I think you misunderstood what I’m saying; I’m saying the kid is deliberately calling the radio a podcast to annoy OP. They know what a radio is because they’ve grown up with their parent using it day in day out in the car. So it’s not an age gap as OP thinks, I’m saying this one is probably the early stages of the long war known as “having teenage kids”.

That’s a clever idea, a great way to ensure they’re keeping lots of core software up to date. Although I imagine it could be a bit annoying Ninite popping up every time you log in, but it’s for the greater good!

I think Firefox + uBlock origin is a good shout. I personally would not bother with an antivirus; leave Microsoft Defender to it.

In terms of other software, it very much depends what it’s being used for. I’d probably put Sumatra PDF on there and make it the default (to prevent some of Edge’s shenanigans), LibreOffice (to ease opening random docs/xls, if you’ve not got Microsoft Office to install in your work), Notepad++ just because it’s quite good (and won’t have MS shitty AI unlike Notepad), VLC incase anyone needs it for basic media consumption, maybe a video conferencing tool if you use them (Zoom? Teams? Slack?), Paint.net as it’s a pretty good image tool for those random times you need to mess with images - way better than MS Paint and much easier for basic stuff than GIMP.

In terms of Windows settings, I’d google Win 11 privacy settings and follow the steps. It changes so often, but it is worth going into the settings and trying to limit the snooping and privacy problems as much as possible.

You should consider what Microsoft Account to link with the computer (if any) in case the laptop is stolen - both so you don’t have your own personal account on there but also so you can use tools like “Find my device” and lock the device remotely.

And if you don’t want to be tech supporting this, then honestly I wouldn’t donate this. It’ll always come back your way unfortunately.

Is it really a generation gap? Would you have wanted to listen to NPR when you were 11? And wouldn’t you have been deliberately snarky to annoy your parents? She obviously knows what a radio is because… you use one every day?

This isn’t a “generation gap”, this is a teenager trying to rile up there parent. Do you tell her that her youtube shows are “godawful”? Because that’s how you get into a coldwar of her pretending she doesn’t know what a radio is to make you feel old.

EDIT: The good news is when she gets out the other side of being a teenager, she might even listen to NPR in the car because that’s what her parents used to do.

“Time to switch to uBlock Lite or another ad blocker”

No. Time to switch to Firefox or derivative such as Librewolf.

This is a good article calling out the true problems with the campaign.

I keep seeing people blame voters, but the only group to blame is the Democratic Party. Parties exist to serve and represent voters, not the other way round.

The Dems failed to address the genuine concerns of their traditional base - primarily the economy - and that left the race open for the Repulicans.

The Democrat message on the economy seemed to basically be “things are not as bad as you think and we’ve already done what was needed”. Instead they focused on abortion and a threat to democracy as the main issues of the election.

Yet for many lower income households, they rent and have been hit doubly hard by inflation. Home owners have been shielded from the rent portion of the cost of living crisis, and experienced less hardship. The dems did not seem to understand that and effectively left the field open for the republicans.

Looking at the numbers, Trump hasn’t significantly grown the Republican vote or if so, it’s a relatively small increase. Yet the Democrat vote is way down on where it was in 2020.

There are lots of other failures on the part of the Dems - allowing Biden to run essentially unchallenged, the leadership aggressively pushing back against concerns about his suitability, Biden waiting until very late to step back and Harris being coronated and having to use Bidens existing campaign. Harris was a decent enough candidate but she was given an impossible task thanks to an out of touch and poorly led party.

The Dems lost this election, rather than Trump winning it.

The in- in inflammable means “to cause to be”. Like indebted or indent. Flammable and inflammable are actually subtly different words, they dont mean exactly the same thing although often used interchangeably now.

Useful to be reminded how many people don’t vote. The polls are always about likely voters; they don’t include those who won’t vote. So the 50:50 split is a nonsense; neither party likely has more than 1/3 of the electorate behind them, with a whole 1/3 disengaged from the whole thing.

I’d recommend video streams from BBC, Sky News and Channel 4 all in the UK. Channel 4 is partnering with CNN for data and shared stories, and their UK election coverage earlier this year was well regarded. TV news in the UK has to be impartial by law so they will not take a side in the election. They will however voice opinions from both sides.

Having said that though all coverage will endlessly speculate all night on what ever result means because that’s the nature of elections and filling air time.

Regarding the Guardian, that is not regulated but it is a good quality broadsheet. It is left leaning and effectively supports Harris but it’s coverage will still be good quality and not as partisan in the style of US media. But expect it to be biased somehwta in Harris’ favour.

This is not open source? There is no license just a statement saying free to use for personal and commercial projects, but don’t redistribute or resell.

This freeware at best but if you contribute to this project it’s not clear who owns the work.

It’s a thought experiment, not an observation. The idea is that if you have infinity and it’s truly random than eventually all possibilities emerge somewhere within that.

The idea of infinite monkeys typing randomly on infinite typewriters is that eventually one of them would accidentally type out all the works of Shakespeare. Many more would type out parts of the works of Shakespeare. And many many many more would type random garbage.

If we then take that forwadd imagine for a moment the multiverse is also infinite and random, then every possible universe would exist somewhere in that multiverse.

It can be taken in other directions too. It’s a way of cocneptualising the implications of infinity and true randomness.

Meanwhile actual Shakespeare had intelligence and wrote and created his works. Him being a monkey writing Shakespeare is just a sly humerous observation, but it has nothing to do with the actual meaning of the thought experiment and the idea it is trying to convey.

A prediction for the 2024 US election

I think from a third party point of view that makes no sense. It’s not for her to prop up the broken electoral system. Harris is essentially the lesser evil in this argument, but the real problem is the electoral system.

Arguably the “better” outcome for third parties is for Harris to win the popular vote and lose the election because of the stupid electoral college system. That may actually get Democrats more serious about electoral reform which would benefit everyone. They’ve already lost twice despite winning the popular vote (Gore and H Clinton). Yet they continue to support broken electoral systems across the country at national and state level as all they care about is Dem vs Rep. Not actual democracy.

The Democrats didn’t even have a proper primary contest in this election, they value democracy so little. They tried to forced Biden on the party and voters and it blew up spectacularly. The party needs a shake up and frankly losing may be better for them than Harris saving them from the party’s own disastrous mismanagement.

I’m no fan of trump, but Americas problems run far deeper and are far more systemic than one election.

The metaverse a resounding failure, Facebook has latched on to the AI hype train in hopes of making the company relevant. They’re basically put of ideas on how to feed the beast of “forever growth” the markets demand.

I don’t have specific experience with the tools you list, however on googling it looks like Ableton Live does work under wine. Wine is what underpins playing windows games on Linux too; it’s very powerful and effective.

You can install Mint into a VM environment on your current PC (such as Virtual Box) and see how you get on with software you really can’t live without. It won’t run as fast as real life in a VM but you should get an idea whether any tools you can’t live without can work.

As for OneDrive there are unofficial clients to get it working with Linux if you want to sync to your local filesystem. However Microsoft doesn’t officially support it beyond Web browsers, so if you want something slick and supported you probably would be better migrating to other solutions. You’d certainly be able to migrate with the unofficial clients but I’m not sure I’d want to rely on them long term as things xna break if Microsoft unilaterally changes something.

There are PPAs with different builds of ffmpeg for Ubuntu. It also depends what codecs are needed as to whether this is even relevant?

Bearing in mind some (many) encoding codec libraries are not installed by default as most people don’t need them but can readily be added from the official repos via apt or synaotic. Each codec is usually provided as a library of its own; ffmpeg is more than just one set of binaries. There is a big difference between an incomplete build and incomplete default install of all available libraries/codecs. Most people don’t need or want every possible encoding codec installed by default.

However some codecs are more strictly licensed and may need to be installed or acquired via different routes - that is the nature or proprietary software (as on Windows).

Which codes are you saying are not available in Ubuntu official repos?

One significant difference that has been missed here is that Laptops can and often do run on the power supply, while phones usually use the power purely to charge the battery.

It’s a significant difference as the laptop needs a stable electricity supply to supply all it’s components or the laptop would crash. That means not only does the brick need to dissipate heat, but it also needs to be able to deliver a stable continuous DC current. So as well as a transformer and rectifier (that together convert AC to the correct DC needed) there are smoothers and potentially capacitors to ensure a smooth continuous output even if the wall supply is janky.

If you turn off the power at the wall / unplug you often see any light on the power brick stay on - that is because of the capacitors and there is still a small amount of energy available to the laptop as it discharges.

While phones are mini computers they are usually designed to always run on the battery. Even when charging, the phone draws it’s power from the battery and it’s in built circuits to smooth the current; there isn’t usually the redundancy in a phone to switch between different supplies in the same way as a laptop. There isn’t also the expectation that they need to run off the wall continuously by users (even if users might plug their phone in and expect to continue to use it, they will find their phone shuts down if its at 0% and they push it beyond what the recharging battery can supply; a laptop would be expected to run solely on the wall not shut off).

Things are blurring now with USB C power supplies for laptops - but you will find the plug itself has more of the electronics built in or some of the functions of the power brick have moved into the laptop to reduce charger bulkiness. Look at how bulky a USB c charger plug is for a Mac - they’re not simple USB chargers you’d use for a phone or tablet, they’re bulky because they are also doing the smoothing and stabilisation people expect for their laptops.

Tl:Dr they’re different sizes because they’re doing different things. Basic chargers purely charges a battery, while laptop chargers both charge a battery and provide good quality supply to keep a laptop running optimally.

Quick FYI - Exa is no longer fully maintained; there is a fork called Eza which is maintained. They couldn’t take over the original Exa repo as the original creator is unreachable. Eza is in many distros; I’ve installed it on OpenSuSe Tumbleweed with ease from the factory-oss.

https://github.com/eza-community/eza

Get a step counter and aim for 10,000 steps a day. First it makes you aware of how much (or little) you’re moving each day - you have a real number you can see and a target to aim for. Second it sets you a reasonable goal to achieve every day no matter how you’re feeling.

It’s good for your mental health as well as physical health. There is good evidence that people who do the equivalent of 10,000 steps a day are generally healthier on many metrics, and the benefits plateau at around 10k. And on a bad day, going out for a walk to hit your 10k can make a huge difference to your mental health.

It’s a simple, achievable but impactful lifestyle change that almosr anyone can make.

Edit: while you can get a step counter on your phone (including privacy apps like Pedometer on F-droid), I’d go for a dedicated clip on simple counter. There is something about a physical object dedicated to the task that makes a difference to me sticking to it. Also if you walk around without your phone a clip on device will keep on counting.

For the Flatpak apt upgrade how about “flapt”.