The letter arrived yesterday.

Hey, if you can make it work, it would be a hell of a cool system. Very hacker-y.

I like the Gormanian and Holocene calendars; but I use the Gregorian for compatibility with the rest of humanity.

Also, as I live in Britain, I use an unholy mixture of metric, imperial, and archaic measurements.

Length of an object? Centimetres. Height of a human? Feet and inches. Mass of flour? Grams. Mass of a human? Stones, pounds, and ounces. Distance by car? Miles. Distance on foot? Kilometres. Volume of a soft drink? Litres or millilitres. Volume of beer or milk? Pints. Volume of non-dairy milk? Also litres and millilitres.

Honestly no

Europe/London, BST, UTC+01:00

Do you use a different calendar system, by any chance?

Yes, but one would assume I meant the 19th of the current month of the current year.

Also “They said the 19th June 2024” doesn’t work so great as a title.

It was two days ago.

19th June

Oh damn! Yeah, no, the old Atom series will be slow on anything other than, like, Puppy Linux.

Here are a few distros to try:

• Puppy Linux
• EasyOS
• Fatdog64
• Absolute Linux
• Legacy OS
• Damn Small Linux
• Tiny Core
• GNU Guix
• Debian (use a lightweight WM, like Fluxbox or IceWM)
• Arch (again, use a lightweight WM)

And here are some software substitutions:

• Firefox -> Konqueror/Netsurf/Dillo/Lynx/Links2/w3m
• Thunderbird -> Claws Mail/NeoMutt
• LibreOffice -> AbiWord, Gnumeric, etc.

You will be able to run Firefox and Chromium, but they will be somewhat sluggish and likely to freeze or crash, in my experience.

Also, the suckless tools are really good for this. Back on my old Raspberry Pi, I used to be able to compile st and surf in under a minute, and dwm ran brilliantly.

~Source: my old Raspberry Pi, although arm-based, and my old MacBook had similar specs.~

It’s an Acer Aspire 5742z: a chunky old laptop from 2009.

It requires proprietary WiFi drivers and only has one working USB port because the other two are on a separate board connected to the motherboard by a ribbon cable that seems to have shrunk by a millimetre or two over the years, so it no-longer reaches the contacts.

The keyboard has a decent amount of travel and it’s easy to clean with compressed air. However, the keys are a bit harder to press than on other keyboards I have, so it’s easy to miss out letters when typing quickly. It’s also difficult to put the keys back on once removed; but at least they are removable.

The performance is okay, and I had to pull some extra RAM out of another machine to get it to run smoothly. This machine originally only had 3GB. However, it is easy to upgrade and repair.

To be honest, you’d probably be better off with a late-2000s ThinkPad or a mid-2010s MacBook.

American flag checks out.

You probably could, but you’d need to use twin instead of Xfwm in order for the deKorator theme to work.

Yeah, it’s pretty cool what you can do with deKorator.

• Distro: Devuan GNU/Linux
• Init: SysVinit
• Desktop: Trinity
• UI Theme: Tragedy2
• Icon Theme: Crystal SVG
• Cursors: wonderland (from Mageia)
• OMZ Theme: simple
• Wallpaper: The Bay (builtin)

(This is from cohost)

I have a few machines, which run:

• Raspbian Bookworm (arm64) with IceWM - Raspbian is the only desktop RPi distro that works out-of-the-box. I chose IceWM because it’s fast, light, customisable, and I can make it look like it’s 2004.
• openSUSE Tumbleweed with Xfce+Bspwm - I keep going back to openSUSE. It just works. As for the desktop, I wanted Xfce but with tiling.
• Mageia 9 with LXQt - I just needed something lighter than Fedora Xfce, as this machine only has 4GB of RAM.
• FreeBSD with i3 - Thought I’d give BSD a try. I was pleasantly surprised.
• Gentoo (WIP) - I’m just throwing random distros at my MacBook until something sticks. Gentoo is fast and can control the fan without me having to git clone and compile the drivers (ironically).
• crunchbang++ (i386) with Openbox - This is a mid-2000s MacBook, running one of the few Linux distros that actually boots on it.

Some distros I tried but did not like were Pop!_OS, Slackware, Zenwalk, Freespire, Redcore, Fedora Atomic, ArchBang, and antiX.

Sone distros I’d like to try are Qubes OS, Clear Linux, CRUX, Kwort, Paldo, Exherbo, NuTyX, T2, Chimera, Adélie, Frugalware (no new ISOs since 2016, but the packages are still updated), Dragora, Parabola, Hyperbola, PLD, KANOTIX, Calculate, ALT, ROSA, and AUSTRUMI.

The reasons I have not yet tried these are mostly down to my limited hardware and the complexity of some of the distros. With others, it’s often down to WiFi drivers not existing for my proprietary cards. And then there are also a couple of distros from Russia, which I feel I can’t trust at the moment.

Use Smidge. It’s the best repellant.

Also, get some citronella. You can get it as oil (for burning), as tealights, as rope (also for burning), as incense… It does the trick in Northumberland, though I’m not so sure about Loch Latrine. Those midges might be a bit tougher.

goddamn…

Last I heard, the CCP did a bit of social engineering and got a load of TikTokkers to post videos in juggalo makeup in order to retrain their facial recognition software.

I don’t recall if it was successful, but it happened.

That’s far too good for AI. It has to be photoshopped.