So if you use a *buntu based distro, but prefer kde, why not KDE neon?

The Golden Child.

I I I I I want the knife…

Please…

Good. That’s what I was aiming for.

It is painful.

What was worse for me? I began suffering from a kidney stone when I was parked at a New Jersey turnpike rest area/service area.

In a semi truck.

Almost 1000 miles from home or anyone I know

With my dog in the truck.

Obligatory pic. Gina, the dog in the story, is no longer with us, but she is the golden/husky mix, while Zeus, the bigger black and white mutt still is.

https://tinypic.host/image/Snapchat-1486115008.3dlaJ4

A dog that had horrible separation anxiety and would chew her way out of said truck if I left her in it with the climate controls on, for more than a few minutes.

I wound up calling 911, since obviously I’m not getting a semi truck into a hospital parking lot, and explaining the situation to the dispatcher. By the time the ambulance got to me, I was doubled over, dry heaving in the parking lot, with my dog freaking out thinking I’m about to die.

In her defense, by then, so did I. I still didn’t know it was a kidney stone, and my mind was going immediately to “burst appendix”, and me dying a thousand miles from home, in the middle of the night, leaving a wife and a daughter behind…

Ambulance crew loaded up me AND my dog, and one of the EMTs called the hospital, and got that handled.

The hospital security team babysat her, while the nurses and doctors fussed over me.

When it was time to get back to the truck, I tried to call a cab. None would take me back because of the dog. She wasn’t a big dog, but not a lapdog either.

Needless to say when the head ER nurse found out, she flipped her shit in perfect, foul-mouthed, Jersey attitude, and this southern boy loved her for it.

She said “I’ll take you myself if this guy doesn’t, and if he doesn’t, his fuckin whole company will be banned from this whole muthafuckin hospital!”

As an aside, that’s when it clicked that New Englanders ain’t rude or unfriendly. They just express love differently. 😂

Damn. I rambled like hell, but. It all needed to be said anyway

3 words.

Stand.

And.

Deliver.

I’ll admit to being mostly right of center in a lot of ways gasp HERE??! Lol.

But I’m no boot licker.

Anarchocapitalist is probably the closest category.

That said, there’s nothing I like more than fighting back against “the man” whether that “man” is a corporation or the government itself.

So when corporations, or anyone really, tries to fuck me over?

Stand. And. Deliver. Bitch.

I turn 49 in August. I’ve had a home computer since 1984. I am of the generation that could work on the old school computers, and I’ve been pirating since the 80s.

If you want me to PAY you, make it worth the money. Otherwise, I’ll get it however I can get away with.

Got my first home computer in 1984. I’ve sailed the high seas off and on pretty much my entire life.

I hung up the hat for a while when Netflix really had their heyday, and had pretty much every show and movie.

But then studios and networks started pulling shows from Netflix, and creating their own streaming services, prices kept creeping higher and higher.

I finally had enough. They wanna play? Ok. We’ll play.

Stand and deliver bitches.

What’s hilarious is, Netflix damn near killed piracy completely. Until every single network decided to do it themselves.

They forgot the most important part of piracy. Access.

I am NOT paying for your entire streaming service if I want to watch a movie.

Not to mention, a LOT of older movies should be in the public domain by now, and therefore free to watch. But nope, in fact, many older movies are simply gone. Never to be seen again.

Know what else is like pinball?

Kidney stones. Definitely feels like you’re getting your balls thrown into a lot of shit.

My work provided phone is, sadly, an iPhone.

But the case they provided for it (OtterBox) actually doesn’t have the window.

Meanwhile, my personal phone, a Pixel, has a case is 100% clear.

I bought a white phone, so dammit I want to see the white phone! 😂

laughs in C64 BASIC

Socialism, and even communism, are great on paper.

But they forget the human element. Greed exists. It always will. Both economic systems require someone or a group of someones to enforce equality.

And when that someone or group of someones falls to greed, they will inevitably decide that they are more “equal” than the rest, and deserve to get just a little bit more than the rest because of their obvious service.

I wasn’t specifically planning to. And yeah, proxmox is a VM management system. I’ve never used it myself, but it’s apparently the “new hotness” and I’ve been meaning to do a VM/container build for a while.

I’m more familiar with FreeBSD jails, but not everything lends itself to that well. Bhyve was also something I looked at, but proxmox seems to leverage qemu and ZFS together.

Plus, since I’ve never actually used it, it gets me out of my comfort zone and I’ll maybe learn something neat.

That won’t do anything about Bluetooth audio compression.

I’m about to drop a supermicro Xeon board plus an E3-1275 and 32G of ECC ram into the guts of this old Optiplex 790 mini tower I have. (i3 2100, so a generation newer, and a Xeon instead of an i3)

I plan to eventually get a better case but for now this is fine. Right now it’s running Plex media server on FreeBSD on bare metal, but I’m planning to swap to proxmox once I get the new board installed.

Unfortunately that won’t be for another week. While the board will be here today, it is a little more power hungry than the old system, and I’m already pushing the OEM 375W PSU with 5 drives (SATA SSD and 4 7200rpm SAS drives) so I also have a PSU coming. But that is not expected until middle of next week.

Last week isn’t really that long ago. Going through my mom’s old things and found a PC she bought new back in 2013. A Dell Optiplex 790 with a dvdrw in it.

I just happened to have a couple of blanks so I verified that it worked before pulling it out and using it as an external drive. Works that way as well on my much newer Ryzen 5800x build in a case with no 5.25" bays. (Or externally accessed 3.5s for that matter. No external bays of any sort other than some USB ports on the front.)

My 2006 Honda also has a 6 disc changer and it sounds better than the Bluetooth adapter I connected to it. (It is wired to the back of the factory sound system, but Bluetooth audio just sounds flat to me, even on the best speakers)

Maybe they can call it kdm.

Oh. Wait

That’s actually a lot better than I was expecting. Thanks for the info!

Yeah, I’ve been looking at those as well.

I was also considering something more like this, and moving the drives out of the server and I to just an enclosure.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/196524846940?mkcid=16&mkevt=1&mkrid=711-127632-2357-0&ssspo=vnd-wzNtQhm&sssrc=4429486&ssuid=inwhn8kcste&var=&widget_ver=artemis&media=COPY

I’m just not sure how energy hungry it would be if I only filled 4 out of 24 bays.

It really doesn’t, honestly. I currently have two of the hard drives mounted in 5.25 to 3.5 adapters where that cage would go, and two of the others are the ones that won’t quite fit, so I’d have to move both of them to make it close properly.

It really does look like I need a different case to put it all in.

That’s about the way I was leaning, to just get a bigger case, but the problem is, the current system is mATX, so I would need all new internals, and then, as you say, that goes quite a bit over my current budget.

I’ll keep looking. Thanks.

It is the larger (relatively speaking. It’s still small compared to my and my daughter’s machines) mini tower.

But I’m not sure I can fit that cage. There’s room for 2 5.25" drives, and that cage looks to be the size of 3 of them stacked atop each other.

But thanks for the suggestions.