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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 30th, 2025

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  • Good news: The feature you want has been a part of KDE since forever. Cursors are fully customizable with different cursor packs being available. Installing a cursor pack is very simple, just look through the different packs, select the one you want and click install. There’s so many different kinds available, one is probably to your liking. And if it isn’t you can probably find an artist easily enough and commission your own set.



  • Wasn’t that whole gros michel story made up after the fact? Those bananas are still available, just more expensive. People who’ve eaten them have reported them tasting a bit more like the chemical banana taste, but not really the same. And the taste is highly dependent on how ripe the banana is. I think the actual story was the chemical banana was close enough and cheap and easy to produce. People also liked it, even though it didn’t really taste like bananas. So it became the de facto banana taste. In small amounts the taste is a lot closer, but people prefer the higher amounts because of the more intense taste.

    It even says as much on the Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gros_Michel#%3A~%3Atext=The+Gros+Michel+has+a%2Cseeming+version+of+the+Cavendish

    A food history myth is that artificial banana flavor was specifically developed from the Gros Michel, but isoamyl acetate is a simple compound and was not based on any specific cultivar.



  • Thanks, I usually know what it is tho. Most often it’s VMs I was using for testing stuff, which I forgot to shutdown. It takes a while for them to cleanly shutdown, which is what the wait is for. I have a shortcut on my desktop to a script that checks for any running VMs still and shuts them down. But I forget to click it sometimes and then I have to wait. No big deal, except I like to switch off the power bar that powers the computer and everything attached to it. An old habit from when such a thing mattered, these days standby power is probably nothing to worry about. But still I wait patiently for the computer to shut down till I switch off the power strip.






  • Reminds me of the first water cooling setup I’ve ever built. This was way back in the before times, a few years before Danger Den made their first block. So all we had was home made stuff.

    Me and a friend went to a local metal shop and convinced them to give us an off cut of a copper bar. They didn’t want to sell it to us, but we said we needed it for a school project and they gave it to us for something like 20 bucks. My friend’s uncle had a bandsaw that could cut it, so he chopped it up into slices. The bar was a rectangle, something like 16 by 8cm and the slices were around 2.5cm thick.

    I drilled 2 holes from one side, not all the way through and 2 holes 90 degrees to the other ones. This formed sort of a square. I tapped the two holes on the wider side and put in some brass fittings from the local hardware store. I sealed the threads with Teflon tape. The two holes on the side I filled with an epoxy putty, something meant to fix central heating radiators. This got a bit sloppy but it was fine.

    The bottom of the block I sanded with a little mouse sander I had. And after that finished it up by lapping the bottom on a mirror and some fine grit wet sanding paper. The block was mounted on the cpu using some bits from the hardware store. Some nuts and bolts and a couple of random bits to put some pressure on the whole thing.

    For the water stuff I went to a local pet store that had aquarium stuff. So I bought a little water pump and some tubes. As a radiator I got a damaged moped radiator, it had a dent in it, but it didn’t leak. I got that for like 5 bucks because of the damage from a friend that repaired mopeds and motorcycles. The radiator was zip tied to the back of the case, with a couple of holes sloppely drilled for the hoses. I used tape to protect the hoses from the sharp edges. The simple 80mm fan I attached with duct tape as I read the air shouldn’t be able to escape from in between the fan and the radiator.

    It looked jank af and didn’t work very well, but it did work. The pump was a bit overpowered so it tended to cavitate and make annoying noises. I didn’t have any reservoir and just bled air from where the hose connected to the radiator. This didn’t work great, so air in the system was always an issue. The radiator was aluminum and I used simple anti freeze car coolant, which didn’t stop the corrosion. Messing with the whole thing I got water over my hardware a lot, luckily never causing any damage except for an ugly stain in the bottom of the case. But I was proud of the thing I built.

    Keeping the radiator on the outside was the norm for a long time. I remember having a radiator about as wide and long as my case (and we had big cases back then). It sat on top of the case with some spacers and large fans that turned slowly. Because of the radiator size it was super quiet. The top of the case was just the black radiator itself and it looked pretty cool. Cases by then had special holes for the hoses to go through. No more drilling your own holes, which never worked well in thin but though sheet steel.





  • I was anti GUI for years. Having learnt to program on a tiny green and black 40x24 CRT on my old MSX back in the 80s. I remember being made fun of by fellow students and co workers alike for doing almost everything in the terminal. This included huge projects with complex file trees and lots of files.

    But as time went on, I started to appreciate the GUI more and more. And these days I’m all for using a GUI for a lot of things.

    Especially in IDEs that can do a lot of things with short keyboard shortcuts. I now have multiple monitors, including a large 32" primary. I always have stacks upon stacks of windows open and manage them efficiently. There’s always at least a couple of terminals hanging out and of course most IDEs also have terminal windows baked in. But all of the extra visual tools help me out a lot.


  • When you are having a really big yawn and feel the bottom of your mouth tense up. Those are the absolute worst cramps. Especially when you’re with someone else who thinks you’re choking or having a seizure or something. And you can’t tell them it’s fine and it’s just a cramp, since you can’t open your mouth.