My man.

Most of my listening is also done over headphones, and I admit that my library is all in mp3 format. As much as I love optical media, it’s because I can rip my discs to my machine in whatever quality and format I want, then never have to handle them again unless all my copies are deleted. This preserves the discs.

I have a portable CD player from, and I use the term portalble liberally because while it can accept six AA batteries for a power source, it also has no anti-skip because it was made in 1991.

But what I love about this thing is how much of an occasion it makes the listening experience. Handling the discs carefully so as not to smudge or scratch them. Waiting for it to spin up and start playing. And just sitting there and intentionally listening to it. It’s kind of magical. Even more so with a decent set of cans and a dark room.

Mazda3 is an excellent car to have. My brother used to have an '08 Mazda3 hatch until it was totaled by a drunk driver. He wasn’t in the car. It was parked on the side of the road. Really cool car, and the 2.3 is probably one of the most underrated engines out there. They really pack a punch.

I don’t necessarily have a thing against automatics. My beef is more with the fact that manuals aren’t really an option anymore. I said in another comment that my real cars are a '97 Honda Prelude and a '12 Civic. I did daily the Prelude for six months when the starter died in my Civic, but the Prelude is really only a weekend car because it does maybe 25 mpg and takes premium fuel. My Civic does 40 without trying and E10 costs about $1.40 less per gallon where I am. My Civic is an auto, and I’m fine with it. Automatic just feels boring to me. I really enjoy having something to do with all four limbs at once.

If I ever feel like dropping money on a newer car, I’ve always loved the idea of a manual midsize sedan. I know the Accord could be had with a six speed manual all the way until like 2021, which is bonkers to me since Toyota stopped making the manual Camry in 2006. I think my only other option in this very specific segment is a BMW 3-series, and I just can’t picture myself in a Bimmer.

Anything brakes is always so stressful. If anything else fails, you can probably still get the 3,000 pound metal death box to stop. But if your BRAKES fail? Yeah, just pull the hand brake and try not to cry too much. I basically rebuilt the rear brakes on my Civic last month. It has 147,000 miles on it and was running on original brake shoes. And because I’d waited until they started grinding, the drums couldn’t be resurfaced, either. So I went all in and got new hardware and cylinders, too. I’d so much rather do disc brakes than drum brakes. Those springs are such a pain, and Honda made them really weird. Not to mention my hammer was entirely too small for the job of literally beating the brakes off the thing lol 2012 was the last year the Civic LX had drum brakes of any kind. I’m fine with drums. They really do last forever if you’re not a monster on the brake pedal. I’m just glad I won’t be doing brake shoes again for at least another 7-10 years.

My wife points out every new gray hair in my beard. One day, there will be so many new ones at once that she’ll have to stop counting. For now, it’s really cute. I love it.

I used to be so excited about a everything-digital during my teenage years. Now I look at my mechanical tools with joy, and become suspicious of anything not having an open firmware.

Me too, friend. Generational leaps were so cool when I was a kid. Now that I’m in my thirties, I just see it all as a rent-a-spy.

At this point, even my printer is suspect. It stays unplugged until it’s needed.

But the phone? It’s a shame the telephone is always listening.

I was using a mix of debian servers, arch thinkpads and macos macbooks at the point where I moved everything to NixOS (macbooks did not survive this transition and were donated due to never working properly because of t2 issues).

Nix is extremely hard. I mean, don’t get me wrong, initial setup is easy, adding and updating packages is the easiest experience between all package managers out there, nixpkgs is overpowered as it has almost all the software that exists since there are no conflicting dependencies in nix. Getting something that is not in nixpkgs to run is impossible for a beginner (nixpkgs has steam-run to partially solve this, but results may vary). Getting to the point where a tornado may pass through your home and destroy all the hardware inside, and the whole recovery process from that point is about 20 minutes of your time, including the trip to the store for new hardware, requires significant effort, both time and mental, that most of us don’t have. But the entire point is that it is possible with Nix!

If Debian is like owning a 90s Corolla, NixOS is like owning a factory that can make any car you like. You can choose to get a 90s Corolla, you can choose to get a newer Corolla, you can skip corollas entirely and make something new and fast. When the new and fast thing breaks, you can make a new car or go back to the Corolla. The Corolla comes completely ready to use by you from the production line. If you need to adjust the mirrors, you just make a new car with the correct mirrors setup. All the cars you make after that will come with the mirrors setup how you like them, because that is now a part of the manufacturing instructions the factory has.

The only caveat is that factory gets updates every 6 months and then your car building pipeline may break when you get the update. In three years I’ve been using nixos fixing those took about 5 minutes and usually boiled down to stuff like ‘previously we had a list of car colors, passed as a string, now the factory expects to get a hex color code’.

Judging by the commit history, I moved most of my machines to NixOS after about 6 months building my config, then, 8 months later I rebuilt the entire thing from scratch when I understood nix enough to make everything truly modular.

I really doubt that once you’ve embraced NixOS you’d be tempted to use anything else or try LFS. NixOS is beautiful. NixOS just works (after 6 months of setup).

Seems like I skipped the whole pipeline amd went straight from Rasbpian to debian :p
I tried a bit of mint but it was too annoying to get something to run and bailed.

I went straight from Ubuntu to Debian. It still took me a little bit to go from GNOME to KDE. I would not recommend new Linux users go straight to Debian from their first distro, but I’d been using Ubuntu on and off again since 2012 so when I decided to leave Windows in 2024, I also decided to leave Ubuntu for good and went straight to Debian. The idea that I set it and forget it and never have to worry about it was (and is) so appealing to me.

I’ve considered running Slack on my laptop, though.

I also ditched my “dumb” thermostats but went the DIY route. I put at least one temp sensor in each room/zone. Then switched out the actual thermostats with hard-wired Shelly relays from ameridroid. Everything is in a Zigbee network governed by “Better Thermostat” in Home Assistant.

A bit more work, yes, but everything stays local, I have all heating and cooling in one dashboard customized to my preferences, and the system is modular and extendable - next will be further automation with open door and window sensors + better presence detection.

honestly man…it’s not a bad decision. I for a long time didn’t give Debian the time of day. Now i’m daily driving OpenBSD and I use a Debian VM on it for certain dev work (mainly builds and deploys) and then on my second NVME I first went with Bazzite to do gaming but then I changed my mind and was like “meh, debian” and it’s solid. it’s good. it stays out of my way for what I want to do on it which isn’t much.

It’s a decent distro that’s just kinda there and you don’t have to worry about it.

I use arch linux and drive a 2001 sebring i found abandoned. My internet is a hotspot and i have 3 powerstrips hooked into a single outlet