Mainly once, if you dont count prehistoric versions

Hah. I made it work enough to do my work, and handed it in as soon as I was done

I remember some linux laptops my employer handed out to devs that absolutely needed them. Horrendously outdated and misconfigured, half-assed ports of the company software, you had to have a second laptop to read the knowledge base if it broke again. Not fun. Imagine all the shitshow of corporate windows, but with 1/100th the budget.

May I also recommend dusting off the old pirate hat?

Oh, and group policies. I could not work on a system without turning all sorts of shit off in gpedit.

I wanted to check if everything worked correctly out of the box (and not have trouble with any warranty if it didn’t), and doing the initial round of bios updates was easier on windows. So, I booted to windows, played around a bit, and then installed Linux.

Let me open a random online computer shop here in Central Europe, and I am greeted with this:

Ranging from shit-tier 300€ office and youtube machine to 1k€ entry-level macbook. Sure, it’s no thinkpad carbon pro ultra leet, but face it, most people don’t buy that (or buy that used)

Not too many, with today’s stupid websites. Plus a bunch of large tools, IDEs, Ghidra, a few containers… it adds up :(

Good for you, I have 32g and if I do too many things at once, the oom killer will stalk my tabs

Maybe stop shouting, some of us try to sleep here!

that’s also something I won’t get over.

Not when you keep repeating that to yourself. Shit sucks, shit will suck for a while, but shit won’t suck forever. It is okay to grief and be sad about good things. But life has to go on. Do things, meet people, force yourself to do it.

It will get better, period. Right now, it feels like it won’t. But you are already reaching out here, that is working on getting better. Keep doing it, and in the meantime, head up, chest out, carry on.

Wtf, how is food more expensive over there?? It’s been a while since I was in eastern Europe, but shouldn’t basic food be way cheaper?

From a fellow German: where are you now? Worse but more expensive food, I am guessing US?

I am assuming as low as possible means not eating huge amounts of sugar, not going into hypoglycemia regularly ;)

I did some stupid things, broke a few bones. It is mostly fine, but mostly fine is not 100% fine, and some days I notice. Things accumulate. But that is not an excuse. I had a boss once that looked like he’d be able to bench-press half the office and complained about too many women hitting on him. I had a teacher who was at least approaching 50 and whose ideal holiday was spending more time on a bike than off. It’s never too late for that.

Roughly the same age here. Sure, some minor issues start to accumulate. I broke some stuff that will probably haunt me forever. My teeth had some issues earlier. But everything else? I finally started doing enough sport, and the effects are visible in just weeks. No, you should not fall apart, and if you do, it is high time you fix it.

Meat, rice and veggies is literally the definition of a (non-vegetarian) stereotypical healthy meal

It is a history joke, for fuck’s sake. People are just weird these days.

Relative power? A phone and an app that shows you the received signal strength. Wifianalyzer on F-droid for example.

For me, setting it from max power to 6% (lowest value) took it from -30dBm on my couch to -50 dBm, so 20 dB difference, which is ca. 1/100. So it roughly checks out.

Keep in mind that radio waves are magic, and the higher in frequency you go, the darker the magic gets.

Absolute power is hard, especially if you are interested in average power for, like, health concerns. WiFi works in short bursts over a pretty large part of the spectrum, and you’d need calibrated equipment as well. I knew a guy who did radio wave strength mapping for like government, telcos and concerned residents, and he had a car full of tech. Simple field probes can be reasonably priced, but you need to know how to operate and interpret them.

I’ve sold most of my international/US-biased stocks, only keep a few, plus some local company that I know is doing pretty OK.

I replaced it with mostly high-security stuff like the bank savings account or European central bank rate coupled stuff. So I guess I am losing the potential interest?

I am still not sure when to “buy the drop”. I bet that (sadly), the US administration will do more bullshit before it gets better.

I just looked at my router, it supports max transmit power settings somewhere deep in the menu, I just leave it at maximum/automatic.

I know from debugging my wifi drivers on my laptop that at least that one does adjust its power, I am guessing it works with most other modern devices as well.

I live in a 10-ish story apartment building and according to my router, channel utilisation is <20% for both 2.4 and 5 GHz. So, I guess it just works.