You know, I think if Stallman had put as much thought into the code of HURD as he did the acronym, Linus Torvalds wouldn’t be where he is today.

It’s kind of funny looking back on albums like that, and the bonus content they would add. It was common early on to write the ToC in such a way that it skipped over a track, so Track 1 would be some ways into the disc, but there was data before “track 1” you could get to by rewinding past 0:00. Later, smarter CD players and especially computer CD-ROM drives wouldn’t do that, so that practice started decreasing. But with computers, it was already commonplace for a video game to take up a small fraction of a CD, and then fill the rest with the soundtrack as red book audio, and CD players could still play the music. So they did that for awhile.

There was a brief moment in the mid-2000s where the record labels were feeling the threat of iTunes, so they tried adding value. I have a 2005 copy of Bon Jovi’s Slippery When Wet which doesn’t have the Compact Disc Digital Audio mark anywhere on it, because it’s a DualDisc. It’s a CD with half a DVD on its back; so it’s slightly thicker than a standard CD and thus non-conforming to the red book standard, and . The CD side is an otherwise conforming red book audio copy of the album, but the DVD side features a very high quality stereo recording, a “made 20 years after the album was mastered so it’s slightly janky” Dolby digital 5.1 surround sound version with added length, and the four music videos they recorded for the album in glorious “80’s BetaCAM transferred to DVD” 480whatever.

Remember when companies tried to compete on benefits and features?

I installed an optical drive in my computer recently, and I was playing with my old CDs, and found that Poodle Hat has a data partition, or whatever the hell you call them on CDs. On which is a 6 minute .mov file that takes up about an 8th of the disc’s space, in which Al thanks the owner of the disc for buying the album “instead of downloading it like some HOOLIGAN!” And then proceeds to joke over some of his own home movies.

This statement is technically correct, the best kind of correct.

What was it, the G in GTK stands for GIMP, and the G in GIMP stands for GNU, and the G in GNU stands for GNU, and…

I used Cinnamon as a daily driver for ten years, I’ve still got Mint Cinnamon on my laptop, and Fedora KDE on my desktop.

KDE offers Wayland with all its bells and whistles ready to go, but Fedora is the second worst operating system I’ve ever operated. There’s a lot of shit that doesn’t run on it. .rpm is a complete joke compared to .apt, it’s just a shame that Ubuntu is such a joke compared to Fedora. Frankly this might be the perfect time in history to take a fire axe to everything more technologically advanced you own than a wall and go roll around in the mud.

There is something about the slightly bad kerning of QT that gives KDE a vaguely Windows 95 feel. Especially when you start installing extensions that make no attempt to resemble each other; there is nothing I can do to make my CPU temperature meter and my system clock look like they belong on the same computer.

Gnome on the other hand feels like MacOS with meningitis. It’s designed to look nice, but not necessarily do anything.

Nothing really stops you from using OctoPrint with a Prusa…other than it feeling really awkward having bought a machine with networking built-in only to end around it.

Prologue: I can’t talk from experience about the Mini, the XL, or that…$12,000 delta printer they’re offering? This is going to concern the conventional “MK” series of bedflingers and the new Core One.

All Prusa printers I’m aware of “run locally.” From the MK3S and back to the Prusa Mendel, they used various 8-bit ATMEGA 2560-based control boards which had no networking capabilities at all. You could add network capabilities with Octoprint, For awhile Prusa even included a way to attach a Raspberry Pi Zero W to the main board via the GPIO header.

Since the MK4, they now use a 32-bit ARM-based control board that has an Ethernet jack, and a removable Wi-Fi module. You can still walk up to the thing, poke the touch screen, and stick a USB stick in the side with G-Code on it, but we now have not one but two ways of controlling the printer remotely:

PrusaConnect is their cloud-based service. Either through a web browser, PrusaSlicer running on a PC or their smart phone app, you can monitor and control the printer across the internet, from anywhere. It integrates with Printables, their own Thingiverse with blackjack and hookers, and they even have a cloud slicing service. You can choose a model from Printables on your phone, their server will slice it and send G-code to your printer to start it printing. But, everything you do to it goes to the internet. So when I press the Preheat PLA button in PrusaConnect, that message crosses the Atlantic twice before the red light on my print bed blinks on.

PrusaLink is their local network control system, which consists of a web server running on the printer itself, through which you can view the current temperatures and upload G-Code (and firmware) files. That is it. You cannot so much as preheat the bed through PrusaLink. You can set it up in PrusaSlicer such that it will give you a button to upload G-Code to a printer directly across the LAN, but…

It feels really strange that I can preheat my printer either from its control panel, or across the internet, but not across my LAN.

I’ve also been getting a kick out of my new 3D printer and controlling it remotely. Even though if I hit the X+10mm button and that message has to go to Prague and back before the Nextruder nudges to the left.

I haven’t had a computer with a built-in SATA optical drive in years, just the crappy off-brand old recycled laptop drive in a random housing ones you get these days that require a good USB A-MicroB cable, and good luck finding one of those. Having a proper built-in drive is nice enough that I actually want to use it.

So I was playing with some of my old CDs, and noticed that my copy of Slippery When Wet is two-sided. Bwuh?! CDs aren’t two-sided, that’s a DVD thing. Sure enough, the “back” is a DVD that has the four music videos they made for the album, and two more copies of the music, one in “even better than Redbook Audio Somehow” stereo, and one in Dolby Digital 5.1 surround sound that has been lengthened, mostly just additional studio chatter before and after the tracks but one of the songs, I think it’s Raise Your Hands, has a lengthened bridge or something?

So I learned how to rip FLACs from a DVD!

Weird Al’s Poodle Hat has a .mov file on it.

Had a big ol time partying like it was 2004.

It’s the power glove that really gets me. It’s so bad.

I put an optical drive in my PC recently, and I’ve been giggling like an idiot typing “eject” and “eject -t” into the terminal. Terminal commands that do something physical in the world delight me.

It’s more like the RC Cola version of iPadOS but your main idea holds up.

Actually, Hammond would show up with something busted like Manjaro and at some point he’d manage to break Xorg or something near the end of the journey.

That seems to be what Zorin is offering, it’s Gnome that has been customized to look like Windows, and yet not forked into its own thing like MATE, Cinnamon, Unity, Pantheon or Cosmic were. And they’ll sell you a Pro version that’s got like, Gimp and Darktable and such pre-installed. I genuinely don’t see what people see in Zorin.

Can’t; I dumped Windows 8 for Linux.

Okay, so, Richard Hammond would be the first to arrive with Linux Mint! …xfce Edition. It’s the sports version, it’s lighter, sleeker, faster than the standard version.

Meanwhile, Jeremy Clarkson would arrive with Ubuntu Server, under the impression it somehow has more POWAAA!!!

James May turns up, having done this properly. With FreeBSD.

And Gnome customized to look like Windows, rather than Cinnamon or KDE.

Can you blame a Chameleon for blending in? Look to the right of Fedora.

The Island of TempleOS is in the middle of the Holy Sea.