Came here for this. You can basically use LARP as an excuse to further almost any creative hobby. For PAX Unplugged I made a LARP Escape Room, and that was an excuse for me to learn how to use Arduino controllers and wire hardware in order to make a robot puzzle for the event.

It depends on how many versions I am away from the latest, and how much I’ve messed with the distro.

Usually I stay on an Ubuntu LTS and upgrade from LTS to LTS when that upgrade path is ready. I upgraded from 20.04 to 22.04 this way.

But this time I wanted Pipewire in 24.04, and didn’t want to wait for a 22.04 to 24.04 upgrade to be ready. I’m using a bluetooth headset and Pulseaudio is pretty terrible at switching headset profiles. Between not wanting to upgrade an upgraded install, and having messed with Pulseaudio quite a bit trying to get it working, I went ahead and clean installed 24.04 and moved some configs over.

You might want to look into taking an older car and paying to get someone to install a conversion kit. If you have an existing car you could see if there’s a compatible kit that’ll save you some money.

What if a revolution in the US caused a global economic collapse?

We tend to think of potential revolutions in the same way as the US Civil War, or the French or Russian revolutions. The problem is that a civil war would be much more like the British Civil War, and most people know very little about the French or Russian revolutions.

A Revolution or Civil war wouldn’t have 2 times. It’d have a dozen. We can’t agree on what the future of the country should be now, how would we in a Revolution? There would be Revolution, counter-revolution, a civil war where the sides shift every 6 months. And you know how other countries try to influence us now, with Russia interfering with elections and China manipulating companies? That’s with the full strength of the Federal government attempting to stop it. Now they’d get to do it with an extremely vulnerable, fractured country.

Add on to that that those other revolutions involved world powers, but in a far less connected world wide economy. The fall of the US looks less like the French Revolution, and more like the Bronze Age collapse.

I think it’s too soon to write off the US as irredeemable without revolution. The last time we had a brush with Fascism taking over the country, we got FDR and The New Deal. If we can avoid this brush with Fascism, we might get another chance at turning things around.

The best explanation I’ve seen is that music is mixed differently for CD/streaming and vinyl.

For mass market, the move has been to mix for louder bass and similar things. The idea being that it makes the music more popular. But it also makes it difficult to appreciate anything but the bass.

On vinyl, you can’t max out bass like that, it won’t work on the format. So they have to give it a normal mix instead, making it sound better. In theory CDs should sound better than vinyl, but because of the music production trends, it doesn’t currently.

They don’t have to force them to make an app. Instead they could make them provide an interface that an app can use. Instead of their current strategy of thwarting any attempt to make their ecosystem interoperable with competitor’s devices. I imagine them instantly killing Beeper’s connection to iMessage was a part of this move.

The fact that reddit cares is mostly used for harassment told me all I needed to know about how they’re handling their community.

A lot of Google/Android TV devices support “Basic TV” mode. You get the option during device setup, you can switch to it later by resetting the device. I would probably also not connect it to the internet, but that should cover making it a dumb device. I bought a Hisense one, tried it with Android TV for a bit, experienced it slow down and freeze up a bunch, and just switched it to Basic TV and plugged in a chromecast. Has worked fine since then.