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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: October 18th, 2023

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  • I had one of them almost a decade ago, before Google bought them. The one that I had really just counted steps and tracked heart rates and that was about it. It could also tell time. It was one of the fancy ones at the time.

    Assuming you’re not allergic to the watch band like I was, it did fine. Battery lasted about a week. Accuracy was close enough that I didn’t notice a major issue.

    I remember that the Fitbit app was annoying as all get out, though that has almost certainly changed.

    Overall I remember liking it, I think I wore it for about 3 months before my wrist started to get torn up by it.

    As to what they are like currently, post Google buyout, no clue.







  • If I remember correctly, this one of the use cases why bitcoin was created in the first place. It’s not anonymous but it does solve the control problem.

    The only other way I know if is cash via sneakernet. Also not completely anonymous, and it could get you labeled a drug dealer or distributor. Especially in the US.

    As for how to get into bitcoin, you can mine it, but more feasibly, just start doing commerce in it. If you have a podcast or you stream, accept lightning boosts. Or you could sell off your old things for bitcoin. If you have some other business start accepting bitcoin as a form of payment.

    If you need to convert a national currency to bitcoin there is a peer to peer network that accepts cash, as well as several online exchanges (ID usually required, at least in the US.

    As a warning, once you step off the garden path you lose it’s protections, so buyer beware. The “Big Money” have a vested interest in minimizing how badly you can get screwed in their system. Such protections don’t exist it the alternative currency sphere regardless of which crypto currency you choose.









  • installing and managing programs on Linux is a NIGHTMARE

    I feel you, but it’s a damned sight better than it used to be. If you’re ever in a headspace for some masochism, try installing something from source. It can either be smooth sailing or one of the most torturous experiences ever. Just do yourself a favor and do it in a VM or on a throw away system. Software installed that way is often HARD to remove cleanly.

    I just wish there was an all in one program manager.

    There is. At least for flatpaks and apt repositories, though I would imagine that it would work just fine with rpm repositories or whatever Redhat based distros are using nowadays. YUM I think? Never been big on team Redhat.

    In KDE the program is called Discover. Gnome, i think, is Software Center, though that may just be for Ubuntu derivatives. Been a while. I’ll be honest, I don’t use them much. Early versions (20ish years ago) were dog slow, and as a result CTL + ALT + t followed by sudo apt get and flatpak install are burned into my fingers.

    I don’t know what linux’s equivilant of “C/Windows/Program Filesx86/”

    Exactly where things get installed depends on your distro as well as who built the actual package that was installed. Linux has a couple of standard directories that things are usually installed at. If you actually need to find the 7zip binary, try in /bin, /usr/bin, or /usr/local/bin but wherever it is, it should already be in your path. Here’s a decent explanation of *nix’s directory structure: https://linuxhandbook.com/linux-directory-structure/ .

    It’s generally applicable to Unix, Linux, WSL, and MacOS. Feel free to open a terminal and go have a poke around. If you stick to the commands cd, less and sudo less you won’t be able to break anything, but will be able look at what’s there. cd is the same as in Windows. less let’s you read a file a page at a time, without editing it. sudo just let’s you read the files that are owned by the root user, or another user.

    You can usually read more about these commands using the man <program> command. If your distro hasn’t included man pages, it works in every web search engine I’ve tried over the years as well. Usually it’s the first result.

    <command> --help will generally give you a brief crash course on how to use a command. Very helpful, but also usually very terse.

    I want to install 7zip. I go online, find the terminal command, I install it…and terminal tells me it’s already installed on the latest version.
    It’s not in my start menu.

    According to its man page you would call it on the terminal using 7z. So to extract an archive, the command should be something like 7z e /path/to/archive. As a heads up, there is a warning not to use 7zip to create backups on linux.

    I seem to recall that there were also applications called zip and unzip that do much the same thing but were limited to just .zip files. May already be in your distro. And found a nice refresher on them here: https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/linux-unix/zip-command-in-linux-with-examples/

    If you were looking to create zip files to share, there should be a gui application included in your distro that should be able to create and extract zip files. For me its Ark, but for Gnome it might be called Archive Manager or some such. If your application menu is sorted by application type, try looking in the System or Utilities sections.

    Proof reading this has given me a horrid thought. “Oh God! I’m a GREY BEARD!”