That’s awesome. My 1993 self is very envious of your rig.

I have not been able to find the case again since. It was a local shop that built it from parts, so it was not a big brand. I didn’t pick the parts either, since I knew nothing about PCs at the time, and it showed lol.

Edit: it was a white/beige mini tower. If I recall correctly, it was similar to a lot of cases at the time, with a black band across and a circular button on the right. The turbo and reset buttons were pink and teal in the shape of triangles. I purchased it in 1992 when I needed a PC for college.

I had the exact same configuration. 4MB RAM upgraded to 8MB. 40MB HDD upgraded to 200MB later. And the fugliest case with triangular pastel buttons you ever saw. Ran Windows 3.11 then Slackware Linux on that for many years.

Mod_perl. Now there is a name I haven’t heard in a long time. My paralysis demon appreciates your triggering my PTSD.

You’re not wrong, but I would rather OP seek any qualified medical care than none, even if all they do is refer them to the ER.

Consider going to a walk in clinic. If it’s nothing serious, you pay 100-200 and you’re on your way. If you go to the ER and it’s nothing serious, your insurance may deduct you hundreds more (my ER copay is $500 and I have great insurance).

If it is serious, the walk in will tell you to go to the ER. In that case, the insurance may waive the ER copay. While it is true they can’t deny you care, this system of expensive ER copay was presumably put in place to stop people using the ER to provide free care. Check your insurance policy (preferably before you get sick). I believe some places also have free clinics, but I would expect them to be pretty crowded.

Good luck OP. This sounds serious and you need to take care of your health. Try to find a way you can at least get some real qualified medical advice, even if you seemingly recovered this time.

First: you’ve done good, raising a kid that asks for your permission first.

Second: realize that this comes from peer pressure, them wanting a space away from parental supervision. If you truly want to make your kids savvy about the Internet, you need to assume they will eventually encounter seedy places, run into assholes, and be exposed to things like bullying.

Have a conversation: you will encounter these things. Your friends may be into them. But they can have bad effects and here is how you avoid it and how to deal if it happens to you. Talk about keeping private information private.

Be open and non-judgemental. You want them to feel safe coming to you for advice.

Be truthful and stay credible. Keep up with what’s out there, but don’t just buy into the latest Tiktok scare.

Talk to your kids about stuff they found that was cool or scary.

Embarrass them by using memes incorrectly.

Setting up a mastodon instance may be cool at first, but their friends are going to think it’s lame with the supervision. You could still do it for a number of other reasons, but it won’t prepare them for the ugly Internet.

Source: me, a parent.

I’m not a doctor or pharmacist, so I can’t give you medical advice, but if I were you I would contact your doctor’s office and ask.

Sometimes pharmacists can recommend an exchange, but it’s best to first check with your doctor. Typically it’s just a matter of getting a generic or different brand, but they will know best what the options are. It can be a headache though if one option is covered and one is not. You will have to check with your insurance company to find out if it is covered. Doctors don’t know the details of your plan and could end up prescribing something not covered. Pharmacists can often help with finding drugs that are interchangeable.

Not sure if it’s an overall increase, but you can always search the FDA drug shortages database.

This is a great answer. I will just add that KDE in general exposes more settings in the UI than stock Gnome (but Gnome Tweaks is a thing). If you are the kind if user that just sticks with the defaults, Gnome is probably less confusing to use and what I recommend, but I personally prefer KDE because I like to tweak things.

I know it’s ELI5, but this is a common misconception and will lead you astray. They do not have the same level of isolation, and they have very different purposes.

For example, containers are disposable cattle. You don’t backup containers. You backup volumes and configuration, but not containers.

Containers share the kernel with the host, so your container needs to be compatible with the host (though most dependencies are packaged with images).

For self hosting maybe the difference doesn’t matter much, but there is a difference.

The closest official thing in the US is Labor Day in September. Most people forget it is a workers rights day, though.

From Wikipedia:

More than 150 other countries celebrate International Workers’ Day on May 1, the European holiday of May Day. May Day was chosen by the Second International of socialist and communist parties to commemorate the general labor strike in the United States and events leading to the Haymarket affair, which occurred in Chicago, Illinois, from May 1 – May 4, 1886.

I’m going to interpret “too long” as “longer than I expected”. To that I world say the sudden loss of a college friend that I, to be honest, failed to keep in contact with. Still miss that guy.

I take some comfort in that by the time he died, he had turned from being an outcast and victim of bullying to having three wonderful children with a beautiful and loving wife.

Oof. I hope you’re doing better now.

A heart attack. A sense of impending doom can be a sign of a heart attack. Health line article

That’s a great tip! It turns out I must have already tried some of that. I found multiple settings in about:config. Anything with a file picker works (open, save as), but the “open folder” from the Downloads dialog must just not use xdg-open, since none of the settings had an effect on that. It’s not the end of the world, but it would be nice to have my Dolphin bookmarks and places.

Edit: Adding this here in case someone in the future finds this searching for the problem. It looks like I’m bitten by the bug described in comment 55 (near the bottom) of this Firefox bug report. TL;DR: it works if I have Dolphin open already, but if not, it starts Nautilus. While this isn’t great, at least I have a workaround.

See if a light weight kubernetes installation is for you. Secrets are first class citizens in k8s. You can maintain secrets in a number of different ways, but they are exposed to containers the same way. They can become files or environment variables, whether you need.

I recommend looking at k3s to run on your Pi and see if that works for you. You can add vault software on top of that later without changing your containers.

Thank you for replying, very informative. I think I have most of the actions/types I wanted associated with my preferred ones now. The most noticeable one is Firefox when I open downloads from the menu. I’m not sure if Firefox uses xdg or not? I don’t mind GTK or Gnome at all, in fact I probably have spent more time on Gnome, but I do like when things are consistent.

Looking forward to this. I do have a question for the more seasoned people here: I installed Fedora 41 not too long after its release on a new PC, which has been my daily driver every since. Very happy with it, tweaked everything to my liking. However, by mistake I installed Workstation (with Gnome) and then switched to my preferred KDE Plasma as the DE. This has left some corners of my system with the Gnome look and feel, which is fine, but I prefer if it were more consistent.

My question:

1. Can I/do you recommend that I upgrade Fedora in place? I prefer this if it means I don’t have to reinstall everything.
2. Or do you recommend I do a fresh install anyway for a clean upgrade and at the same time clean up my DE? What is the least disruptive way to do this?

Are you telling me Beowulf clusters are back?

Jokes aside, it depends what you want to do. You can’t really build one powerful gaming PC out of multiple, but your can run parallel workloads in a number of different ways. What exactly, comes down to what you’re doing. A kubernetes cluster is different from a Blender render farm, for example.

As others mentioned you can just remote into the servers with ssh, vnc, rdp, etc. if you want physical displays on them, you can look for a cheap KVM which lets you control multiple PCs with one keyboard, monitor, and mouse.