I’ve been using Debian MATE. It’s mostly ok.

I use Thunderbird and hate it. Full of bugs and cramdowns (not sure what the right term is) where they make a bad setting that you can’t undo. Also too difficult to find too many things. And way too many non-mail features. I haven’t bothered seeking a good alternative but Thunderbird leaves a lot to be desired. Forking isn’t likely to help much. It needs total replacement.

Actual difficult instances of TSP are pretty rare, and for something like Uber Eats, it’s fine if your route is 2% worse than the mathematical optimum. Traffic fluctuations probably matter more than having the shortest route.

There are many good heuristics for TSP that might not give you the optimal solution, but that will generally come pretty close. The Wikipedia article probably describes some of these.

Your own damn blog that you host yourself. We don’t like spam here.

Changing employment status is a qualifying event or whatever it’s called, so assuming the company offers its employees coverage immediately on hiring (not all do), you shouldn’t have to wait for open enrollment. However, while health coverage is a common benefit of employment, it’s not universal and policies vary by employer. That is: ask the company, or if for some reason you don’t want to ask, get a copy of the employee handbook, maybe by asking one of your co-workers for it. The info for the particular company is likely to be in there.

At the dr’s office the idea is generally sit down and relax for a few moments, if you have gotten exerted by walking up stairs or whatever. Otherwise there’s not much special. The main difference is they usually have a nurse take your blood pressure with a manual squeeze bulb device, using a stethoscope to listen to your pulse underneath the cuff. This is more accurate than using an automatic pushbutton monitor like most people use at home. The pushbutton monitors work somewhat differently and inherently lose accuracy from that.

I don’t know if it’s possible to take your own blood pressure with the manual gizmo. You might need another person to do it (unless you’re one of those rare and exceptional people with three arms), and they have to know how. It’s not rocket science but it’s more complicated than pressing a button. There are online instructions and youtube vids showing how to do it, I’m sure.

It might be possible to build a fancier machine that does the manual-style measurement automatically, but it would be more expensive than the typical kind.

This is spammy and AI-style long winded. I didn’t read much. A shorter version without the advertising would be more useful.

The usual way to stay mostly private is just set up a corporation and bill through it. Here in California the annual fees are enough to be annoying but in other states they are very low. I once played with the idea of offering “company as a service” that would do everything for you online, but meh.

Schedule a meeting in a conference room with the one you want to talk to. Just you and the other person.

You will need a fast ship to evade the border patrols. May I suggest the Falcon here. She did the Kessel run in just twelve parsecs.

Never used any of them and get even more glad of it with passing time.

I was just looking through old books and noticing my Yggdrasil manual the other day. That was one of the earliest plug and go cd-rom distributions. Before that was e.g. Slackware and the early Debian, both of which involved big piles of floppies. I also remember sending Linus an email and getting an answer. I’m sure he is too much of a busy celebrity for that now.

Cheap VPS. Look on lowendspirit.com for products and culture about them.

I’m still driving mine and would be very reluctant to swap it for a modern enshittified car. I sometimes think of homebrewing my next car (DIY EV conversion of an older ICE car) rather than put up with any manufacturer’s offerings. Who knows.

Noo, really, idk what Disco was but tags and recommendations from other humans are plenty to find good AO3 fic to read. And AO3 itself has been getting hammered for months, presumably by corporate AI crawlers. A recommendation engine would also have to crawl AO3. That’s very difficult to do because of said hammering. Even the regular download feature barely works now if you use fanficfare for it.

Borg is a backup program not a synchronizer. Backing up to mutliple targets just means running a normal backup to target 1, then another to target 2, etc. Maybe what you really want is git. There are also some self-hosted multi-access notepad programs, sort of like how google docs work. Anyway if your problem requires a server or synchronization, look into self-hosting rather than some cloud thing.

It’s hard to understand what you want. Why multiple devices? Why remote storage? Why not just use your laptop with local storage and encrypted backups? If you must have remote storage, why not self-host it on a cheap VPS? Just who are you trying to protect your data from? It’s a lot different if you think Trump is after you or something like that: you have to check your bed for microphones, rather than just worrying about your computer software.

So far I’m satisfied with just using my laptop for personal files, but if I were more paranoid I’d set up a separate laptop with no internet and take some additional precautions besides that. Anyway, the more machines you use, the more potential security holes you have to deal with.

Multiple backups is just a matter of running a script that backs up to more than one place, right? I use Borg for backup, and pointing it to multiple targets is pretty easy.

Yeah a buddy of mine (not rich) has one and seems to like it. It’s the big style not the Moto Razr style. It’s like two normal sized smartphones folded together, so when you open it you get a big roughly square screen about 6 inches on a side. About 2x the area of a normal phone screen. It’s a Samsung, idk what model or what it cost. It looks nice. No idea about fragility. If you have a question I can relay it to him.

Gamed by special interests just like they already are in the states that have them.

You can get that much ram for 5k but maybe not in the densest modules. So you need a mobo with 2x as many socke5, raising costs again. I might look into it but I have trouble thinking of applications that can use so much ram. 256gb is quite easy to do and is also a lot.

Last I saw you had to use super premium ultra dense memory modules to get 1tb into a motherboard. Maybe that’s less so now. But the hope would be to use commodity ram and CPUs etc. 10k for a 1tb system is pretty good. Last I looked it was a lot more.