Making a windows11 bootable flash drive is a mega pain in the balls on anything other than windows. The easiest way to do it is to install ventoy. Then make a bootable ventoy flash drive, download the win11 iso, copy that iso onto the ventoy bootable drive. As long as you’re using a newish version of ventoy, you won’t run into secure boot issues.

Way way way easier than trying to make a dedicated windows bootable installer.

Edit: everything applies to win10 as well

So I can actually comment on both the 13 and the 16 as I helped my family member build a 16. The 13 is my preference for a daily driver for school or for what I use it for - at work. The 16 is best “docked as a desktop, but I can take my powerhouse on the go”. The 16 is a bit bulky to carry around or use on a plane imo.

The 13 The chassis is great. Well built, sturdy, super easy to take apart with a single supplied screwdriver, captive bolts, no glue, etc. Really just a dream to work on. Swappable ports are awesome and they work great. Screen and trackpad are nice, not as nice as a MacBook, better than almost all others. Trackpad bracket is a little flimsy, but it’s replaceable. I’ve had zero other issues. As far as getting locked into their ecosystem. I’m not really worried about about that. Yes if they stop making main boards to fit the chassis, then the laptop gets stale, but the it’s a regular laptop…. All the components are standard thingies you can buy anywhere, ram, ssd, WiFi cards, etc. Battery is OK, I wish it lasted a bit longer. Like everything in the laptop, that’s easily replaceable too. I would say it’s about as future proof as you can get in a laptop.

The 16 The chassis is also great except for the little blank plates on the sides of the trackpad. They work fine, but from a fit and finish standpoint they are lacking. The 16 is otherwise a beautiful machine. Now the gpu- that I believe is subject to “being locked into the framework ecosystem”. Nobody will make a gpu in that form factor except framework. They did just release a 2nd card with a newer gpu in it. Hopefully that continues-so far so good. I both want a 16 and don’t. It’s kind of big. Just depends on what your use case is.

Both beautiful machines that are fantastic to use, and both are “laptops that are like desktops”. There’s other options probably, but I can only compare to thinkpads, Macs, hps, dells, surfaces, asus, and other random windows machines. Never seen a system76. Framework is my favorite, thinkpad is second.

I have a framework 13 running fedora and I absolutely love it. Upfront costs are expensive though - long term cost might be more reasonable (or even less) if I upgrade it for years/decades. Bit early to tell. But I do love it. Best laptop I’ve ever had (and I’ve had them all - even a thinkpad)

Fedora is a great distro. IMO it and Mint are the “it just works” distros. Mint just works, unless it doesn’t - usually a result of bleeding edge hardware. That’s where fedora comes in - newer stuff but without the downsides of something like arch.

The thing with fedora is that it’s “pure”. You have to install codecs and whatnot. Once you realize that there’s a team (rpmfusion.org) that is dedicated to making these things easy - fedora becomes much more tolerable for a newcomer. While it’s a bad idea to copy commands and jam them into the terminal - in this one particular case, I tell people to just copy and paste the commands and just do what they say. Boom nvidia and codecs installed and everything just works.

No idea. I didn’t drink for three weeks either but I had an IV feed of saline. I think you die of thirst in a few short days.

I’ve gone three weeks and change without a single calorie of food. Not by choice - medical thing. Lost about 30 lbs give or take. Was hard to start eating again once I did. Lost additional weight beyond the 30. Went from fat to skinny. Took years to eat properly again. Now I’m fat again :)

Was interesting for many reasons.

1. it’s possible if you’re injured to not be hungry and starve to death without feeling any hunger whatsoever
2. while I lost fat, I lost more muscle. Crazy how the body canibalizes itself.
3. still need water, that you can’t go without. But you can go a long time without food. I could have easily gone weeks longer I think without food.
4. Hug your family and always tell them you love them. I lived through my ordeal and gained perspective, but many young people die without saying and doing the things they should.

I’ve honestly been trying to figure out this move for weeks. What was the point of grabbing it ALL when it’s so easy to rip whatever you want with some of the tools? Was it just a big “F you”? And peace - that’s a reason :) In that case they could care less what they get sued for. But to me it seems like unnecessarily whacking at the hornets nest. I hope it doesn’t bite them in the arse someday.

I dunno, smells like teen spirit hit pretty hard. It was a new sound and many people’s first exposure to grunge. I agree, there are better bands (STP was better than Nirvana and I’m dying on that hill). But they were first, and it explains how they blew up overnight.

TLDR - try slowing down “bad” ram

RAM is tricky these days. When you buy “fast” ram - in my case 6200 dominator sticks - what you really are buying is ram that the manufacturer says can be overclocked to 6200 speeds. But this is shady at best. It is entirely possible for that ram to run fine in your rig, and fail miserably in mine - showing itself as errors in memtest. This can be a result of the motherboard or say your cpu - and nothing is broken. Not the chip, not the mobo, not the ram - they just don’t work together at those speeds. Two sticks can work just fine, and then fail when you add two more (for a total of four). I’ve even had sticks that were on the edge, works for a year, and then started giving me trouble.

Most people just RMA those sticks - which I support - if it’s marketed to run at those speeds, then they should run at those speeds everywhere. But if you have “bad” memory laying around that was out of warranty, and given today’s prices - it might be worth pulling them out and trying to run them a little slower. It’s not like you have to take them all the way down to 3200 and turn off the overlock. For example, on many amd rigs, 6000 is the sweet spot. My “bad” stick of 6200 immediately fails a memtest at 6200 (even running that single dimm), but infinitely passes at 6000 (even with 4 sticks plugged in). I can’t even tell the difference between 6200 and 6000.

So ya - try slowing those bad sticks down manually. It might only be a little bit of a performance hit, but at today’s prices, could save you $1000

Any couple that fights over the toilet seat (or toothpaste or whatever other stupid thing) is doomed - get out now before it gets worse.

My wife of almost 30 years can have whatever she wants and I’m happy to provide it - especially if it’s something as stupid as the toilet seat. I spoil her, she spoils me. We’re happy.

GenX here. I was alive and remember the older folks the millennials and later didn’t get to meet. Boomers were, and still are, much more liberal than their parents and grandparents were. It’s hard to imagine but it’s true. Example: god forbid you were a girl - you could be one of three acceptable things 1) a baby factory/cook/maid for your husband 2) a nurse 3) a nun. And 2 and 3 were sketchy - those were just for the ugly girls….I’m serious… They shouldn’t vote, they didn’t have credit cards, and they certainly didn’t need to “think” - just do what your father said until your husband took that job over. GenX girls literally could be whatever they wanted - we were the first generation where that was possible (even if it came with disapproving side eyes - it was still possible).

The generational hate is misplaced IMO. It’s hard for my kids to understand what life was like after ww2 and the fifties. Boomers really did think and act quite liberally compared to the world they grew up in. We gen Xers saw a glimpse of that world and for all the boomer’s faults, we appreciated what our parents tried to make for us. I’m not saying they were perfect, there tends to be a lot of selfishness in that generation as well as pulling up the ladder behind them. GenX ain’t like that generally speaking. I don’t think you’ll see that type of behavior from us. If you want to criticize us, you’d have to point at our apathy and “fuck it” attitude. We’ve seen some shit yo, and we were tired of it all by high school. Some of it is the same rage boomers rebelled against, some of it directed at all the fucked-up-ness that was new (the economy, the environment, drugs alcoholism and physical abuse, the rich’s exploitation of the working class, having to care for both kids and our parents on a pauper’s salary, etc.). We ain’t perfect, and some older GenX might as well be boomers - but in the end I’m not sure any of it matters. There just ain’t enough of us compared to the rest of you. Boomers croak, and millennials, genz, and alpha have like 75%+ of the vote (someone should fact check me on that but I think I’m in the ballpark). And I would HOPE my generational cohorts would vote more in line with the younger folks - because otherwise they are posers who sold out (they should listen more closely to their Rage Against the Machine lyrics).

Remember, it’s class warfare, not generational warfare.

Drain uncloggers are a caustic. Meaning they are a strong base that eats stuff away. They are generally safe to use except for two very specific circumstances.

1. you really don’t want to use them if you’re on a septic system. It will kill the good bacteria that eats your poop. It’s not a deal breaker, your system will repopulate eventually. But it could lead to a backup. In my opinion - just don’t use that stuff with septic tanks ever.

2. if your pipes are old af and on their last legs. Or some of your joints are shoddy. Draino might eat through that last little bit of metal and cause a leak. But to be fair, a snake could bust something open too. This isn’t a problem with modern plumbing. Nothing you can do about it except watch for leaks no matter what you do (or replace that old plumbing).

I’ll offer some advice. For like $35 bucks you can buy a real honest to goodness plumbing snake that’s hand operated. Mine has a little orange saucer thingy the snake coils up into. You pull out some of the snake, and stick it in the drain. You push with one hand, and you use the other to twist the snake via the big hand crank knob thingy. You push a foot or so of the snake down the drain, then pull out a bit more of the snake from the saucer, and then push that bit down the drain (always hand crank spinning). It’s SUPER easy to do.

The one I have is like 25 feet long, and I have cleared some of the nastiest clogs with that thing. I’m talking 5 foot long clogs of my wife’s hair/grease/soap grossness. Draino would never clear that - but the snake makes short work of it in less than 10 minutes. I spend a few bucks on some rubber gloves instead of hundreds on plumbers and expensive Draino.

TLDR: get a hand snake. They work amazing, are super easy to use, and are less money than Draino (and plumbers)

Edit/update: I’ve got one like this: https://www.homedepot.com/p/RIDGID-EZ-SPIN-Drain-Cleaning-Snake-Auger-80168/332294628

Food. I’m a fat ass. :/

Seriously

I’d give my left testicle to be 30 again.

And many of us were laughed at for saying recall was going to come to win11. This is worse than recall ever was.

I’ve installed Ubuntu and fedora workstation on 5 machines in the past 6 months. Not a single install required using the terminal even once. A couple of those installs were on sketchy hardware and everything still just worked.

Meanwhile I installed win11 on a new machine a couple of weeks ago and it had missing drivers on install, trouble activating, and the login screen switched to Chinese characters after a few reboots (it is a known bug).

/shrug

I’ve had good success with makemkv for ripping both blu rays and dvs. I’ve not had good success making a duplicate disk though. It can be done but it’s been a very long time. I used to use handbrake in that chain but it got to be too much trouble. I resorted to ripping all my stuff, serving it up digitally, and only taking the disks out when nostalgia hit.

But ya - makemkv and handbrake used to get the job done a long time ago, you can search in that direction. Maybe there’s a newer better way.

Yes, like this ;)

No no - not like that. Like crappy overpriced laptops. Like “I’m a piece of crap laptop masquerading as a good one and sold to people who don’t know better at a price way way way too high”.

Of course we have laptops :)

It’s often a laptop, something us nerds wouldn’t buy generally speaking, so they tend to have hardware issues. So newer tends to be better. So plain old Fedora workstation with gnome. I pin their favorite programs to the dock, and show them the basics of the interface. I show them the software button and say they can install anything they want from there, and that they should do the updates that pop up from there.

Zero issues. Honestly does a better job than windows - things are more intuitive for the non tech savvy.

Edit: mint is pretty good too if it works. It’s one of those two systems.