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Joined 8 months ago
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Cake day: June 8th, 2025

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  • He noted that the ace of spades has a long history as a tool of intimidation, including its use by white supremacist groups meant to demean people of color.

    I’m not doubting this story, but I’ve never heard of Ace of Spades association. It would have been nice if the article included more information to elaborate.

    I had to click through to the Voces Unidas blog post, which then had a link to a HistoryNet page about it.

    Sidenote: the link from VU includes a UTM tracking code that indicates the article was written with the help of ChatGPT. I’m not sure exactly what to do with that, but it felt worth noting.

    The HistoryNet page says that US soldiers in Vietnam would leave Ace of Spade cards behind because the symbol was considered a mark of bad luck to the Vietnamese.



  • About a year ago, I installed kubuntu on a laptop that couldn’t officially support windows 11. So far, I’ve only had minor annoyances.

    I had a program that wouldn’t work when I first switched, despite being supported. I installed MakeMKV from the built-in repository, and it wouldn’t detect my optical drive. I installed from a separate repo, and it still wouldn’t work. I compiled it from source, and I don’t think it even launched anymore. Then one day, while randomly flailing, some combination of uninstalling, reinstalling, and random commands I found online made it work for no reason I could discern. I haven’t had a problem with it since.

    If my optical drive can’t read a disc, the eject button doesn’t work. I have to either reboot or use the terminal to eject the disc.

    Every once in a while, something (presumably Firefox) locks up the entire system. Mouse won’t move, keyboard is unresponsive, the works. It’s a decade-old laptop, but it had a decent processor for the time, and I upgraded the RAM, so that shouldn’t really be happening as often as it does.













  • and the answers are run these commands

    This one always gets me. There’s rarely an explanation of what the commands do, and “man $command” is often so obtuse that it takes 10 minutes to figure out what the list of switches and options are doing to make sure it’s not going to download some malware in the background.

    Then, you run the commands, and the output is six pages of warnings, debug, and test scripts. You might even notice that some of the tests fail (if you can even follow along), but was it important? Who knows? I guess as long as it works, who cares?