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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 3rd, 2024

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  • I stopped drinking soda regularly decades ago and went through the same thing, drinks I once enjoyed were now either “meh” or way too sweet and acidic to be able stomach more than a few ounces. Cutting out soda also meant cutting out a lot of artificial sweeteners (because I was never very picky about diet or not, I just wanted the bubbly sweet. That meant that when I did try diet sodas after having quit for some time, they tasted even worse or sometimes even made me feel worse. This is all anecdotal obviously, but it seems like you’re experiencing something similar. It’s not just you. There’s nothing wrong with you.


  • You sound like someone that hasn’t had to listen to that song on repeat every half-hour of the working day from November to January while serving the dregs of society we call holiday retail shoppers.

    Its not about this particular song being good or bad. Practically any other sufficiently popular Christmas song could be a drop-in replacement for all of these memes. We who have worked retail (or retail adjacent public sevice) have trauma related to the circumstances of that seasonal torture.

    This song is just a lightning rod because it has become a cultural shorthand for all this. That’s what many jokes are by the way, cultural references that relieve tension around a group’s shared trauma. That is exactly what memes are. This opinion boils down to, “I don’t like this meme, because it is a classic meme and I don’t like memes because they are memes.”



  • It could have been an accident or incident that resulted in a death. They may have been collecting evidence. There are even some police in my area that uses conventional land surveying equipment and rapid high density laser scanners. Precise measurements of things like skids marks and other evidence of how the vehicles came to rest can be used to estimate initial speeds and confirm or refute the testimony of witnesses.

    It could also be something more mundane like an actual land surveyor collecting data to support future design work or verify completed projects.

    Neither of these are jobs that can be done at night or at times more convenient for your car.



  • You want mpd to server and play the music, connected with a web front end (there are a few to choose from) accessible on the private store wifi. You should probably serve this frontend only to a certain machine on the network (like the managers computer in the back) and lock everything else out. The last time I ripped CDs on Linux I used whipper, which I believe was the successor to morituri. This is all only legal if the CDs they have already included the licensing fees to play them publicly or are themselves freely licensed. There are sources of freely licensed music out there that you can play publicly without paying.





  • First, 400 pounds is a pretty beefy fridge, most basic units are a lot lighter. 400 pounds is coincidentally the top end of the average weight search AI gave me too, the lower end being 200 pounds. I’ve moved a few fridges over the decades, they’d have been hard pressed to get a 400 pounder wedged in there like that.

    Second, a fridge is mostly empty space. The weight is certainly not distributed throughout. If they put the heavy end (usually where the compressor is) hanging out the back, they probably wouldn’t have made it very far anyway before the thing ejected itself. They are primarily difficult to move because they are bulky and lack safe handholds for lifting.

    Third, police modifications adding weight would necessarily require modifications improving the suspension. It would be pretty bad design if putting three 200+ adults in the rear of a police wagon were enough to make the vehicle unsafe.

    This is all a pretty dumb thing to argue about. After all, I agree that the cop in this case was an idiot. That’s mostly because storing a fridge on its side is a dumb move, but also because I do actually believe that storing it as we see in the photo would be bad for the car too. Fridges have lots of sharp edges, plenty of opportunity to destroy the interior, shatter a window, or cause an accident. I just don’t think weight or its distribution is the problem.





  • At work, all black, because I prefer working in a darkened room and sometimes I need to use the laptop in sunny conditions full of glare. I have no need of any extra light getting blasted at me not directly related to something I’m working on. Also, I get a kick out of the “Why are your other monitors off?” comments. Also, IT tends to clutter my desktop with a bunch of shortcuts with a hodgepodge of icon styles, it’s a lot easier to visually parse these on a black field.

    At home, the media server is directly connected to a TV with HDMI and has a desktop environment. My distributions default wallpapers always come in two varieties, colorful or greyscale. The server automatically logs into a restricted user account for family access to Kodi, retro arch, web browsing, etc., which has the colorful wallpaper. If for some reason I need to get into the admin account with a GUI, the desktop wallpaper is grey. It’s like an always-on simplified color coded whoami. Since I almost never interact with this machine except through ssh or the services it hosts, this is the most amount of ricing I’m willing to do.




  • It is amazing foundational science fiction story. Once you’ve read it, you’ll see many of its ideas and themes in many other great works of science fiction literature. Perhaps the most recognizable is as the inspiration for the Ewoks from Star Wars. (In my personal opinion inspiration is a bit of a stretch, Ewoks are pretty much a direct copy.)