I think the main issue was that Mint doesn’t have good power management tools (so I used a third-party utility). Not a ‘gaming’ laptop but it does have a dedicated Nvidia GPU and I got the drivers working fine, and most games ran better than than they did on windows. I’ll check out CachyOs! Thank you for the suggestion. I haven’t tried Fedora in a decade (and not on this PC, obviously), so I’ll take a look at that, too.

Last time I tried (Mint) the dealbreaker for me was battery management. I tried various utils and settings but I couldn’t get as much juice of of the same charge using Mint and still have good performance. If anyone has any suggestions I’d be grateful!

Wouldn’t your normal fear response be to… get out of the way?

As someone regularly uses Japanese and sometimes uses node.js, this is a handy library to know about! Cheers!

That’s why I employ a staff of a few dozen multilingual interpreters to follow me to the supermarket to translate the ingredient labels in the import isle.

I think the USA was already on a not-so-slow decent into fascism, and this assassination just gives another talking point to justify what they are doing, not change course. I can imagine people putting this at the back of their mind soon, just like they did with the assassination attempt on Trump. A civil war isn’t going to break out (there’s only one military in the USA, and no established apparatus for a coup (except for an auto-coup)), but there is a chance of war in a geopolitical conflict.

The last time Qatar was attacked was by the Ottoman Empire. Your comment indeed highlights how many think about the Middle East as a homogeneous blob.

There’s a difference in how people perceive Syria, Lebanon and Iran, and the Gulf states. An attack on a stable Gulf state is a big deal. SA and Qatar have been at odds historically, but you can see them being brought closer together by this event. If the Arab states are pushed much further, they may unite and fight back.

Given the amount of dehumanization of Arabs by Israel, I can imagine them “feeling justified” to drop a nuke on Riyadh or Mecca as a retaliation. Hopefully cooler heads prevail, but they will keeping poking the bear (falcon?) so long as they have support from the US. Of all the nuclear powers, I believe Israel is the most likely to use them. Russians at least see Ukrainians as fellow Slavs, but there’s little Semetic solidarity.

It’s true that what happens in the US has massive consequences for the rest of the world (including the Middle East, as stated above). But given the course of the federal government and the courts in the US already, I can’t see there being any fundamental change here; maybe some minor acceleration, but things are pretty far gone already.

I expected a megathread when Israel bombed Qatar, not when some white-wing guy got shot.

People really like a personal story over geopolitics, eh.

What they did in Tokyo? Drop 1600 tons of incendiary bombs, killing 100,000 civilians, destroying half the city, making a million people homeless? I’m pretty sure Israel is already emulating this strategy.

This is Piaget’s conservation of volume test. I did this experiment at school (we went to the elementary school next door and ran tests on the kids). Most of the kids said the higher one held more liquid because it was ‘taller’, though some said the short one had more because it was ‘fatter’.

A further complication is that the aluminium is considerably thicker on the base and the top… so there’s more thin metal, and less thick metal.

Many people saying ‘live for the now’, which is totally valid, but there’s an alternative as well, which is the path I followed - devise a concrete economic plan for your life (5 year plan, 3 year plan, etc), and track ALL your spending until you have a strong grasp on how you like to spend your cash.

It’s hard to make more money, so do everything you can to reduce spending in your life. No only will you increase how much can put away, but you’ll need less to sustain yourself when you reduce how much you earn, due to the cultivation of a spendthrift life.

the sole reason I stay in this cold dreary backwater of a country.

You do know you can get crumpets in any supermarket in sunny Queensland, yeah? You can even get Marmite (but why would you when Vegemite is superior).

I’ve only spent a couple months in France, but I agree from my experience. I think that foreigners that complain about the French being rude were just expecting special treatment, didn’t put in any effort themselves to be friendly, then shocked that the storekeeper/waiter wasn’t kissing their ass, even though they didn’t even manage to say ‘bonjour’.

Cadbury’s Marvellous Creations range has been doing it for about 10 years, but I’ve only seen them in Australia and SE Asia (assumigly sold in UK, too).

Operation: Inner Space