I am Lattrommi. Yes, that one. You’ve never heard of me? I’m not surprised. It is often said that anything you put on the internet will live there forever. It becomes immortal. I do everything backwards and wrong. I do not live forever, I am always dying. ¿|√∞²|?

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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • Sometimes I need to show off that I beat Microsoft Minesweeper on Expert in slightly less than 200 seconds.

    My time is by no means competitive, the current record for Expert is less than 30 seconds. I am also aware the score could be faked by rewriting the .ini file. In fact there are numerous cheats which could simulate a win. That is why when I share this accomplishment in person, it is only with those who know I would never compromise my integrity with such dishonest behaviour.

    Most people have been more impressed (if impressed at all and haven’t left by the time Windows has booted) that the drive Windows is installed on still works, since it was made in 2005 (Seagate ST3160023AS).




  • To compare, I was born into a household of Luddites via poverty. When me and my siblings got to high school and homework assignments started to have typing requirements, the family solution was to purchase a used computer that was running windows 3.1 (this was in the late 90’s) which didn’t last long.

    Despite my fascination with computers and again due to poverty, I was unable to obtain one for many years into adulthood. I learned about Linux sometime around 2004-5 and reading about people like Torvalds and Stallman and open source and the FSF seemed like a wonderful world of progress I had not experienced. I was given a computer that didn’t work and was convinced I could make it come to life thanks to the magic of Linux. It did not go well.

    Thanks to my inexperience, I attempted to download Linux from my local library, where I had 1 hour of internet usage allowed per day. I don’t know what I downloaded but it was not Linux. I think it was a collection of man pages in text files. Needless to say, that was not my year of Linux.

    I did not own a working computer until I built one myself, in 2009 at the age of 27. I ran windows, played lots of games, wasted a lot of my time and finally delved back into the Linux world by installing Mint alongside my Windows installation. That was in 2020. The next day, the COVID lockdowns were announced. Then my system wouldn’t boot into either Windows or Linux. The day after that, my internet was disconnected because Spectrum is one of the worst ISP companies ever. All I had was a usb with a Mint live system. I had also gotten my first smartphone the month prior and because Verizon is one of the worst phone companies ever, I was unable to tether my data plan, which was heavily throttled anyways and effectively useless. Learning Linux without internet access or having any friends interested in Linux or computers in general, is not something I would recommend to anyone.

    September of 2021 I finally decided to ‘defenestrate fenestra’ or ‘throw windows out of the window’ and switched fully to Linux. My year of Linux I will say was 2024. That is the year I built a new computer, the third computer I’ve built and the third computer I’ve owned. The computer I’m using to type this out. I have not had to change distros or reinstall since then and being self taught in computers, having never held a job in IT, having a developmental disorder, being well below the poverty line my entire life and being someone who has attended college 5 times and dropped out 5 times due to either poverty or disability, it feels pretty good. I am still light years away in knowledge compared to many but it feels good to be able to know what my computer is doing and know that I did it myself.

    I still will randomly ‘stat /’ just to see the birthday. “Birth: 2024-02-05 04:54:20.000000000 -0500”. I don’t know if the time showing all those zeros is normal and I don’t care. I’m a month away from my second year with this machine and I am very proud of it.

    Why did I type this huge and personal story without being asked? The answer might be the same answer to your question of ‘why did I post this in Linux memes?’

    Because someone out there might read it and it might be what they need to give them that courage to finally make the switch themselves. Seeing stories like these with people who feel comfortable using Linix despite the various problems which might accompany them.

    Anyways, because this is Linuxmemes, I should mention that I use an Arch derivative, BTW.

    I can draw a circle in GIMP too. Like 4 different ways.

    Yes ladies, I’m single.


  • Not to mention if everyone started doing it, they would just train AI to do it also, and it would only be giving data to train AI with. That’s why I think most data poisoning strategies are pointless. One exception might be to try to include a spelling mistake somewhere that doesn’t make a comment too confusing, sometihng that could easily be a typing mistake. LLM’s are basically spellcheck² and never make spelling mistakes unless explicitly told to or trained that way. If I see a spelling error, I know it’s more likely to be human.


  • To expand on this thought, I take broken electronics and make what I call art from them. They already come with neat patterns and colors, some surfaces are dull, some are shiny, they have the added effect of generating shadows with their shapes and can easily be modified in various ways. I’m sure there’s probably copyright issues and health hazards so I’m unlikely to ever put it out on display but I feel they add a sort of dirty cyberpunk look to my apartment. For an example, this is my “Love bug” that hangs out on top of my desktop tower, offering its broken hearts to whomever wants it. Made from a broken GTX 7800. https://i.imgur.com/ySS3fes.jpeg



  • I still have the slide as default and use it a lot. I have it set to slide when I mousewheel on the desktop and keep my taskbar shorter so there’s always some desktop showing in the corners. When I get frustrated with something though, I hit my key to activate the cube and the animation of it pulling away from the normal view works as like a disconnect from whatever I’m doing. Virtually stepping back basically.

    Without the cube, I found I would get frustrated and instead of working on something else I would keep going and ultimately make mistakes and end up more frustrated. If I tried switching with the slide or fade to another project, the irritation stayed with me and I’d mess those other projects up too. The cube, for me, just worked.

    I did have some success using the overview, however it was a lot more overwhelming with the way it shows everything, while the cube limits it to what’s on each cube face, without showing minimized windows at all.


  • When I updated KDE and found that I had lost the cube desktop switcher effect I was fairly put off on Wayland and made a lot of effort to get the cube back in various ways which did not go well. Now that it’s on Wayland, albeit slightly different, I am content with staying on Wayland. I can’t thank the people who ported it enough. It may seem like a trivial graphic effect to some but that fraction of a second that it uses when switching desktops is something that helps my ADHD tremendously. If I’m getting frustrated with a project I can switch to something else and something about that visualization helps me keep everything organized mentally. I use 4 virtual desktops, each with it’s own project subject matter, one for each side of the cube, excluding the top and bottom.

    This meme imagary is from the movie Seven Psychopaths. It’s a very good movie.


  • True, it can be tricky for certain things. I suggested it because it fits the OP’s a) and b) points better than anything else I could think of. The different versions of it can vary a lot too. Bionicpup worked great on my old eeepc, a netbook with a single core 32 bit cpu, but didn’t do well on anything newer. Focal Fossa has worked without issue on everything I tried it on. I wouldn’t use either as my main OS, but it can be fun on a secondary system. I kept mine in the bathroom until the humidity from showering likely wrecked it.


  • Set up a flash drive with puppy linux. It’s relatively easy to do (depending on how much you already know about Linux) and is mostly risk-free (but you can still do damage so always use caution) because it runs entirely in RAM and shouldn’t mess with the internal storage drive unless you tell it to. You can use it to copy any desired files without booting Windows and it will probably run on that machine better than Windows ever did. I think that has a 64 bit CPU but there are 32 bit versions floating around the internet if it doesn’t. I’ve seen Puppy Linux versions advertised as being 'so easy your grandma can do it. One project of mine that was fun was creating a Puppy Arcade, a usb flash drive filled with emulators and ROMS but I had issues with some emulators.






  • Do you want online or offline? Both? Need online for somethings but not all? The answers however, will only unlock more quests… Oops, I mean they will lead to more questions. Do you want to self host everything or do you need to use cloud storage? Would cloud storage be for sync and back up data for yourself, or will other people need access?

    What I’m asking, to put it a different way, is what are you world building for? a novel you are writing? a campaign setting for a tabletop role playing game? Are you making a MMORPG, with its own in-game wikipedia with a group of friends or alone? Trick question, you can’t do the last one alone. it would have to be called a ORPG)

    Offline, with just you making the world, Zim. The interface is fairly customizable, although might seen tricky at first if you are unfamiliar with GTK and Gnome or programming in general. However, I have no usable programming skills. I can’t even program the clock on my microwave. Okay, I can but I’m too lazy.

    For me, a severely ADHD person, it makes it easy to organize… everything. A picture might show it better than I can describe:

    I know, a screenshot of a wall of text. Not cool of me. I hope it works and the image shows or this wont make much sense from here on.

    To break it down, I have the preferences dialogue open, it’s on the plugins menu, you can see many are self explanatory. if you know how, you can write your own plugins. i do not know how.

    However, i do know how to write simple bash commands, which can be added as custom tools and set to hotkeys. I can timestamp in EST or UTC for logging purposes with a push of a button. Your imagination is the limit! Well, plus the limitations of bash and your computer/tablet/cellphone/etc and probably like a dozen other things.

    That preferences menu is open on top of a page in my notebook. The silly magician stuff. It can be ignored (and might not make sense) it is sample text. To the left, you can see my notebook, sorted by subject in my own arbitrary way. The current page is selected, the ‘magic’ page in the ‘written’ chapter.

    Also I’ve not had problems with Joplin (which I’ve read is not FOSS, it does not save as .txt files) which has an Android specific App (Zim does not) but I haven’t played with it enough to give a valid opinion.

    Zim and Joplin both work on Windows and Linux, both can be cloud synced, like with google drive or dropbox, if you use those (I do not, I use Zim offline, except for backups). If security is a concern, Zim does not encrypt, it’s .txt files. Joplin I believe does. If you backup to cloud, Joplin would be safer from theft I think. I could be wrong. theft meaning your intellectual property, i.e. possibly being intercepted and viewed online by evil hackers, possibly even copied and published under their name. I do not worry about this. I would be honored if someone tried to publish my crap without permission.

    My use case is personal organizer and mind map and many other things, including a ‘almost D&D’ campaign setting for a TTRPG, a novel I’ll never publish, pictures of things I know I’ll forget… oh yeah, that reminds me, in my linked image, on the right, there’s a table of contents (ToC), which gets automatically generated if you use the Header tag, for easier in-page navigation of long pages. Next to the ToC tab there’s ‘Attachments’, this page has none. You can attach files to pages, like pdf’s, images, graphs, etc and link to them from other pages in the notebook.

    The only problems I’ve had, are likely my own fault for messing with the theme and config files a bunch. This got long. Hope it helps.