Lorindól

Yes, I mean to try running them with VM. The software I need are old and light, so there’s a good chance that my laptop can run them.

I installed Fedora last Friday and I have no regrets. Win11 was never an option for me, my laptop is “too old” and I have no desire to touch that horror in any

~10 years ago I had a Win7/Ubuntu dual boot laptop, but I dropped Ubuntu when I upgraded to SSD and needed all the space I could get. Ubuntu was OK, but there was something with the UI that just didn’t click with me. I meant to try other distros but never found the time, so I just stuck with Win10 until now.

I have several legacy software that I need, so I went with dual boot again. If I can get them to run smoothly on Fedora, I’ll do a complete clean install.

The only challenge in installing Fedora was Windows’ crappy partition manager, which would not let me minimize C: for more than 54MB. I did every trick I knew and learned a few new ones, nothing helped. Then I just flashed Gparted to a USB stick and it worked instantly.

After that everything went smoothly, with the exception that Fedora didn’t recognize my Bluetooth device at all. I’ll dig into that single issue tomorrow, I’m fairly certain that a fix can be found easily.

My grandma made the best meatballs. She showed me how she made them and I have the exact recipe, but I just can’t get them taste the same.

Many of my friends really love Coldplay, so I’ve heard several of their albums played at parties. Many times. But I cannot remember a single song from Coldplay and most likely wouldn’t recognize them if one was playing on the radio.

And I have a decent ear for music, I can play a few instruments and can even find the right chords for a song after hearing it once or twice. But not Coldplay. There is nothing wrong with their music, but it doesn’t make me feel anything. It’s just so generic to my taste, I guess.

I think there’s also one on a ski lift gondola in Lapland…

There’s one made of stone and a natural brook runs through the floor.

In the winter there are several saunas built from snow / ice. The snow sauna is said to be an especially pleasing experience.

There are sauna rafts that have engines, so you can cruise around the waters.

There are car trailer saunas that you can rent and drive to any open beach you wish. Or your own backyard.

And probably a whole lot crazier ones that I can’t remember right now.

I assume it was a generalization, just few weeks ago I installed 32-bit Linux Mint to two laptops from 2007 or 2008, now my kids have their very own and fully functional computers. They do lag a bit sometimes, but learning patience is just good for the kids.

You are pretty much correct.

When the Soviet Union’s unprovoked attack started the Winter War we were basically left on our own by nearly everyone. With our minimal stocks of ammo and weapons we managed just barely to stop the onslaught. The Finnish army’s capabilities had suffered under severe budget cuts for almost the entire 1930’s. The Soviets were well aware of this and decided to use it to their advantage.

When the Interim Peace began, our leaders were certain that sooner or later Stalin would attack again to finish the job. So we started to frantically rebuild and restock our army and seek allies wherever we could find them. Unfortunately the only one whose interests aligned with ours was Germany. Fighting against the Soviets alone was not an option anymore, so we allied ourselves with Hitler’s Germany. No formal treaties of alliance were made, but that’s just a technicality.

Most of our leaders were not very enthusiastic about this (it is well documented and confirmed by several reliable sources that our supreme commander Mannerheim despised Hitler) but Germany was our best and only bet.

When the Continuation War began, our offensive to regain the lost territories and “liberate the Finnic people of East Karelia” did undoubtedly help the Nazi war effort. We both went out to crush a common enemy, but as a nation we did not embrace Nazism in any way. There were of course some who did, but there were very few of them.

Hitler requested us to complete the encirclement in the siege of Leningrad but our troops stopped at the old border. We also refused to cut the railroad supply line from Murmansk, which was vital for the Soviets due to the US aid arriving from the north (the US had informed us via diplomatic channels that blowing up the railroad would be really, really bad for us in long term).

Hitler’s trust in our alliance was wawering due to these denials and so the Germans requested that we send them a battallion of “fine Aryan examples” to fight with Waffen SS and Wehrmacht against the Soviets in the eastern theatre of war. We called them the “Deposit Battallion”. My grandma’s cousin was one of these men, I met him several times when I was a kid and he most certainly was not a Nazi. He told us that if you had showed any “Nazi enthusiasm” in your home regiment, you were automatically disqualified from the Deposit Battallion selection. The leadership did not want to send them any whackjobs who would bring Nazi ideology back home.

The Deposit Battallion was deployed in Ukraine with the SS Division Viking , alongside other foreign volunteers. My grandma’s cousin never shared any stories from the war. “They are not for children, or anyone for that matter.”

Germany gave us more than 200 000 troops to defend Lapland and a vast number of equipment and ammo. Without the troops and material the Soviets would have crushed us.

One can call us “Nazi belligerents” or “Nazi allies”, it does not make any difference. When presented with only one viable option, one tends to choose it even if it was one they would rather not make. In retrospect our leaders chose correctly and we remained independent.

Had we known about the true scope of the Nazi atrocities before joining forces, would we have been able to reject them? I fear that the tides of war would have still forced us to join the side of the fascist monsters.

This must be a prototype test of some sort, to my knowledge nothing like this was never taken into mass production. The picture was taken in 1947 at the Santahamina garrison in Helsinki.

Apparently the original team behind Star Control is making a direct sequel to II, since SC 3 was done by a different studio and did not follow the storyline that the creators had in mind.

And it’s supposed to be released this year. They are calling it “Free Stars: Children of Infinity”, since they don’t own the rights to the Star Control name. But they do own all the rights to the content in SC 1and SC 2, so this could be fun!

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Stars:_Children_of_Infinity

I did like SC 3 as well, but it wasn’t nearly as great as SC 2. I can barely remember the main storyline.

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Star Control II, PC.

All hail the Gerbil King!

This is the way.

I solely used Netscape Navigator since it came out and after it fell I chose Firefox. My interface has always been modded to look permanently like Firefox 3.6.

Everything is where I want it to be and everything works perfectly.

Many moons ago my employer tried to force us to use only Internet Explorer / Edge for reasons they were unable to explain - since there were none, technically or otherwise. I rebelled and remotely installed Firefox with Adblock / uBlock Origin to every personal computer (I was the unofficial IT guy) and told my co-workers to try it out.

At the next meeting we were told that the use of Firefox is not only approved but recommended. The magic of an “ad free browser” had taken hold, people found it vastly superior and had been vocal about their newfound dislike of MS browsers.

To my surprise I wasn’t even reprimanded in any way.

Wow. That was far better than most of the official sequels.

I am a lifelong fan of Tolkien and the colour of my hair is golden.

Few days ago I was talking with my wife about groceries, reminded her about buying more cat food. My daughter was sitting next to me, playing some game on her Android phone. Then she chirped “I got a cat food ad! I’ve never gotten a cat food ad before, ever! It’s like the phone heard what you just said, dad!”

Yep. VPN and Adguard are now installed to every single mobile device in my household.

This is the way.

You forgot greed.

I have many projects going on.

1. Complete window / frame restauration underway at the country house built in the fifties, I scraped all the original paint off by hand and now I’m waiting for drier days to finish the painting.

2. Fixing the terrace at the country house, I laid the first new layer of concrete to fix the corroded parts just last Thursday. When it dries I’ll see if an entire additional layer is required. Next summer I’ll also rebuild the terrace fence and install growth lines for vines over the terrace.

3. Acoustic Research AR-7x speaker restauration. I installed the new woofer surrounds few weeks ago, now I’m waiting for the ferrofluid for the tweeters to arrive by mail. Just yesterday I found suitable and cheap linen cloth for the new covers in a nearby cloth shop.

4. Fixing the rain gutters at home, the weight of last winter’s snow and ice pulled some if the screws off. This is a priority.

5. Yard fence repainting, I rebuilt a large part of the fence in June but the weather has been too hot / humid to paint the old parts.

6. New ceiling curtain rail installation at home. Would be easy per se, but it’s a two man job and the ceiling is high…

7. Motorcycle needs a new heat resistant paint job for the exhaust.

8. Two sets of new custom speaker stand parts are cut and ready for welding, just haven’t had the time to start it yet.

…and many more.