Sorry, I don't understand the reference. They live in Peachland, a rather unimpressive little town full of pickup trucks just West of Kelowna.

TL;DR: if you're an adult and live within transit distance of a hospital in Vancouver, Calgary, Toronto, or Montreal, the costs are probably manageable. For anyone else though, it's not.

Honestly, this sounds low.

My niece was diagnosed with stage IV neuroblastoma at 8 years old. She lives in Peachland, roughly an hour from Kelowna, and about 5 hours from Vancouver. Her parents both work, and one had to either give up work altogether so my niece could be accompanied to Vancouver for weeks and months, while the other worked the few days they could in the Okanagan then drive down to the cost to be with their daughter while she was on chemo.

The costs were brutal. Transport was a big one, and since they both ran their own business, both companies cratered. They stayed at Ronald McDonald House for much of their time in Vancouver (thankfully) but they couldn't stay the whole time and had to pay Vancouver rents for the remainder of her treatment.

They have two kids, so the other needed regular care. This was handled by her retired grandmother, who moved to Vancouver and took a job so she could help out.

My niece survived and is now turning 12. She's just been diagnosed again though, so they're all back on the treadmill. Thankfully this time it was found a lot earlier, so the prognosis is a lot better. She may only need to be in Vancouver for a short time this time.

Syncthing on Android will be discontinued, and there's a fork already, which as I said above, I use.

I guess it's been a while then. Syncthing works perfectly for me, with the official latest version in Arch, the older version in Debian, the flatpak on Ubuntu, and the forked version on Android, syncing all my Joplin data all over the place.

I don't much care for the file format though. The appeal of Git Journal is strong.

Joplin + Syncthing has been great for me. Sync across multiple devices with no third party in between. However the "sharing" in this context is limited to other installations of the entire db. To my knowledge, there's no way to say "sync these notes with my wife, and these others with my phone only" etc.

I used KDE for about 10 years, but switched to GNOME when 3 came out and haven't looked back. It's a little unusual if you're coming from Windows, but I've found that once I let go of old paradigms like a start bar and icons and embraced multiple workspaces, that GNOME is pretty damned amazing.

BG3 is a pretty impressive game really. It's clear that they poured a lot of effort and talent into it. It just feels... pointlessly complicated to me. There's like, 200 different spells to cast, each with their own effectiveness based on a dice roll, a multitude of different configurations for character development which all feel both too similar and like I'm closing the door on something I might really like. The story is... okay, but really not that interesting to me, and the pacing in combination with the very open world and constant fiddling with gear with a multitude of only slightly different attributes... it's just too much. The game feels more like a job than something I'd do for fun.

Whaaaaat?? Friend you just made my night! Thank you!

I broke down and bought Baldur's Gate 3. I really tried to like it, but I did not.

So now I bought Horizon: Forbidden West, but the Deck can't play it, so I'm playing that on my desktop.

So the argument is that there's no winning, so no one will play. I can see the appeal in the idea, but doubt its viability. Should the US ever decide to take Canada in whole or in part, it would be through salami tactics (Wikipedia link you want something more serious) rather than a full scale invasion. The Americans could annex Toronto tomorrow and the rest of Canada would be scared and angry for sure, but would we demand that Ottawa launch our nuclear arsenal promising our annihilation? What if the Americans took Ottawa, and Montreal a few weeks later? How 'bout then? Would Alberta even care?

The MAD doctrine was developed as a deterrent to nuclear attacks, not conventional ones. Sure, if the US were to attempt a first strike nuclear volley, having nukes on-hand might deter them from targetting us, but assuming that having nukes would protect us from conventional invasion doesn't make any sense to me.

Consider your reference to Ukraine. If Ukraine had nuclear weapons, what makes you think that Russia wouldn't have annexed Donetsk anyway and claimed "liberation"? They had all manner of cover: local Russian-speaking population, strong separatist factions. They could invade claiming that they're simply "protecting Russian interests/citizens" etc. Would the world expect Ukraine to launch their nukes then? What would be the inevitable outcome of such a choice to both parties? How many Ukranians would be left a few days later?

So now you have a poorly trained local military (all your money has gone to developing and maintaining a nuclear arsenal you don't expect to use after all) and the Russians have taken an entire region and are angling for Kharkiv next. Kiev calls for help from the world community but as their rhetoric is also coloured with threats of nuclear retribution, the world isn't keen on helping either side. Maybe the Russians take Kharkiv because they're feeling audacious and stop there, or maybe they try and Kiev launches a nuke on Moscow and everyone dies. There's no scenario here where nuclear weapons make things better.

Where are kids seeing ads these days? Is this just for people who watch tv rather than streaming, or would this include any sort of product placement you see in streamed shows? Honestly, it'd probably be a lot more effective (and better for adults too!) if we just taxed the shit out of junk food.

You might want to consider using Docker. You can build an image on your normal machine, export it as a file onto a USB stick, and then transfer it to your air-gapped machine, import it there. Then running it is just docker run --rm my_image

You can do this for a whole bunch of programs in one image, or a separate image for each one.

It would gBoard's autocorrect got one final dig in. I did indeed mean Heliboard, and I've now installed it with the glide extension and... it's great! Thanks for the reference!

How does a nuclear weapons programme help Canada's sovereignty? In what situation would it be advantageous to us to actually launch a nuclear attack against our literal neighbour? Even if it wasn't intercepted, and we somehow managed to land it on a high-value target like DC, the US would simply liquify every Canadian city from East to West in a matter of hours. And even if they somehow showed restraint in the face of a nuclear attack and didn't counter with their own massive arsenal, the fallout alone would kill or injure millions of Canadians and destroy our economy for a generation... assuming our initial volley didn't trigger automated MAD policies around the world and end the world in a nuclear winter.

It's an objectively terrible idea.

Now, if you really are concerned about invasion from our crazy neighbours (a reasonable position to take), then a more effective approach would be a mandatory service model, where everyone is trained in small weapons fire and counter insurgency. If the Americans choose to invade, they should know going in that they'll pay dearly for every hectare.

What does Tubular do for you that the stock New Pipe doesn't? I'm also curious about neighbours, as I'm still using gBoard and I'd rather switch to something else that still supports swipe-typing.

Desktop

• Arch Linux
• GNOME
• Firefox
• Tilix
• Thunderbird or Evolution
• Vim (I still use PyCharm for writing code)
• Joplin
• Bitwarden
• Python

Phone

• Joplin
• Firefox Focus & Firefox
• Bitwarden
• New Pipe
• Thunderbird (K-9 Mail)
• Signal
• Aegis
• Antenna Pod
• VLC
• The FOSSify suite (not the dialer)

The problem of unintuitiveness is sadly very common in Free software, but it's getting better... in a few spaces anyway.

For an Apple Notes replacement, I would suggest looking at Joplin, which I use daily for everything from database diagrams to recipes. It has a built-in sync feature, supporting a variety of options, all encrypted. I used it with Syncthing, which admittedly isn't very easy, but there are other simpler options.

Depending on your DE, you can have those no problem. You just symlink to the respective .desktop file for the program you want to run. So for example, if you wanna start Firefox from your desktop, you'd look for a file called Firefox.desktop on your system (probably living under /usr) and symlink to that from ~/Desktop.

Knowing how to fix my wife's computer, or my parents' computers, or my brother's.

Actually, while it's rather frustrating for them, it's not so bad for me ;-)