Yes, yes it is.

I don’t know about y’all, but I’m trying to find ways to resist what’s coming. They want to fuck us over. Don’t make it easy!

I honestly haven’t noticed a difference.

Me too. I have a Brother printer. When I first set it up, Windows printed everything in inverse black and white until I hunted down the correct driver. Windows also never figured out how to wake it up, so I always had to manually wake it up. And it simply never worked with the scanner.

Linux got everything right without me having to fuss with anything.

I installed Graphene OS. Loving it so far.

I think LLM’s are incredibly useful in limited circumstances. But it needs to be on-demand, NOT omnipresent.

For example, I’m learning a bit of C#. I was following a tutorial a few weeks ago that had some code I didn’t understand. I spent an hour googling and reading documentation, but found nothing. I headed to ChatGPT and asked it what it meant. It gave a clear, easy to understand explanation.

Unfortunately, the industry is going about this all wrong. Google wants to force Gemini on my Pixel. So I nuked Android. Microsoft silently installed Copilot on my laptop without consent. That laptop is now happily running Linux.

Forcing these tools on people will just alienate people like me. In a way, I’m glad it happened. I’m much more satisfied now that these companies are minimized in my life.

This was the push I needed to switch to Graphene. The Gemini offer popped up for me a couple of weeks ago. The only options were something like ‘Yes’ or ‘Not now’. No option to say never, which of course means they would bug me again and again.

So I reported it as Spam and made the jump.

Certainly! Just do something. Consistency matters. The nature of activity you choose is insignificant when you consider doing something, vs. doing nothing.

This was key for me. I spent way too much time working way too hard, like 9 out of 10 exertion. I dreaded just getting started. I’ve now found that I can make better gains working in the 5 to 7 range, and I look forward to my workouts.

Exercise. Exactly how is not important. What matters is just being consistent. Eventually it becomes a habit that will grow with you.

If it’s difficult or frustrating, you’re probably trying too hard. Ease up next time. If it feels like a chore, you’re not doing the right activity for you. It should be enjoyable.

Not necessarily. It varies by manufacturer, and some manufacturers use both methods for the various HD’s they make. Both work just fine, and both have their strengths and weaknesses.

Former industry guy here.

Some HD’s park the head on a plastic ramp at the OD of the platter stack. I don’t see that structure in your picture.

Others park the head on the platter itself. This area is always not usable area, since contact isn’t great for data integrity. This is a simpler solution but comes at the cost of reduced data capacity.

I don’t recall if this park area is on the ID or OD (it’s been a long time), but the position in your picture is reasonable since it would cost less disk area…

Nice work! I’m not an HVAC guy but it looks good to me.