Ahh, the maps were so good. I remember using the extremely detailed hand drawn map to help me locate the Cavern of the Incarnate, and other cool locations. I am sad that I didn’t keep them.

I loved reading through the manual for Morrowind with the copy we got on the original XBox. I read all the class descriptions, details about the schools of magic, and had a whole character planned out before starting the game. I didn’t get into tabletop gaming until much later, but looking back, that manual really captured the same feeling of reading through the D&D players handbook and picking out a race, class, background, etc.

I think that feeling is why it’s still my favorite PC game.

Yeah I’ve never had a missing driver problem with a windows install since maybe windows 7. I even moved a hard drive with a windows 8 install from an Asus laptop with an Intel cpu to a custom build desktop with a ryzen cpu without having to change any drivers. I did have to reactivate windows because of the hardware change but that’s it.

The included drivers are often providing less performance than updated ones from the vendor though, so it is recommended to download those in some cases, specifically nvidia. But most gaming laptops will have a vendor provided update center to manage all of that for you.

I like Linux over windows for a lot of reasons but this post is a bit silly.

If that’s for a whole pie that’s dirt cheap. If that’s for a slice then that’s some expensive pie.

Some still are. Bigelow I think.

But loose leaf tea is much better quality anyway and avoids the issue of what’s in the bag entirely. They also have ceramic filters so you can completely avoid having plastic in contact with hot water

Debian on a base model 2013 MacBook air checking in. Runs better than it ever did on Mac OS. Battery life is still fine. I did have to use proprietary drivers for some things (wifi and webcam) but other than that it was pretty much plug and play.

Lots of replacement parts are on ebay for cheap, and there are a lot of repair tutorials on YouTube (and piped.video) I replaced keyboard and trackpad cheaply, and some of the internal cables.

As far as drawbacks, if you have to replace the storage or or logic board, those are expensive. I have a sound issue which I haven’t been able to fix and from searching around it looks like a logic board would be required. Bluetooth headphones work fine though so I’m just dealing with it.

Oh sweet! I haven’t heard of that one. I’ll check it out

Draw is great, and I’ve been able to use it for most of what I used Acrobat for before, but it has issues with converting certain documents, especially when they have special fonts. Also there’s the issue of not being able to just fill out some fields and then share it back as a PDF

I’m not opposed to paying for software, especially if it’s good. I’ll try that out and see how it is. Thanks!

Are you talking about the adapters that let you run network through your electrical circuits? Because that’s different from PoE. PoE is running power through the network cables so you get power and network with one plug, so kind of the opposite of that.

I can confirm that using electrical infrastructure for network is really not great.

Similar situation here. I was raised home schooled for all of my education. Got a GED, good score on the ACT, got a 4.0 in the community college where I got an associates degree. The problem is parents who homeschool because they don’t want their kids to turn “woke” or be “converted” by exposure to the fact that non-straight, non-cis people exist. A lot of the time, the emphasis is only on indoctrination, and there is little or no actual education involved.

I have been to homeschool conferences - there are some good resources there, and a LOT of really pretty awful stuff like this article mentioned. People like the author are so incredibly impactful, even if they don’t realize it. They may never see results but those seeds matter. Even if the parents don’t get it, the kids will.

At a conference last year, there was a speaker talking about parenting difficult children (Kirk Martin with Celebrate Calm). He was presenting very much a solid gentle parenting approach (though he didn’t call it that) that is very contrary to the culture of a lot of homeschool groups. He spent a lot of time unpacking his experiences as someone who grew up with really strict physical discipline, the impact it had on him, his experience being a parent - kind of leading people on a journey from where they might be to where they should be as parents.

He also spent a bit of his talk on how the Bible doesn’t teach us to raise our kids to fight in a culture war and just really pretty clearly calling out a lot of the toxic far right christian-nationalist talking points. Sure he made a lot of people uncomfortable, but those thoughts will stick with them.

After his talk he was spent over an hour talking with people outside of the conference room answering questions. His next talk was packed as well.

Anyway, all that to say - I know it can take a lot out of someone to deal with people in those environments, but it is absolutely impactful and so desperately needed.

I have issues with FireFox running YouTube on windows 10 - it gets super laggy - the issue is nonexistent if I used the Piped frontend. I think it depends a lot on what website you are using - some don’t play well with FireFox.

That being said, I did not have issues with FireFox on Mac when I used that, or on Linux, though I don’t use my Linux laptop a lot for web heavy stuff

Yeah it doesn’t seem too difficult to me to see when reviews seem fishy. I have never tried fakespot myself.

Another thing to check is that the reviews match what the product is for - I have seen a lot of Amazon listings where the seller will have a product up for a long time, get a lot of positive reviews, then change the listing to something else. So it looks like the listing has been up for a long time with good reviews but it’s really a different item. Then note the seller and don’t buy anything from them lol.

Per the article, they are integrating Fakespot into Firefox, so it won’t be different. Hopefully the tool can be improved

No, it’s not excuses, it’s just reality. It’s hard. Does that mean people shouldn’t try to do better and make things better? Of course not. Being better and doing better is hard, and we should do it anyway. That kind of personal growth is central to the human experience, or it ought to be.

The thing is, just because people aren’t doing better in the area that you understand and care about doesn’t mean that they aren’t in other areas that you may not know about.

For example, someone who is stressed out and overburdened with work may be using all of their available energy to be a better parent and make sure that their child is raised in a healthy and emotionally stable home. If that doesn’t leave room for people to support FOSS and privacy friendly browsers that’s ok.

Just be the best human you can be every day and don’t beat yourself (or others) up for not being perfect.

It’s not really the time. It’s more about the mental effort it takes to find out what to switch to.

Sure, it’s easy to install Firefox or sign up for Lemmy once you know that it’s there, but most people just have a sense that things suck with no idea of what they can do to fix it.

Finding out what to do to have a better experience takes a non-trivial amount of mental energy that scrolling reddit and instagram do not require.

The constant hustle, multiple jobs, or jobs with a high mental load, rising prices and stagnant wages all work together to create a lot of decision fatigue and stress. It often takes something major to get people out of that and get them active at changing things.

Probably my favorite RPG - Such a rich environment and a totally unnecessary amount of lore and background information in all of the included books and dialogue. Really set me up to be severely unfulfilled by everything else Bethesda made after that point.

Thank you for the help @infeeeee@lemm.ee @BaumGeist@lemmy.ml - I believe the issue with the audio is hardware related. I reinstalled Mac OSX using the built in recovery tool and that does not detect the sound card either. So sometime in between it being used last and me installing Ubuntu on it the hardware failed. I don’t think I will bother replacing the logic board as it is a 10 year old laptop and is otherwise working just fine.

Regardless, it’s good to be using Linux again!

Didn’t have any luck setting the model - I read through those doc pages you linked and a lot of it is over my head but I think I was able to learn a few things.

At this point - I am not seeing any of the errors mentioned anywhere - I only see HDMI audio as the only card and that is displaying no errors (this laptop doesn’t have an HDMI port, only thunderbolt, and I don’t have a cable or adapter to even test if that audio is working on an external monitor) I’m not sure if Linux is incorrectly reading the internal sound card as the HDMI output, if it’s all on the same card and the internal output is not being read, or if the internal sound card is just totally not working (hardware issue) - To my knowledge there was no issue with audio on Mac OSX but this laptop hasn’t been used in a while.

I really appreciate your time and if you want to continue helping I will put more info below, but I also understand if you don’t want to think about it anymore 😄

I didn’t see any of the errors mentioned on those pages when checking dmesg (assuming that is where they would be) - I read through all the errors, nothing related to sound that I could tell, and used grep to pull out the messages containing references to snd or audio, etc:

[   10.711044] snd_hda_intel 0000:00:03.0: bound 0000:00:02.0 (ops i915_audio_component_bind_ops [i915])
[   12.579602] input: HDA Intel HDMI HDMI/DP,pcm=3 as /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:03.0/sound/card0/input14
[   12.605430] input: HDA Intel HDMI HDMI/DP,pcm=7 as /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:03.0/sound/card0/input15
[   12.605925] input: HDA Intel HDMI HDMI/DP,pcm=8 as /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:03.0/sound/card0/input16

If you want I can put the whole dmesg here but it is a lot of text.

I also ran lsmod |grep 'snd' after the changes and the result is exactly the same before any changes and after each change:

snd_hda_codec_hdmi     94208  1
snd_hda_intel          61440  1
snd_intel_dspcfg       36864  1 snd_hda_intel
snd_intel_sdw_acpi     20480  1 snd_intel_dspcfg
snd_hda_codec         204800  2 snd_hda_codec_hdmi,snd_hda_intel
snd_hda_core          135168  3 snd_hda_codec_hdmi,snd_hda_intel,snd_hda_codec
snd_hwdep              20480  1 snd_hda_codec
snd_pcm               192512  4 snd_hda_codec_hdmi,snd_hda_intel,snd_hda_codec,snd_hda_core
snd_seq_midi           20480  0
snd_seq_midi_event     16384  1 snd_seq_midi
snd_rawmidi            53248  1 snd_seq_midi
snd_seq                94208  2 snd_seq_midi,snd_seq_midi_event
snd_seq_device         16384  3 snd_seq,snd_seq_midi,snd_rawmidi
snd_timer              49152  2 snd_seq,snd_pcm
snd                   135168  11 snd_seq,snd_seq_device,snd_hda_codec_hdmi,snd_hwdep,snd_hda_intel,snd_hda_codec,snd_timer,snd_pcm,snd_rawmidi
soundcore              16384  1 snd

And here is the most recent pacmd list-cards output:

1 card(s) available.
    index: 0
	name: 
	driver: 
	owner module: 7
	properties:
		alsa.card = "0"
		alsa.card_name = "HDA Intel HDMI"
		alsa.long_card_name = "HDA Intel HDMI at 0xb0a10000 irq 73"
		alsa.driver_name = "snd_hda_intel"
		device.bus_path = "pci-0000:00:03.0"
		sysfs.path = "/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:03.0/sound/card0"
		device.bus = "pci"
		device.vendor.id = "8086"
		device.vendor.name = "Intel Corporation"
		device.product.id = "0a0c"
		device.product.name = "Haswell-ULT HD Audio Controller"
		device.form_factor = "internal"
		device.string = "0"
		device.description = "Built-in Audio"
		module-udev-detect.discovered = "1"
		device.icon_name = "audio-card-pci"
	profiles:
		output:hdmi-stereo: Digital Stereo (HDMI) Output (priority 5900, available: no)
		output:hdmi-surround: Digital Surround 5.1 (HDMI) Output (priority 800, available: no)
		output:hdmi-surround71: Digital Surround 7.1 (HDMI) Output (priority 800, available: no)
		output:hdmi-stereo-extra1: Digital Stereo (HDMI 2) Output (priority 5700, available: no)
		output:hdmi-surround-extra1: Digital Surround 5.1 (HDMI 2) Output (priority 600, available: no)
		output:hdmi-surround71-extra1: Digital Surround 7.1 (HDMI 2) Output (priority 600, available: no)
		output:hdmi-stereo-extra2: Digital Stereo (HDMI 3) Output (priority 5700, available: no)
		output:hdmi-surround-extra2: Digital Surround 5.1 (HDMI 3) Output (priority 600, available: no)
		output:hdmi-surround71-extra2: Digital Surround 7.1 (HDMI 3) Output (priority 600, available: no)
		off: Off (priority 0, available: unknown)
	active profile: 
	ports:
		hdmi-output-0: HDMI / DisplayPort (priority 5900, latency offset 0 usec, available: no)
			properties:
				device.icon_name = "video-display"
		hdmi-output-1: HDMI / DisplayPort 2 (priority 5800, latency offset 0 usec, available: no)
			properties:
				device.icon_name = "video-display"
		hdmi-output-2: HDMI / DisplayPort 3 (priority 5700, latency offset 0 usec, available: no)
			properties:
				device.icon_name = "video-display"

Here are some screenshots of pavucontrol and alsamixer: https://imgur.com/a/W4mURaW

Also FWIW here is the alsa-base.conf:

# autoloader aliases
install sound-slot-0 /sbin/modprobe snd-card-0
install sound-slot-1 /sbin/modprobe snd-card-1
install sound-slot-2 /sbin/modprobe snd-card-2
install sound-slot-3 /sbin/modprobe snd-card-3
install sound-slot-4 /sbin/modprobe snd-card-4
install sound-slot-5 /sbin/modprobe snd-card-5
install sound-slot-6 /sbin/modprobe snd-card-6
install sound-slot-7 /sbin/modprobe snd-card-7

# Cause optional modules to be loaded above generic modules
install snd /sbin/modprobe --ignore-install snd $CMDLINE_OPTS && { /sbin/modprobe --quiet --use-blacklist snd-ioctl32 ; /sbin/modprobe --quiet --use-blacklist snd-seq ; }
#
# Workaround at bug #499695 (reverted in Ubuntu see LP #319505)
install snd-pcm /sbin/modprobe --ignore-install snd-pcm $CMDLINE_OPTS && { /sbin/modprobe --quiet --use-blacklist snd-pcm-oss ; : ; }
install snd-mixer /sbin/modprobe --ignore-install snd-mixer $CMDLINE_OPTS && { /sbin/modprobe --quiet --use-blacklist snd-mixer-oss ; : ; }
install snd-seq /sbin/modprobe --ignore-install snd-seq $CMDLINE_OPTS && { /sbin/modprobe --quiet --use-blacklist snd-seq-midi ; /sbin/modprobe --quiet --use-blacklist snd-seq-oss ; : ; }
#
install snd-rawmidi /sbin/modprobe --ignore-install snd-rawmidi $CMDLINE_OPTS && { /sbin/modprobe --quiet --use-blacklist snd-seq-midi ; : ; }
# Cause optional modules to be loaded above sound card driver modules
install snd-emu10k1 /sbin/modprobe --ignore-install snd-emu10k1 $CMDLINE_OPTS && { /sbin/modprobe --quiet --use-blacklist snd-emu10k1-synth ; }
install snd-via82xx /sbin/modprobe --ignore-install snd-via82xx $CMDLINE_OPTS && { /sbin/modprobe --quiet --use-blacklist snd-seq ; }

# Load saa7134-alsa instead of saa7134 (which gets dragged in by it anyway)
install saa7134 /sbin/modprobe --ignore-install saa7134 $CMDLINE_OPTS && { /sbin/modprobe --quiet --use-blacklist saa7134-alsa ; : ; }
# Prevent abnormal drivers from grabbing index 0
options bt87x index=-2
options cx88_alsa index=-2
options saa7134-alsa index=-2
options snd-atiixp-modem index=-2
options snd-intel8x0m index=-2
options snd-via82xx-modem index=-2
options snd-usb-audio index=-2
options snd-usb-caiaq index=-2
options snd-usb-ua101 index=-2
options snd-usb-us122l index=-2
options snd-usb-usx2y index=-2
# Ubuntu #62691, enable MPU for snd-cmipci
options snd-cmipci mpu_port=0x330 fm_port=0x388
# Keep snd-pcsp from being loaded as first soundcard
options snd-pcsp index=-2
# Keep snd-usb-audio from beeing loaded as first soundcard
options snd-usb-audio index=-2
# Troubleshooting
options snd-hda-intel model=mba6

That is my biggest gripe with modern windows. The OS itself is pretty decent, but WHY am I paying at minimum $100 and seeing ads all over the start menu? Even with a vanilla MS sourced USB there are so many bloat apps. It didn’t used to be that way.

I set up a PC for recording in a sound system and got a fresh install of Windows 11 on a custom PC and it was still super bloated with garbage games and a video editor that watermarks footage instead of the perfectly functional basic software they used to have.

I am in the process of repairing and setting up an old macbook with Linux since it stopped getting Apple updates. When I get a new laptop I will likely go with Linux there as well.