I read the manual before i buy a product, I watch the product reviews, and if I can I watch the repair videos as well.

Big part of my enjoyment from buying things is the work I do upfront. I tend to do the same with any tech project.

I have a BEng in software engineering. It wasn’t thst different from a normal BSc in CS. Bits that stood out to me was industrial stuff around building and programming our own circuits, making our own (very simple) compiler, and some assembly modules, I had more maths stuff but that was for 3D graphics. My dissertation was a temperature control system for radiators.

I don’t really use any of it in my job, although I did do a ton more programming modules than most CS of the time, and those programming modules prove very useful.

Yeah we stole all our good food from our former colonies and improved on them, see curry.

Yeah that’s not the same thing as a bland food diet, that’s up there with the cabbage diet for how awful it is.

Mine is: Scrambled eggs made with cottage cheese + porridge for breakfast Chicken, salad (no dressing) and rice for lunch Chicken, vegetables and rice/sweet potatoes/lentils for tea

No sauces, just dry herbs/spices as a rub.

Snacks are two protein shakes, naked bar (counts as a one a day of fruit/veg allowance), banana.

Repeat for past two years. Before that it was lentils, avo, boiled egg, before than goats cheese salad for lunch.

Its boring as fuck when you do it for months at a time but it works for me. Controlling

just eating potatoes for every meal?

Only a small percentage of people keep weight off long term, Ive seen figures around 20% so whatever works for you is the right answer but its unlikely to be the same solution for the rest of your life. Its a higher relapse rate than alcoholics.

Speaking from experience, if you only buy healthy food it massively reduces the attack vector of unhealthy food, and by unhealthy I mean calorie dense food that leads to relapse due to its high processed sugar content.

If I am eating clean then everybody else in the house is eating clean, its no different from an alcoholic needing no alcohol on the house. Obviously food exists outside the house as well, but its about reducing your exposure to it as much as possible, which includes avoiding majority of restaurants.

Unless you have a problem with over consumption of food its very hard for people to directly equate it to an addiction. When people who can self regulate food intake, who have never had to diet in their life, try to give diet advice its like a fish giving running advice.

One of the strategies for long term weight loss is to swap from an interesting and tasty diet (which are often high calorie density) to one as bland and uninteresting to you as possible diet (often low calorie density). Idea being you will eat less if you are only eating to survive rather eating to enjoy, you will leave more on the plate.

Personally I say fuck that, as life is hard enough as it is.

Just keep in mind that the upper limit of what you can mount onto plasterboard is the strength of the actual plasterboard itself more than it is the wall plug once you get to the correct plug for your wall type. Plasterboard gives up quite quickly, its around 30kg per square meter, something like tile backer board is like 200kg per square meter.

The most important thing is that its snug and does not wiggle. This means you have to cut a clean hole that is the correct size for the plug, any good plug is marked with the correct size. A wonky hole or one that is too big or too small will cause no end of problems and you have to start again.

If its anything heavy you should be going into the stud or adding in a baton to do it properly. Mounting something like a TV to walls in the UK I will go into the breeze block behind and use ferrules/baton to support the bolt in the gap to the plasterboard.

Good, if older video from Project Farm on different types of rawl plugs, shows both sides of the plug so you get a better idea of whats going on. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lHb-Tcvkn7M

Always hated that they pretend you cant tax unreleased gains when they are perfectly capable of raising loans against them. If unrealized gains can be used to secure loans then they have a quantifiable value that can be taxed.

I love my pocketbook colour three. The extra screensize is very much appreciated for comics

Yeah I have the same impression of it, although the volume of some updates, even when I update daily, can be a little off-putting.

I wont move unless I have a good reason to, inertia over the effort to change when bored is too high

I moved from Redhat when they started pulling the shit around getting paid for their source. I understand why they did it, but I disagreed with that choice and I moved.

I quit Ubuntu when I finally had enough of their insistence on their way for everything such as firefox via snap, sure I can and did work around their shit, but why the fuck should I?

I would move from Opensuse if they did something similar, if it became unreliably maintained, or if something much better came along.

Yeah its a super paranoid process, I would just rather take a traditional person exam

Question difficulty makes no difference whatsoever with proxying, these are already long form questions in the main. The whole point of it is you are paying somebody else to take the exam for you, either directly by something like screen sharing or indirectly by relaying questions and answers. The AI voice assistant is another form of this, its higher risk as LLMs aren’t always right but its still proxying.

I personally know of half a dozen people who used Cheggs to indirectly proxy their engineering degree exams as they weren’t proctored and had 12/24 hour exam window. The uni was meant to require an in person defense of similar questions from anybody getting unusual results, something people who cheat simply cannot do, but because they had done it the whole way through they never triggered the flag. This is why proctoring is so important.

One of the reasons so many companies use Pearsons for their exams is because they have centers everywhere, they are by far the largest. If you cannot do it online then you have to go to your nearest center. Simply too much cheating is attempted otherwise. As always the actions of a minority ruin it for everybody else as rules have to be put in place.

Yup, exactly that. You are not allowed to proceed if you have additional devices including your mobile visible during the setup phase, you have to sweep the area with your webcam so they can see. When the exam is proctored if they see a phone or anything suspicious that you introduced into the frame you are generally fucked and have to go through a review.

Pearsons run a lot of different exams on behalf of a lot of different companies so the rules change depending on what that company wants and will pay for.

I know of one that you have to connect with your webcam and again with your phone camera so the phone can capture from behind you.This is one is live proctored by a real person throughout, it is pretty damn expensive so its not the norm. Many are just at the start and end, with AI triggers and random sampling to find cheaters.

I know of another than limits how many screens you can have connected to just one, this is principally to reduce the chance of a IP KVM being used for proxying. Its trivial for the software to detect how many displays are connected, same with number of HID devices.

I think you are underestimating how much cheating is attempted with these, and how much they have already been through the loop of being able to detect it.

Yeah making it optional for them to turn on because they are still entitled to privacy even though they are children is the key to building trust. Them trusting you as a parent is the most essential thing here, there is always a way around something, you want them being honest by choice rather than sneaky or you forcing “honesty” by coercion.

We always did that from when the kids were younger and my now adult daughter still chooses to turn it on when going on dates.

Nope as you have to show the room before the exam starts andusing the second computer shows up in the webcam. It’s what the webcam if for.

So, in principle, I agree, but it doesn’t help with proxying, or for example, one I saw this week of someone using AI voice assistant to answer questions. Or people copying and pasting from online groups.

Their shitty software monitors all the connected devices, running processes, and webcam. That’s still needed for open book.

Does it have online exams? Pearsons shitty anti cheat stuff they use for proctoring is windows and mac only.

Having seen how much people cheat including using someone else using screensharing to proxy the exam for you I cannot blame them for wanting to do this, but I do blame them for not wanting to support Linux properly.

Redhat 4.1 back in 97. I even purchased the CD from PC World, seems wild now to buy a CD/DVD of a distro.

First PC I installed it on was a work laptop, had to compile a bunch of kernel modules and then the kernel to get everything working but get everything working I did, Thinkpads being good for Linux even then.