Lots of places do a better job providing DRM free or DRM Lite ebooks (Chicago press only ties your name to the files so you’d have to doxx yourself to share it, but you can share it), but the sheer library of self published books on Amazon is hard to find.

There’s an author I’ve become good friends with who I pay him (in coffee) for his books because I disagree with giving Amazon a cent. But he noted that’s just where the masses are still and it’s hard to break that momentum.

Personally I’m a huge fan of the Alcoholics Anonymous understanding of “god” and I think it applies more widely.

In AA it is supposed to be A-religious so as to accommodate as many people as possible. To them, god is whatever higher power you need to put your faith into to do better. An entity who you are striving to make proud or you are asking for guidance or help, etc.

This genericized god idea kinda gives up the game to me as an atheist, but it doesn’t mean it’s bad. In fact it’s made me believe in god as an idea.

There are plenty of studies on “manifesting” goals and how saying out loud to yourself or to someone at all substantially increases your chance of succeeding in your goal. This is just prayer or a magic spell or whatever else you wanna call it. I call it a ritual.

The fact that god is a made up idea has been uncontested in my mind for eons, however the psychological power of a belief in god is new to me and makes me appreciate the systems of religion more (doesn’t excuse a lot of their bullshit).

I mean you can always use the web version of office for 'free" with a Microsoft account. There’s a 100% chance your paper gets used to train AI but still

What’s happening in Ukraine sucks

That doesn’t contradict the sentiment that borders are generally arbitrary lines designed to divide us.

Using a Russian sure to get free books doesn’t hurt Ukraine unless these are all like infected with Russian turbo malware or something

The biggest perk for me for a dedicated NAS is redundancy and hot swap ability.

It is inevitable that a few of your spinning disks will die and need to be replaced, a proper dedicated NAS box will let you pop out and swap that drive and then the NAS software will rebuild the array for you with no data loss.

Obviously you can do most all of this with a normal desktop, but it’s generally easier with the right hardware.

I custom built mine running Truenas which was way cheaper then a dedicated NAS, but also I’m an IT turbo nerd so I wanted to do the whole thing myself.

Most of the address and numbers they do have are off or old.

I moved through a lot of places in college and one of those 5 are usually what shows up.

Now that I think about it I did used to sign up for a bunch of religious mailing lists before I would leave an apartment because I thought it was funny.

Online book clubs are kind of a thing.

Welcome to Lemmy, just find a community and start chatting. If it’s dead/empty, start filling it.

I try to open myself up to people as best I can here and on Mastodon just because we’re pretty used to the algorithm TM deciding who we talk to or where we engage for a long time now and I don’t think we are collectively ready to have non-hostile “discussions” in that we just don’t know how to do it.

What’s been on your mind? If you don’t wanna share here try the casual conversations community. They might be better to receive you.

I took 5 years to consecutively not get a degree and I’m about to go back to finish 5 years later.

Yeah it sticks not graduating with the people you started with, but that really isn’t any more of a signifier of success or failure than graduating at all.

Sometimes things happen and at that point everyone is mature enough to but be a dick.

Couple things

1. Start applying for things you’re not sure and you know you aren’t qualified for. Often recruiters or HR people don’t actually know what the fuck the job needs and just sorta copies similar job titles recs. Once you’re able to talk to the actual hiring manager, then you can see if you’re a good culture fit and if they can give you some on the job training.

2. Get a job at something not really what you wanna do but feels related enough. For me, my big break into my career was working at a call center for a hospital. It was not IT related, but it got me office experience that I spun into IT experience.

This is something I tell people all the time. It’s just as easy to troubleshoot on Linux as it is on Windows the biggest issue is that most people are just kinda innately aware of Windows troubleshooting by virtue of the fact that they’ve been doing it for so long. Linux is probably just as complicated skill wise, but most people just aren’t used to it yet.

And that’s especially true for gamers. If you’ve gone through the dance of tweaking BIOS settings or DDU removing drivers and reinstalling them, then you’re probably gonna do fine on Linux. The only difference is sometimes there won’t be a GUI you have to go hunt down. It will be like 3 commands someone has already written out for you that you copy/paste into the CLI. Which is WAY better in my opinion.

Pop OS

Lots of people were hyping it in 2019/2020 so I thought I’d give it a try as my first real Linux experience. It works great and has a Nvidia driver option when I need that. So I never really tried to switch.

Distro hoping never appealed to me, but I did try Fedora, Manjaro, Mint, Ubuntu, and Debian 12.

I use Kali for work and considered swapping to XFCE DE but pop is fine.

No bro! I promise bro! It’s just because Michaelsoft isnt tracking and indexing that info. I promise this next micromanaging software won’t be as bad! The next one will be as good as teams bro! I promise!

The best punishment is undoing their damage and teaching their sins to future generations as a warning.

And using their Graves as a gender neutral bathroom when we wanna scratch the sadistic justice itch