According to the best school playground scientists of the time, opening a packet of crisps upside down (i.e. so the branding/writing is upside down, and you open the bottom of the packet, at the top) actually “made you gay”.

It wasn’t just gay if you did it, but it would literally cause a spontaneous eruption of gayness in whoever did it - who would be permanently gay from that point onwards.

In the 1990s in the UK, it was gay to wear a backpack using both shoulder straps (as opposed to using one strap over one shoulder, which was the heterosexual way to carry things to school).

I genuinely didn’t realise that! It looked like they were missing, and just had the little nubs underneath.

Would you perhaps like to imagine they were missing, if only for the sake of my previous comment? :)

How often do you write the word “wads”? I can see a potential problem.

All three of ours play fetch, but only with specific objects. They’re all brothers about 2½ years old.

The tabby cat plays fetch with fluffy toy balls with feathers on them, the grey cat plays fetch with spare cat collars and the little black cat plays fetch with menthol sweet wrappers.

I miss lovely, earthy, warm, friendly chocolatey Brownbuntu.

I always felt purplebuntu was a bit vile.

I might be wrong, but wasn’t Movit just for timeline preview, and hadn’t worked properly for quite a few versions and now you just use the NVENC/VAAPI etc export profiles to export with GPU?

I’m sure it’s not possible for everyone - but I essentially did this some years back - though more with Premiere than Photoshop - and therefore more Cinelerra/Kdenlive than Gimp/Krita.

I ran a dual boot system from about 2008 until about 2015. If it could be done in Linux/FOSS, it was. If it couldn’t, it was done in Windows/Adobe software.

I was self-employed, though I often did subcontracting work for a handful of media/umbrella organisations - so sometimes I had to use Premiere or Sony Vegas to carry on half-done projects I was handed.

Bear in mind this was when you bought Adobe software and didn’t rent it - and you could also keep running an older version for years.

Anyway, over time I used the Windows partition less and less, until I got rid of it entirely when I got a new computer.

I had to work a bit harder one year, and I did miss out on a few projects - but mostly, I could do everything I could do previously, but it took a bit longer for a while until I adjusted to a different workflow.

After that, you’re just saying “That’s a £2000 job”, “That’s a £200 job”, and meeting a deadline. Nobody really cares if it took 7 minutes longer to do, and I saved a lot of time not using Windows any more.

Editing (and other design stuff) is a far smaller part of my overall work these days, but I still do a good chunk of projects over the year, and I’ve been 100% Linux for almost 10 years. No regrets.

To a degree, yes, but don’t expect magic. Some laptops have a waterproof membrane under the keyboard, so if you’re lucky, and it does, you may be able to just pop the keys off and dry the membrane out, and make sure no liquid creeps round the side into the electronics.

Otherwise you may have better odds if you open up the case and mop up any/all loose liquid you can get to with a microfibre cloth, as soon as possible, then try and let it air dry for a while.

A sealed bag with dried rice and your electronic object may absorb a bit of leftover moisture, but only to the extent that it will equal the moisture level in the sealed bag - the dried rice will gain a little extra moisture, the object will lose that bit of extra moisture.

Try to resist the urge to turn it on to check if it’s working until you’ve got all the moisture out.

It’s a good plan for a more professional setup, but in this distinctly unprofessional setup, if I did it remotely, I wouldn’t get my chat and a cup of tea and biscuit :)

I can’t personally, but I’ve installed/set up Linux systems for quite a lot of older people, and I think only one of them ever uses the terminal for anything. The rest just… use the computer.

On the whole, they’re pretty much just using Libreoffice, Firefox and a few other bits these days. If something needs the terminal to fix, we’re already past the point where they’ve phoned me to pop round and fix it.

These used to be Ubuntu systems, but I switched them all to Mint after having endless Snap permission problems with printers, USB sticks and other peripherals. Once up and running, it’s pretty low maintenance.

I guess they don’t need to use the terminal, because I’ll go and do it if it’s necessary - but we are looking at once every few years. Not a lot of tech support needed.

On my own machine, I probably use the terminal every day.

You’re totally right for brand new kit, but for older kit I’ve found that’s swung hard in the opposite direction.

For example, I was trying to help someone at the weekend setting up some old audio kit, a few printers and a slide scanner on their mac system, and it was a nightmare, and half of it’s still not working.

You’re constantly getting stuck with "this device only works with these 3 versions of this software and those versions of software only works on these versions of MacOS and these versions of MacOS only work with these models of Mac.

When I tested the devices on my laptop (Linux Mint), everything was detected instantly and worked with several different pieces of software (at least as far as you can test in a few minutes).

As said, I get that’s not the case with newest kit, or kit that requires special proprietary software, but for a lot of older equipment, I absolutely can’t fault it.

Do you know any of the following:

• what’s the WiFi card in it?
• what’s the laptop?
• what kernel version are you using?

For an easy GUI way to find these, you can go to the

bottom-left menu > administration > system reports

Then go to the System Information tab.

You should have the kernel i.e. 6.3.0-39-generic at the top

Scroll down, and under network you should have something like Device-1 Realtek RTL8111/8168/8411 - that’ll be the WiFi card.

In case you didn’t know, the Kernel contains drivers for things like WiFi and other devices.

An older kernel tends to be more stable (the bugs have been fixed) - but it cannot contain the drivers for devices that didn’t exist at the time.

By default, Mint is likely using the kernel 5.15, from 2022. If your WiFi device is newer than 2022, it won’t work yet. However, you can install a newer kernel (mine, above is 6.3.0). I had to do this to get the WiFi working on my Thinkpad p14s. This is quite simple and safe to do, and completely reversible if there are problems.

There’s a chance if the WiFi card is particularly new or obscure, that it won’t work at all currently. We’re waiting on the company, or more likely a talented volunteer, to write the drivers.

In this case, you may need to buy a USB WiFi adapter, for example TP-Link USB Wifi. I had to do this with my Dad’s laptop recently. Within the next year, he probably won’t need it anymore, as the drivers for the internal one will likely exist.

You’re probably aware already, but others reading this might be interested that you can access the same format conversion with Handbrake and WinFF if you prefer GUI tools. Remember your settings once and save them as a preset.

Nicely done :)

Not the easiest thing to find, but there is a site for templates and stuff here: kdenlive templates.

There’s not loads on it, and quality may vary. Note that quite a few of these are more like snippets of a project to copy and paste in, so might take a bit of fiddling to get running, compared to just picking “swooshy title #3” and putting your own text in it - but in some form it exists at least :)

I get what you mean - it’s quite “roll your own” rather than “pre-made” - and the same for quite a few of the effects and motion settings.

Note that you can save template versions of effects or motion settings if you need, so after you’ve used it a while, you might have a reasonable library of things you need - but you’re right, there’s a bit of a lack of “drop in, ready to go”, particularly for quick titles.

Something like a “jiggly funky colourful text shaking about” effect can be a day’s work, rather than a 2 minute “write your own text with this pre-made sequence”.

Just in case they’re useful, there are a set of downloadable templates Kdenlive downloadable titles here, but I’m not sure it’s quite going to cover what you’re after - but worth a browse in case.

Very interested to hear about Glaxnimate - I’d not heard of that one and will definitely have a look - thanks for bringing it to our attention :)

It might be quite hard to give full tutorials - I suppose it depends a little on what you’re trying to do - and are your titles intro sequences or other onscreen graphics etc?

The titler within Kdenlive is perfectly functional for static text/shape work, but you may find it easier to produce things externally - I certainly found myself producing the majority of titles in Inkscape - both onscreen graphics and intro pages etc. Basic stuff, i just put the full page in, faded in and out as appropriate. Kdenlive will take SVG and PNG, so you’ve got transparency for different layers of title component.

For bits with moving/sliding/fading components (like in an interview, a coloured bar slides onto the screen in the bottom left, then the person’s name fades in, then their position/workplace fades in, then it all fades out together) - I’d do those with individual components in Inkscape, imported as separate svg files and layered up in Kdenlive, then individually positioned, cut and faded in/out as separate clips (My timelines are normally 8-10 tracks high).

More complex motion graphic work I used to render out in Blender, but I think these days I’d probably use Natron for some of it.

Also, copy and paste as much as possible - work with reusable templates where you can.

If you’ve got a better idea of what sort of thing you’re aiming for (maybe an example of what you want to (re)create?) - I might be able to offer a few pointers at least :)

Brilliant - I’ll have to have a look at Shotcut again. It used to be quite “crashy”, but it’s been in solid continual development for a few years now.