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2 yr. ago

  • floors are made out of poly vinyl chloride. not super pretty but quite smooth on the surface which equates to easier cleaning. anything that has ruts in it like wooden planks or ceramic tiles is going to be harder to clean

  • Do you just sweep with a broom? A good vacuum cleaner is a lot more thorough. And if you mopp right after there's a better chance to get most of the dust.

    The other question is where the dirt is ultimately coming from. Most notably rom outside via air movement and shoes, but also consider shedded hair and skin from humans & pets, dropped food crumbs, lints from textiles and any hobbies/activities.

    I like to avoid any "dust catcher" objects like carpets or rugs. In the end it's a tradeoff between how clean you want it to be and how much time you're willing to invest.

  • Went to a open cast lignite mining operation once. The scales are quite impressive. Once standing at the bottom of the pit vision of the surrounding landscape just fades and you feel a bit like in a wasteland of sorts.

    open cast mine

    I assume many people are familiar with hydrocarbon gas for cooking or heating. Coal can also be converted to liquid or gas fuel form chemically but the process is quite complex and usually not economical.

    Then there's crude oil. Never been near it but its ubiquitous in its refined forms, just go to a gas station.

    EDIT: the coal typically used for barbecue (charcoal) is made from wood and is different from the stuff mined from the earth. Many people seem to not know this.

  • Don't think so. Big Picture mode still let's you alt tab out to other applications. Essentially it's a full screen window. Game mode seems to unload the desktop environment. This is quite handy for longer battery life. It also gives you different controller and keyboard layouts.

  • I actually have a brother inkjet printer which works reasonably well under Linux. Inkjet printers in general are troublesome, so there's a cap on how well they can work under any operating system.

    I could never figure out though how to receive faxes and the return receipts for sending them directly on the PC. There just seems to be a lack of modern, user friendly apps for this. I'm certain it's possible but the technical expertise is just beyond me.

    And yes, I still use fax when communicating with government agencies. My country is a backwater when it comes to digitalization and faxes provide legal certainty just like registered mail. But unlike registered mail they cost next to nill.

  • If you use a different distro ¿do you still have access to the "game mode"? ¿Or do you launch everything from "desktop mode" (which is just the default for other distros)?

  • Yup, in many of the world's poorer regions Facebook has partnered up with cell phone providers to provide free access to the Facebook ecosystem and a limited number of other sites but not the general internet. This means for instance that if someone posts a newspaper article you can't even check up on the source without incurring extra costs. For millions of people Facebook therefore is the de facto Internet experience.

    https://theconversation.com/facebooks-free-access-internet-is-limited-and-thats-raised-questions-over-fairness-36460

  • I appreciate the Arch wiki much, even as a layman Kubuntu user. It explains some background concepts pretty well which aren't typically coveyed in man pages which dedicate themselves to individual commands and their syntax. For instance I've read about home folder encryption or how signals get converted from keyboard presses to symbols on screen. It's not perfect when it comes to writing style and coverage sure, but it's a valuable compendium to have in addition to everything else.

  • Nice to see that option included. It wasn't there the last time I checked.

  • Works as intended for me between my android phone and Kububtu PC however I deliberately turned it off for security reasons.

    ¿Why? Whenever I copy a password from my password manager on the PC it is shared to the Android phone and stored on the clip board there in plain unecrypted form. Since I also use a clip board manager app which remembers anything that is copied for later retrieval this means that if I were to lose my phone it would yield the finder with a long list of logins and passwords that I use.

    I could of course manually delete each password from the smart phone after logging in but it's way too much of a hassle and I'm prone to simply forgetting it.

    By default KDE connect should simply not transfer copies made from password managers. It bypasses the whole security feature that password managers have which automatically clears the clipboard a short time after copying any password. Last I checked there were feature requests // bug reports on github arounc issue. But I'm not tech savvy enough to know whether there is a programmatic way to detect what kind of app the copy is originating from or whether we are stuck with the current way by design constraint.

  • Sure, it's a marvel how they managed to achieve a game of such scope within the constraints of a single cartridge. Still for the cries they could have managed to simply arrange them a bit smarter. For instance if you're going to have pitch shifts the best place to use them would have been within evolutionary lines (grown up version simply has a lower pitch). So you could probably simply rearrange the existing sounds to make more sense without needing extra storage.

  • My physics teacher once told us that this was due to the influence of disciplines that calculate with huge masses, say in astrophysics the weight of a planet or the the amount of oxygen within it. Don't know how much of it is true but the basic tenet of everyone preferring the numbers that they work with on a daily basis having as few prefixes as possible as it makes mentally handling and remembering them easier.

  • There's both practical and more spiritual/philosophical reasons for this.

    Before artificial light sources, especially electrical ones, moon light let people stay productive longer whilst outside. This was especially important for comunal activities like hunting, harvests or celebrations too. Keeping track of moon cycles is thus valuable for preparation in scheduling. And once you do that it can also be used to organize other social events around that. Similar to how our modern calendars and schedules are built around important fixed events.

    The moon and sun as celestial bodies also gained prominent religious and mystical significance in ancient cultures. Remember that people didn't actually know what the moon or sun were in the modern scientific sense. But for some strange reason these mystical glowing disks on which people were so reliant kept rising with unerring synchronicity. The inquiry into the movements on the firmament lead many a civilization down the paths of observation, record keeping and math too.

  • Yeah, rabbits as a species are not only tolerant to eating their own poop pellets but also gain calory extraction benefits from it. Usually mammals don't completely break down food they eat, ie there is still energy to be gained from it. Microorganisms have the necessary biochemical pathways to do it but for mammals it's not efficient.

    Basically any animal has only a few ways to into crease its energy budget. First it can simply eat more or more rapidly. Second it can find ways to make use of resources that are less contested (think of a giraffe reaching for the top of a tree or a koala being able to digest eucalyptus leaves). Third it can simply be more efficient: that's the slow metabolism of a sloth, but also a rabbit eating it's own feces alongside fresh food. It's basically an evolutionary strategy to extract more energy from the environment.

  • Podcasts, being prerecorded and edited, don't really fit this model. It's more for a conversation with a back and forth where both interlocutors don't know ahead of time what the other person will say. So they need to observe/listen, reflect while also coming up with answers and putting effort into being properly understood. So basically the natural context in which inter human communication evolved.

  • weirdly enough SI unit for mass is kg not grams

  • In today's world we envision of "simulated reality" achieved via digital technology but the concept isn't completely new. Philosophers of bygone eras would use different metaphors, for instance as our lives existing inside a slumbering god/demon's dream or within the snow globe of an outside dimension that we can't fathom.

  • When I was extracting sounds from the sound banks from the Nintendo 64 game F-Zero X I simply couldn't find certain sound effects. It turns out that some effects are created during runtime by taking a sound sample and applying certain effects or filters, for instance pitch shifting the sample and looping it in rapid succession.

    It's a clever way to save on memory and the player doesn't notice if it's well done. The original Pokémon Red/Blue on the gameboy is an example where it's not so well done in some places. If you pay attention you'll notice that some Pokémon's battle cries are simple pitch shifts of other ones and they didn't apply any other effects to obfuscate this.

  • The jumping one is quite interesting to me. I used to have a period of lucid dreaming in my life and found that in my dreams I can jump off the ground and then jump again while mid air (kind of like a double jump in a video game). In reality this obviously doesn't work because your feet have nothing to push against while in the air but somehow my dreams didn't care about that.