Yeah. It’s full of really common pop-fiction tropes. But the writing is so beautiful you don’t notice it.
It really jumped the shark when in the second book the guy who is a virgin and can’t talk to girls suddenly became the god of sex and literally out-sexed the sex nymph who had been sexing men to death for years.
An eReader’s literally only job is to format, reflow, render and display ePubs. If you have one that can’t do that, then it is a fancy coaster at best.
I like the books, superficially they are a treat, the prose is brilliant, the words feel nice on my brain.
But reading just a little bit deeper than that, you start to realise the story is pretty empty. The characters are hollow. The first two books are pretty much the same story loop over and over again. The characters making the same mistakes and learning the same lessons over and over again.
The way the author writes female characters makes you seriously worry about the authors relationship with women, and if he even knows any women.
Surprised I haven’t seen someone yet mention Magician by Raymond E Feist. That whole first riftwar trilogy is great. Also the spin off Empire trilogy with Janny Wurts.
Seconding those who mentioned the R.A. Salvatore books including the Dark Elf series and the Icewind Dale series.
There’s not really any advantage of using txt files over open standard drm-free epubs. You can still generate them yourself using txt editors or publishing software, you can still load them over USB. But epubs give you quality of life features on eReaders like title pages, table of contents, chapter headers, formatting markers like bold and italics.
Yeah true, I’ve got to regularly remind myself that for most professionals working in IT, the only thing they know about Linux is it’s that esoteric free OS that you get preinstalled on a cheap VPS, used for hosting WordPress sites by people who are too cheap to pay for a windows licence. At least, that’s the view that my colleagues at the last two places In worked at had.
Sounds like you’d like a power launcher style workflow like KRunner or Rofi. Instead of hitting the meta key to bring up the start menu and search for the app you need, bind a key to KRunner or Rofi and invoke the app you want directly. These solutions also natively integrate file search, web search, quickly toggling settings, do in-place calculations etc.
We call it the “meta” key. And no, not related to the company formerly known as Facebook.
As someone who has been dealing with exactly this issue with my new employer’s enterprise ICT department, I have some insight to share.
When you have thousands and thousands of laptops that you need to manage, it becomes a burden for the in-house IT department, so they often farm it out to a Managed Service Provider (MSP). This is particularly common for organisations like schools and hospitals that often don’t even have an in-house IT department. The MSP will install policies and management software on the laptops to ensure the OS is up to date, the antivirus is not disabled, the VPN is configured correctly, passwords are changed regularly, etc.
Yes of course there are linux-native solutions for each of these things, but the MSP doesn’t support it, doesn’t offer that service. To keep their service prices affordable for enterprise organisations, MSPs usually hire the lowest cost technicians and support staff. These poor underpaid staff probably have never even heard of Linux. The MSP can increase their marketable value by advertising the certifications they’ve attained. The certifications are provided by Microsoft and are related to Microsoft software and systems.
If you have a small fleet of devices and an in-house IT team that has a bunch of Linux enthusiasts, and a user base who drives demand, then it is possible to support Linux. But it requires a lot of effort and dedication. My old employer did that. They had a fleet of around 5,500 devices (a mix of desktops and laptops), mostly Windows, approx 500 of them were macbooks, and about 50 were Linux. Some of these were users who needed to use software that is available only on Linux, some were like me who are simply more productive and efficient using a linux-based OS. But maintaining, administering and supporting those 50 Linux devices took around 20% of the time of the IT department. That’s massively disproportionate to the number of Linux users.
Not long after I left there, the new CTO put an end to that, they saw and easy cost saving by simply refusing to allow users to have any OS other than Windows.
Yeah, LMDE is pretty good. I used it for a couple of years during my rage-against-Ubuntu phase.
I’ve been trying to convince my kids that bunnies lay eggs for years now, they don’t believe me.
Pretty sure it’s “a finer location”.
That’s cool. I wonder what mundane things I should start photographing. I like storm water drains, maybe those.
JIRA and Bitbucket are so bad that even Microsoft Azure DevOps (that is a reskin of the decade old Visual Studio Online, which itself is a reskin on the two decade old Microsoft TFS) is somehow better than it. And everyone loves to hate on Microsoft products.
Are there any actually good enterprise grade Task tracker + Code repo combo that we should be suggesting the execs migrate to? Maybe the GitHub Enterprise product?
I literally have dreams about that happening at my place. Like, often dream about searching through the garage for a box or something and I open a door to a hallway that leads to a totally different part of our house that we forgot about since we moved in.
Nice one. I agree that the hardest part of hoarding potentially useful stuff is being able find it 5 years later when I finally have a use for it.
Years of reading in bed late at night while exhausted have conditioned me to associate reading with falling asleep. I don’t have insomnia much anymore, often the opposite. Any time I want to lay down and read my book before bed, I’m out like a light before I finish a single chapter. It could be a super power, but it also means it takes me months to finish a novel. Also not ideal when I occasionally need to read reports or training materials at work and get to the end and my head is on the desk and I can’t keep my eyes open.
When I was a kid, about 4 or 5 years old, I was at the barbers getting my hair cut. The barber was making small talk with my mother and I. He asked me “what do you want to be when you grown up?”. I panicked, nobody had ever asked me that before. I’d never even considered it. I didn’t have an answer. I assumed I’d have more time to ponder that in the future, but he is asking me now. I was a very nerdy know-it-all kid who always had the correct answer ready for any question that someone would ask me, but not this, I didn’t know what the correct answer was.
I wanted this barber to like me, he was a popular and well known barber in our town. I didn’t want to make something up the he disapproved of. So I said the only logical thing. “I want to be a barber when I grow up”. He was shocked. He said no kid has ever told him they want to be a barber before, and it’s an odd choice, be he was still pleased, so I did a good job.
The only problem was, now I had said that, I thought it was locked in, and I couldn’t change it anymore. So for a couple of years after that, whenever anyone asked me what I want to be when I grow up, I looked resigned, got sad and reluctantly said “a barber”.
Then when I was 8 I finally worked out I could change my choice, so I changed it to Chef, because I loved food and enjoyed cooking.
Now I’m neither a barber nor a chef.
I had a friend who for a long time absolutely refused to upgrade to an SSD. Every couple of years he would add more RAM, upgrade to a newer CPU, and regularly upgraded to a newer Graphics card. He also hoarded a lot of data, so was always buying new 1TB and 2TB HDDs for his movies and games. I explained how his HDDs were his performance bottleneck for years, but he couldn’t see past the price-per-gigabyte barrier. He greatly prioritised drive capacity over drive speed, and couldn’t comprehend how his storage devices would affect gaming performance. He also had some odd opinions about SSD longevity and reliability. He honestly thought they were an elaborate scam or a PC industry conspiracy.
That was until his most recent upgrade. His new CPU necessitated a new motherboard. He got a new mobo with an NVME port. He only used the NVME because the board came with fewer SATA interfaces, not enough for his HDDs, and he thought the board forced him to use NVME to boot from.
So he literally upgraded straight from sata3 5400rpm HDD system drive to a PCIe Gen4 2000+ Mbps NVME system drive. Skipped the era of 2.5" SSDs and SATA SSDs, and Gen3 SSDs entirely.
He was commenting excitedly for days about how fast his new build was, and attributed the enormous performance improvement entirely to the new CPU.
You’re probably right, it’s been years since I read it, and I was simply piggy backing off other criticisms I’ve read about the book by others saying similar things online.