Yep! The Turbiaux pocket pistol. Very unique round gun. Contrary to what the book says, the Iver Johnson gun used in the McKinley assassination bore no resemblance to it.

I still have Arms and Armor on my bookshelf! The gilded percussion revolver? The African throwing knife? The tilting helmet with a face? Every page was a new thing for child me to fixate on.

No thoughts available. My plan was to get a newish router compatible with standard OpenWRT so I flashed the latest release within five minutes of opening the box.

I appreciated the custom skin that glinet provided for the web interface in passing.

I've been using a Flint 2 for the better part of a year. No complaints. I was used to a decent Asus router and replaced it when it went end-of-life because the OpenWRT firmware for the ASUS device wasn't feature-complete.

I installed vanilla OpenWRT as soon as I took the Flint 2 of the box and I ran into no major issues. I only need to focus on home use with wired and wireless clients, plus a network printer. The web interface works as advertised, as has the command line interface to the extent that I've played around with it. Once I dealt with the basic setup, I've been able to forget that it's there other than to install new updates when they become available. Whenever I feel like it, I'll see about installing some services like router-level vpn or network adblocking. Not a priority yet, plus I like doing clean installs when I update the router firmware.

Their way is optimal. If you remove the old k cup while putting in the next k cup, you open and close the machine half as many times. This reduces wear and tear while forcibly obligating each user to remove exactly one k cup per use.

If your showerthought is true, then what do you suppose that I have been doing while shuffling aimlessly through life since the invention of paperback books and smartphones, eh? Living like a pig? How dare you.

Stay away from Chromebooks. Even if you get a Chromebook that is reported to play well with Linux, there can be issues. I have/had two different Linux Chromebooks. They both had unique pitfalls.

I had an arm-based Chromebook that was actually the development target of a custom distro. At its best, it still required a fairly specific wifi dongle to work without kernel hacks. Even then, the processor was slooow and storage was a bit of a problem if I was using it for anything other than text editing.

I'm running an intel-based Chromebook these days with Arch. The biggest bottleneck is the built-in nonupgradeable storage (16gb). Most of my home folder is symlinked to an SD card that I keep in the slot at all times. It works well and has great battery life, but there are easier ways to play with linux on a laptop.

With a circle you actually get the lowest possible ratio of friend-fringe to total friend-area, when compared to alternative 2-D friendship n-gons.

Mint is based on Ubuntu, both of which are versioned release distributions. The idea behind versioned releases is that the kernel and a lot of the software are all chosen and tested to work well together. It gives the user a system that won't change much for several years. Rather than getting the latest and greatest, you get a known, relatively static set that works smoothly and gets security/stability updates rather than big upgrades. Typically, distributions like Mint only get minor security updates to the chosen kernel during their lifetime. You'll see additional patches to kernel 6.8, but nothing beyond that.

To get a newer kernel, the safest option is to wait until Mint 23 gets released and do a full upgrade to the new version of Mint. Along with the kernel, other pieces of the operating system will get a bump to much newer versions. Mint gives you the option to try newer kernels, but this is less stable and could break your system.

There are other types of Linux distributions that ship new versions of the kernel much more regularly. Rolling releases (to one extent or another) update the kernel and other software shortly after the new code is available and tested.

It depends on what you're looking for. If size and weight aren't a concern, Unicomp is making slightly modernized Model M keyboards in the US and you can order directly from their website.

I have a Classic and an EnduraPro, both of which work just fine and could be used as a hammer if necessary.

Haha! My definitions are arbitrary now that I think about it. Tons of gray area, since it's all fiction to begin with.

My definition of 'soft' would be any magic system that lacks exact rules or a concrete cause and effect relationship with scale. Flexible power from a vague connection to a god, planet of origin, or elemental source would be soft. Even softer if there are dozens or hundreds of vague sources with unpredictable effects.

Specific, quantifiable effects from a concrete source (a specific spell, ritual, or x amount of a substance) would be hard.

Malazan Book of the Fallen is fairly soft due to complexity and overlapping systems. A dozen or so themed sources of magic(warrens), several older sources of power (holds) and several powers specific to certain species.

Some characters can access several of these sources and one character semi-accidentally creates a supplemental system that might be more rules based. Geographical location matters and the warrens/holds are also physical realities separate from the main one with their own hazards.

Also, there are mysterious elder entities and there's always the possibility of ascending to godlike powers through a parallel system of high houses roughly aligned to warrens and mysterious buildings but defined by an in-universe tarot deck that can be altered...

Thanks! Your post is how I got a head start on this!

If the lessons that I've learned about lightbulb replacement are applicable, then the nationality of the developers on the bus will impact the answer to your question.

I wish you luck with your campaign!

The sanctions apply to the BSDs too. The only difference with sanctions that I could imagine would be if one of the BSDs had (through happenstance or other factors) a lower starting proportion of Russian developers relative to Linux. If that were the case, then the impact of sanctions on that BSD would be proportionally smaller.

I saw that, too. I haven't had a lot of headaches with MTP using my Android devices, but I'm always surprised at how there always seems to be a plan to make my devices worse than they already are.

No argument here. It is insane to me that if I want content that isn't locked into a particular ecosystem, I have to seek out public domain material or pick from the small subset of books that is sold DRM-free books in an open format. For anything else, money can't buy flexibility. For most books, the only options for digital are accepting the DRM, waiting until copyright expires (good luck with that one), or privateering with out a letter of marque.

Very user-hostile, but very unsurprising.

Kindle hardware can be very nice, but almost every software decision is designed to keep users within their walled garden.

No epub support, no third party app support, no ability to load non-store audio, and now this. What a waste. These things could be so much more useful than they are.