won’t just stand up, but the reality is that the country is massive and you need an incredible organizing effort to offer any real, organized resistance.

And sure, some groups have tried, but you really need your opposition party, or some kind of major celebrity, or someone else with major reach to organize something that reaches every American and pulls them together to action.

And that just hasn’t happened. Some people have spoken out, but nobody has been willing to lead that next step and really lead a movement. Words aren’t gonna be enough to counter this.

I’ve been wondering if he will try the trillion dollar coin workaround.

Previously, no one’s been willing to open that can of worms, but this is Trump we’re talking about.

In fairness, my understanding is that there are a lot of complications with adding distributed power to existing grids. That doesn’t mean it shouldn’t happen, just that there are engineering and safety challenges when power is coming from “everywhere” vs centrally.

And of course, there’s a lot of energy companies lobbying against clean power sources as well.

One thing you could do that I don’t see mentioned here is to install Virtual Box in Windows and create a Linux Mint Virtual Machine. It’s basically installing a computer within a computer. You should be able to find some tutorials online.

This would let you try Linux Mint in a sandbox within Windows so that you could experiment a bit with everything before changing anything.

Just keep in mind that within the VM, things will be less performant, especially graphically, and certain peripherals, etc. might not work. But it would let you test out installing the software you want, the cloud storage solution you want, browsing around, etc.

Speaking of graphics, you’ll want to do some research about how well supported your GPU is. It will almost certainly “work” out of the box, but if you want to get the most performance out of it, like Windows, you’re going to need special drivers. I’ve heard Nvidia can be a bit of a pain, but I think it varies by model.

I wouldn’t be too worried about the touch screen as that will probably work - or at least has on every laptop I’ve tried. I’ve had more issues with things like fingerprint scanners generally speaking. Definitely check out everything you can think of when you install, like Bluetooth, cameras, microphone, peripherals, etc. Oh and when using the laptop definitely manually knock yourself down out of performance mode using the upper-righthand corner in gnome. For me at least, it makes a huge difference in battery life if I’m in performance vs balanced vs power saver. Windows is better at automatically making those adjustments.

I’ve also heard that lately Microsoft is making dual-boot harder - notably that Windows updates will just casually break your dual-boot and revert it to just Windows. I don’t know the details since it’s been years since I’ve done it myself, but something to keep in mind.

Finally I’ll throw out there to make sure you have a recovery plan if the install goes south. Have all your files backed up. Have a copy of Linux and Windows installers ready. It honestly should be fine, but especially if this is your only PC you don’t want to be stuck if you have some kind of issue, accidentally blow away your laptop’s SSD, etc . Not trying to scare you or anything, but better safe than sorry, right?

More of a debugging step, but have you tried running lsinitrd on the initramfs afterwards to verify your script actually got added?

You theoretically could decompress the entire image to look around as well. I don’t know the specifics for alpine, but presumably there would be a file present somewhere that should be calling your custom script.

EDIT: Could it also be failing because the folder you are trying to mount to does not exist? Don’t you need a mkdir somewhere in your script?

It looks like there are instructions here about hosting your own flatpak instance: https://docs.flatpak.org/en/latest/hosting-a-repository.html

I know for me, at least with gnome, toggling between performance, balanced, and battery saver modes dramatically changes my battery life on Ubuntu, so I have to toggle it manually to not drain my battery life if it’s mostly sitting there. I don’t know if Mint is the same, but just throwing out the “obvious” for anyone else running Linux on a laptop.