I was going to suggest putting something in the water that would discourage swimming, but I guess it needs to be worse than whatever’s already in there… and not kill the wildlife. That’s a fine line if it exists at all.

I’d bet a few of those actually do want to exclude people from the other UK nations. Not as many as are flying the flags, I grant you, but nonetheless. Colonialist mindset still runs deep in some of the English.

Tricky. Microsoft currently use two different executable formats and only one of them is compatible with WINE. That still doesn’t mean that a compatible one will work properly though.

On the other hand, people who make ads want their ads to be literally everywhere, so they might make it Windows 3.11 compatible with all library functions baked in just to be safe. WINE would almost certainly run that.

Banksy is as much a person as Nicolas Bourbaki was. Although unlike Bourbaki, there is allegedly one guy who is kind of the main guy, but if that one guy goes to prison, I’m fairly certain Bansky artworks will continue to appear.

In fact I’d put money on the fact that one would appear in a prominent place soon after.

And if the establishment somehow manage to round up every single person associated with Banksy and manage to get something to stick to every single one of them, which I strongly doubt is possible, the rise in wannabe Banksy groups doing the same thing won’t be far off.

The artwork is almost always made with stencils and spray paints. Stencils can be prepared well in advance. A trained group could have one of these up in under a couple of minutes.

If I was Banksy - or one of them - I would almost certainly have distributed my art to trusted individuals for the event of my incarceration and beyond.

I thought Win2K was peak Windows, but I begrudgingly got comfortable with XP (using the classic Windows theme) then Win 7 after they ironed most of Vista’s kinks out.

Been on Linux since then.

But it would be unfair to say that masochist tendencies aren’t a requirement to be a Linux system owner.

All systems require some level of that. It’s just Linux has been rushing towards “less masochism” and Windows even quicker towards “more”, and we find ourselves at that sweet spot where they’ve the same level of requirement.

Frankly, I’d prefer this sweet spot to be more towards “less”, so I’m hoping Linux continues its trend.

Actual populists rarely call themselves populists, you got that right at least. Mainly because a good chunk of people they pander to aren’t bright enough to understand the term “populist”.

But the ones I can think of are all firmly right wing. Trump. Orbán. Farage. And not one of them is, or would call themselves “leftist”.

There was one guy back in the late 1930s who tried that and it didn’t go well for him, and I suspect that makes them nervous.

But then, you probably think that guy actually was a socialist.

This is odd in at least a couple of ways. Mandelson is well-known to be homosexual, so an association with a man known for arranging situations with underage girls doesn’t quite match up.

In the best case, this means that Epstein liked socialising with powerful people even if they didn’t want what he had to offer, but that raises the question of what Mandelson was getting out of it.

This kind of already happens there though. Video view counts are visible and often way below a channel’s sub count.

Sure, there are exceptions (viral video views often far exceeding the sub count), but by and large they’re a good metric for seeing how a channel is actually doing.

Hey, I don’t want my (albeit meagre) tax payments to go towards security for a war criminal. Would be far cheaper to leave him where he is.

You know you’ve hit rock bottom when DJT is your only hope.

Option 1 is a potential cause of “lost” revenue.

Late stage capitalism absolutely forbids anything that could cause that, even if the cost of implementation outweighs any potential gain.

Indigenous Peruvians: “Hey! You can’t do that!”

Peruvian Government: “Hey! How do you even know about this?!”

Serious answer: A surprising number of people, especially those who still have Facebook accounts in 2025, are susceptible to scams where someone pretends to be a rich and/or famous person asking for favours or money.

They get a message from a fake Zuck, and because they are dangerously credulous, they believe it is the real Zuck.

Zuck says they’ve been selected, or won a prize, or should send a photo or some such, and then suddenly Zuck’s blackmailing for a compromising photo or otherwise requesting Amazon gift cards or Bitcoin to “unlock” the prize or whatever.

“Zuck’s a rich man who owns the platform. He knows what he’s doing. I’d better look into how to do this Bitcoin thing.”

Facebook knows all this and so any Zucks that are not the Zuck get flagged as scammers and have their accounts shut down.

Deeply, deeply vanilla here.

gnome-system-monitor for network, drives, memory and CPU usage. Sensors Monitor applet in Cinnamon (which makes use of the lm-sensors console command in the background) and occasionally xsensors (likewise) for temperatures and the like.

Bottom right of my second monitor, on a Cinnamon panel, I have the aforementioned applet set to show G: xx C: yy where xx and yy are the current max temperatures of the GPU and CPU respectively. Tooltip hover on that is set to show drive temperatures, but I rarely look at those because they rarely ever seem to get above 40C.

I’ve also used the bash-sensors applet in the past to do similar things.

xsensors/lm-sensors needed a kernel module loaded to access extra temperature stats beyond the basics, but most of those turned out to be useless, wrong or not worth worrying about.

As for stress testing, I have a shell script that spins up several do-nothing, busywork scripts and will push the CPU to 100%, 80C and the fans to high RPM in barely any time at all. I don’t feel the need to do that very often.

For the GPU, I can just remove any FPS limit from whatever relatively recent game I’m playing. Heck, even Minecraft.

I’ve considered installing one of the applications that adjusts CPU fan RPM curves, but I set a profile I liked in the UEFI over a year ago and that’s been working fine for me. If I’ve ever hit a point where the CPU has had to rate-limit, I haven’t really noticed the drop in performance.

So your cross your fingers and ran it and got an error.

And eventually we learned to understand the programs we were typing in, knowing what those errors meant and how to fix them without looking back at the listing. Magical.

I was given a bunch of old Compute!'s Gazettes by an uncle who’d moved onto PCs from his Commodore 64. I did not get the benefit of the tape or disk option unfortunately, but as a result, many of those magazines are bedaubed with felt-tip where I marked my progress whiling away hours typing in those programs.

I learned so much about the Commodore 64 from those magazines.

By the time I got my C64C in the '90s, magazines had long since stopped publishing code listings due to cost. If they’d continued to do so, magazines would have been twice the price, and less than half as many people would have been able to afford them. As it was, the magazines were, by that point, at least partially subsidised by game companies who wanted to get a demo out on the tape or disk.

I’m still annoyed my subscription to one of those magazines ran out the month before the last ever issue. I could probably get one on eBay for a reasonable price, but it’s the principle, dammit.

Edit: Better wording.

It was once said of Margaret Thatcher that she didn’t so much bring the “much needed” woman’s touch to politics, but that she instead became a man.

Likewise, New Labour was supposed to bring a much needed leftward slant to politics, but instead they became Tories.

Are there ways of doing table things in LibreOffice, even if that specific feature isn’t there? That’s been why they haven’t added things in the past… but then eventually caved in and added them.

I’m thinking mainly of the fact that for long enough either LibreOffice (or its predecessor OpenOffice? It might have been that long ago) would try to add all one million vertical cells as a data range to a chart if the user selected an entire column, and the devs refused to “fix” that to only use everything down to the last non-blank cell.

But eventually someone got on the dev team who was willing to do that.

No harm in asking again.

This is a call for those people who are missing a feature that they absolutely must have in LibreOffice, to 1) check whether it has been added since they last looked (when was that, again?) and 2) to put in a feature request if it isn’t there.

I’m shocked. Who would have thought?!