My laptop keeps freezing for no clear reason lately. After it locks up I usually force a shutdown and then go digging through the logs. My go-to tool for that is GNOME Logs. But recently something weird happened:
Every time I open GNOME Logs, all I see is the current boot. Everything from before is gone.
That’s not how it’s supposed to work, right? I used to see plenty of past runs in there.
This laptop isn’t mine — I bought it for someone else. Their budget wasn’t high, and the requirements were just these:
Honestly though, I think these days every laptop looks fine except those weirdly shaped gaming machines.
My workplace moved recently, and my old keyboard had developed double-press issues across half its keys. I soldered that one myself, so I figured it was time to buy a new one.
But I’m too broke for a real budget, so I bought the cheapest thing I could find: this Dareu EK861 Bluetooth keyboard.
61 keys, Bluetooth 5.0, a big battery, PBT keycaps, under 300 yuan. What more could you ask for?
I’ve been using it on and off for almost a month now, and I’ve got some pros and cons. Let me keep it short:
Years ago, back when I was still hanging around online, I met this so-called “big shot” who completely overturned a lot of my views on the world. It was the first time I’d ever met someone that impressive on the internet. At least, he claimed he was impressive.
The “big shot” said he was living in Canada, young and successful, just taking classes now and then, occasionally doing some work for Microsoft, with access to the latest Windows Vista beta builds. He also had the money to mess around with all kinds of new “UMPCs.” At the time I thought this guy was absolutely amazing—being in the same group chat as him felt like a real honor.
But then I started to find it a bit odd. If he was really such a “big name,” why did his Discord name still have all that “Martian language” and scene-kid vocabulary? And if he was such a huge deal, why was he online basically 24/7?
So one night, while we were private messaging, the “big shot” said he wanted to show me something “nice.” He sent a video. I clicked on it and saw a huge white guy violating two very small people. Looking closer, those “small people” seemed to be kids—a little girl and a little boy.
That video made me extremely uncomfortable, but the “big shot” was still asking me if I “Want Some More.”
Honestly, this is a great breakfast thing. And I learned it from Xiaogaojie.
For most people the annoying part is needing an oven and a skillet, and ideally a whisk. If you’ve ever done any baking, none of that is a problem.
So-called “stress relief toys” are basically the kind of thing that… serves no real purpose in your hand, but always gives you something to do.
The big stress relief toy before this was the fidget spinner. Its influence spread worldwide: foreigners hated it, China banned sales, teachers loathed it. Still, I thought it was pretty satisfying.
Recently I bought another stress relief toy, this Flipo Flip.
Canonical recently posted a thread on their official forum looking for testers to see whether iwd can replace wpa_supplicant for wireless network management.
iwd is Intel’s kernel-based wireless network management. It comes with a bunch of advantages, mostly around performance and speed — which figures, since it lives at the kernel level. Per Canonical’s post, we can join the testing and see how it goes:
The great 囧脸 a.k.a. CSSlayer quietly pushed out a new fcitx release 12 days ago, version number 4.2.9.8.
Bear in mind the last new release from 囧脸 was back in the winter of 2018. Probably busy with the New Year, poor guy — he even forgot to bump the version number that time.
Sure, most of the noble Archer crowd have already moved to fcitx5, but for us backwards Ubuntu users a new fcitx4 release still means a lot. Aside from fixing a pile of typos and updating translation files for a pile of languages almost nobody recognizes, it also fixes a few small problems.
Got bored recently and started messing around with Linux kernels. Ubuntu 20.04 still ships 5.4 by default, and even if you install the OEM kernel you’re only at 5.6 — meanwhile mainline is already at 5.9, which is pretty underwhelming if you like being on the newest thing. And some of the new features baked into recent kernels genuinely do improve performance. Canonical’s Daniel Van Vugt was recently digging into why gnome-shell performs so badly at 4K, and it turned out to be a kernel scheduling problem with Intel integrated graphics creating the bottleneck. That issue seems to be largely alleviated on 5.8.
Girls Book Maker announced a series of cash-grab DLCs half a year after the base game shipped.
Cash-grab, sure, but honestly this is standard practice by now. We’ve seen too much of this over the years. This DLC is called ガールズ・ブック・メイカー ～グリムと三人のお姫さま～, which translates to Girls Book Maker: Grimm and the Three Princesses, so naturally it’s about the world-famous Grimm’s Fairy Tales.
Since Grimm’s Fairy Tales is itself an anthology, you can’t really sum it up with one character, so they just carved out the princesses and split them into three volumes sold separately. Sound familiar? Yeah, classic milking scheme. The three princesses are Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, and Cinderella.
