Richie’s Computer Stuff

I dip my chicken tenders in my soda.

I always wondered. Ghosts who died in the 1980s dressed in neon windbreakers practicing the Thriller dance. Why don’t they talk about those ghosts in TV shows? They sound like they’d be a lot of fun to meet!

I switched to Linux six years ago because I was bored and wanted to try it as a main OS for the first time. “I can always go back”, I told myself when I still wasn’t sure of things.

I never did, and never will. Now, I just watch Windows become worse and worse from the back while laughing in my Debian/Arch-based playgrounds.

It’s a rather complex and intricate biological process wherein mommy and daddy wish upon a star, and that star descends from they sky, becoming a new seed which gently plants itself in a cabbage patch. From there, after continuous watering and plenty of sunlight, the seed blossoms into a beautiful flower which when blooms, opens to reveal a diamond. That diamond later forms into an infant child, and can begin the long process of growing up and consuming resources.

Pregananant.

I don’t even know that most of the time.

I get that too. I can have an energy drink and a coffee in the morning and still feel the need to sleep, but if I do much as have a small cup of tea late at night I don’t sleep.

You know something, I have a weird soft spot for thin clients. They’re so little and compact, but they do ordinary computer things?! Hmm… I think I need to be on the lookout for some to add to my collection so I can force get them to compile Gentoo for three days, or something equally silly. I’ve made a Compaq Deskpro EN run Arch Linux 32, so there’s that.

The thing I’d like news sites or other sites that use paywalls to understand is that I am not likely to sign up for a $5/$10/$15/$20+ subscription just to skim through a single panic-inducing article or quiz and then probably never return. I will literally press that little back button and go somewhere else.

Actually, my local Value Village stores have those. At two of them, you’ll hear it going off quite frequently in the store. I wonder if it’s a just a thing they do.

Oh god the swearing mudcrabs! How could I have forgotten about that? Oh, and the one that turns the spiders into Spider-Man! Those are positively… legendary!

Mods are fun. Half the time I start the game and I begin experiencing intermittent crashing, and now have to test each mod individually to find out which one is the culprit. Is it any of the Beyond Skyrim mods? No. Is it the archery rebalancing mod? Nope, not that one. Hmm… my high-res hair mod has caused problems before. Uh… not this time. Could it be the one that redoes the entire College of Winterhold? No, thank the gods.

Two hours later… it’s the mod that makes goats scream. Ffs. That was my favourite one!

This reminds me so much of Pointless Sites. I’d spend hours on that site as a tween bored in computer class.

Omg you guys that’s obviously a chicken.

One way to deal with this I’ve been doing for a little while is to use a service that enables me to use email aliases. It’s mostly meant to avoid email address leaks, but will also make it harder for online services and companies to track you, since it’s a big point of tracking. You can also use it to figure out who sold your email address. Not a perfect solution, but it’s something. I’ve been using Proton. Whether or not you trust them is up to you, but they do offer this ability (I just can’t remember if it’s free or paid).

I guess they need to train the AI to better differentiate between gut issues and last night’s borscht.

Reminds me of my big upgrade a little while back. I wanted a Ryzen 7 7800X3D, which of course meant a new motherboard and RAM too. I was coming from 64GB of DDR4, and while most of the time I didn’t need it, there were times where I did need it, or it was great to have.

I didn’t want to spend the extra money on 64GB of DDR5 memory at the time, and settled with 32GB thinking “it’s fine, I don’t need more than that most of the time anyways, and I can always upgrade later if I need to”. I got 2x16GB, leaving room for two more later on (and allowing myself to graduate from dual channel to that tasty quad channel).

Well, fast forward to now, and… it’s not hard to get close to that ceiling. Between video/audio work, BeamNG.Drive being an absolute pig on memory (the Linux kernel is like “absolutely f****** not”, and boots it out of memory to prevent an OOM situation), and running AI models locally just for funsies, I’ve been thinking about an upgrade.

lol imagine my face when I see how “64GB prices” are now “32GB prices”. And all of a sudden… I don’t really need it anymore.

Our geese are unreasonable and ruthless. Don’t even look at them the wrong way. One day you need a winter coat, and the next day is t-shirt weather. There are two times in the year where I blast the heat in the morning, and the air conditioner by noon. You apologize when someone bumps into you.

Damn, I really wish I could offer more help beyond ensuring drivers are set up correctly for NVIDIA. I mean, you could also check the power profile too, using something like cpupower-gui to see if it’s in power saving mode. I suppose you could also close other applications to see if one of them is interfering, since you said Firefox may have something to do with it. I suppose it’s possible Snap has something to do with it too.