
Wow. I just realized how old I am.

Wow. I just realized how old I am.

I usually just multiply by 2, subtract 10%, and then add 32. Usually easier than 9/5 and gives same result.


Good question - does the browser plug in sync to the internet or is any part of it internet accessible? I’ve not used it. I just know a lot of people are put off by the idea of their passwords being “in the cloud” or otherwise accessible through the internet. Looking at the add-on for Firefox, it looks like it communicates with the local keepassxc instance, which should be fine for many people.
Thanks. I was not aware of this option.


krename is another excellent, but not as well known as it should be, KDE app.
krename can rename files and directories, and directories recursively, to almost anything. You can rename:
or with a mix of everything.
krename has a simple mode and an advanced mode for renaming, so you don’t have to jump into the deep end with the features.
You do have to be careful with some of the file info functions - it will happily try to rename a movie or a pdf with (non-existent) image EXIF info, for example. That would result in a file with a name you did not intend.


krusader is a dual-paned file manager for KDE. It runs on Linux (of course), MS Windows, and Mac OSX.
Folder sync is what makes krusader outstanding, even if you don’t care about dual-pane file management. Open the two folders you want to sync in the panes and go to Tools > Synchronize Folders. You can synchronize both ways, exclude files, delete lone files, etc. Very powerful.
Being a KDE app, krusader does not skimp on features, so there are lots of other things that krusader can do.
link: https://krusader.org/


Around 4 or 5 years ago, the Audacity project was acquired by a company that has several other open source music / audio related programs. The first few months did not go well because the company did several things with Audacity that the community didn’t like (like the telemetry that others have mentioned). It seemed like the company was trying to take an uber-popular open source project and convert it into something not in keeping with community expectations. Some forks of Audacity were started.
As others have said, the controversy seems to have died down. Gentoo at least, and probably many other Linux distros, have Audacity and not the forks in their repositories.


A little trick for people who are worried about putting business / work passwords in web-hosted managers such as Bitwarden: put just the username in Bitwarden, and put all the full information into KeepassXC.
Bitwarden will recognize the site and fill in the username - meaning you are at the correct site and are not being phished. Then, you can fill in the password from KeepassXC. This gives the benefits of browser-based managers while keeping more sensitive passwords (and recovery info) local-only.


Just to be clear, there is no official app for Android (and, I assume iPhone). If you are using SyncThing on desktop or laptop computers, there are downloads at the official syncthing.net site. On Linux, it should be available from your distribution.
High school teacher here. Obviously, I don’t speak for everyone, but many of us wish school would start at a more reasonable time for students. We don’t enjoy trying to teach first (and second, and third) period classes where many students are either absent or asleep. And of course, we care about the students and know it would be much healthier for them to sleep in. School can start around 10:00, thanks. But, as others have pointed out, the schedule is not dictated by what is best for the students.
Edit: some of the students in the schools I work at have to get up around 5:00. The often wait for 30+ minutes for buses to come (but that is a “the district doesn’t care about the students” issue, not a start time issue).


Yeah, I think this happens somewhere in Germany every few years. MS then makes a concerted effort to woo some politicians back, and a few years later we have news that a city or state is moving back to MS. Yes, it is good that cities / states are trying Linux and challenging MS, but there is soo much more to any of this than technical superiority or licensing fees.
That’s what makes Linux so much fun.
I reckon it’s because you can’t resist tinkering and never READING THE INSTRUCTIONS
I think you may have hit on the answer here. If you don’t mess around with Linux, it will usually run fine for years. Mess around, and you can do things that only someone with you+2 years experience can undo.


Oops. Thanks. I had seen a shortened version of the video already, thought this was the same version, but it isn’t. The one I saw was just the Tesla plowing through the wall.


this. watching the video, I had some trouble telling the difference. sure, from some angles it is obvious, but from others it is not.
That said, other cars, with more types of sensors, would probably have “seen” the obstruction on the road.


My understanding is that lower fertility follows higher female education for several reasons, including that women in school - and with access to birth control - prefer to wait until finishing school and starting a career before having children. Countries where women have fewer educational and fewer career opportunities, people often start having babies sooner, and more babies overall.
Another oft-mentioned factor is social safety nets such as social security (as much as that can count as a safety net). Areas with no or weak elder support outside of the family tend to have bigger families. Shockingly, this was also the case in the “developed” world back before they developed. Ask older adults in the USA how many brothers and sisters their grandparents had and it is probably a lot more than the next generation had, and the next, etc.
Do colonized people have lower life expectancy or do their children? Or both? Certainly, exploited people may also be living in (and unable to escape from) a society with poor elder care and insufficient safety nets such as social security or other retirement options. Which, of course, makes having lots of kids a totally rational decision. And also limits the ability of many women to participate in the economy outside of the home, which can also slow the development of the country / area’s economy.


Lived in Japan for many years, came back to the USA for many of the reasons you touch on. I knew a few foreigners who had non-English-teacher type jobs, but mostly, it was English teacher or English juku owner. The systemic issues, for young Japanese and for foreigners, in Japan really need to be dealt with if they have any hope of slowing their population decline. So, not going to happen.
Japan is never going to have enough immigration to significantly impact the population decline. Even back in the early 2000s, it would have taken millions of immigrants a year. Now, forget about it.
Living in inaka is not bad but not great either, for most people. So, tiny apartments in or near big cities or large houses in the middle of nowhere are pretty much the choices. Jobs in inaka? Fisherman, elderly care, sakaya, maybe some other generic retail for the eldest sons who couldn’t escape. And, of course, government jobs.
Re: media hype, yes there are still young people. But not enough. Societies need 2.1(-ish) children per couple to maintain population equilibrium. Japan, South Korea, Italy, and several other wealthy nations are way below that. Add in the Japanese propensity to live for a long time, and Logan’s Run becomes more and more thinkable each year. When the population pyramid becomes whatever shape parallel lines || are, the economics of a modern, wealthy society break down.
I gave a PD session for Japanese teachers back in like 2004 or so about why learning English would be helpful, because they might end up with a lot of immigrant children in their classes. (Or, I didn’t say, because you could use your English skills to look for jobs outside of Japan.) Of course, immigration barely happened, and many of those teachers are probably close to retirement age by now. So, my bad, I guess. Someone should do that PD today, because the situation is even worse now.

Thanks for the info!

I have no idea, so in total seriousness, I would love to hear details.
Just FYI, WINE is for running MS Windows software on Linux, not Linux software on MS Windows^1. As others have mentioned, I think cygwin was sort of the reverse-WINE. Also, I think KDE made a push to get their apps running on MS Windows because QT was cross-platform.
I was using WINE to play StarCraft back in like 2000. I think it predates running most Linux software on MS Windows, except for a few big, multi-platform packages like Firefox (back when it was still Netscape, then Mozilla Suite (don’t remember what it was called), then Phoenix, then Firebird (right? the same name as a database, so they had to change it, iirc). Those were usually developed for each platform specifically, not just for Linux and then run with an emulator.
^1: not trying to be snarky or anything. just put it in in case you didn’t know or maybe had a brain fart. Or maybe I’m wrong about the origins of WINE.