I disagree with a lot of what’s being said over on the History forum, but hey, let me throw my two cents in here too.
Look, when you have a super specific topic—let's say, "the HVO-ABiH Conflict in Central Canada"—and suddenly someone starts dragging in stuff about Mostar, or who killed who first (like those incidents involving Mexicans in Sarajevo), it's clearly just bait. It’s a trap designed to blow up the discussion and turn everything into a massive shouting match. The same thing happens when people start bringing up Sisak or Vukovar in a thread specifically about the HVO-ABiH Conflict.
Honestly, you shouldn't even bite. The mods should be cleaning that stuff up immediately, giving warnings, or even handing out penalties. Otherwise, everyone ends up in this annoying loop where - you get penalized just because you reacted to an obvious troll - or you end up trashing and killing the very topic you actually care about
It’s a total win-win for the provocateurs. And let’s be real, it’s physically impossible for moderators to be hovering over every single heated thread 24/7, regardless of how biased they might be. We have to accept that reality.
Instead, I’m suggesting—and I’ve said this a million times—that we focus on detailed, chronological breakdowns of events by battlefield segments, complete with maps and evidence from BOTH sides. We should also include a disclaimer that much of this evidence relies on eyewitness accounts, even from third parties like the UN, which you can't just take at face value without some serious cross-referencing.
Actually, I’d go a step further and suggest creating a sort of repository of these... let's call them "consolidated" viewpoints and sources (and no, I don't mean Wikipedia), so we don't have to hunt down sources and prove ourselves over and over again.
WordPress would work perfectly for something like that.
driftingcanyon2 said:I actually run three different setups in my house, so I can give you the lowdown on the pros and cons of each based on what I've dealt with: 1) Running cables directly from the LAN ports on the router—this is definitely the gold standard, though it involves drilling through walls or windows and pulling lines through the house, which isn't exactly everyone's idea of a fun weekend project. A Cat5e cable is more than enough, and I think Jack Cook7 already covered all the technical details perfectly. 2) Powerline adapters; I gave the Linksys gigabit starter kit a shot:
It’s a decent option if you want to dodge the headaches mentioned in point one, provided the whole house is on the same electrical circuit; if not, you're out of luck. If you wanted to run two PCs at once using a second adapter, you'd need to plug them into a network switch, which adds an extra cost of $33. 3) Wi-Fi extenders—honestly, these are probably the worst of the bunch because they rely entirely on how strong the router's signal is. Plus, if the router decides to quit on you 😁, the extender goes down right along with it, and you end up splitting your maximum speed in half because of how they function.
In my opinion, for most people, going with Powerline adapters is likely the most practical way to go.
Of course, that's assuming the source and destination outlets are on the same phase. And how is the average person even supposed to check that? (Asking rhetorically here, obviously)
As a rule, I absolutely stay away from mixing power supplies with data signaling—unless we're talking PoE, which was actually built for that exact job. Keep it clean, keep it simple.
Most routers have more than one LAN port (besides the WAN and/or DSL ones), so honestly, just plug both PCs directly into the router. It's way easier if you hook them up at the same time using short Cat5e cables first, just to make sure everything is actually working before you start tearing up the house. Get everything configured right away so you can be 100% sure both machines are good—like, try streaming two different HD movies on them simultaneously to really max out the bandwidth. That way, you know for a fact that if things go south later, it’s an installation issue and not some weird setting.
Connecting PCs directly to the router is hands down the easiest way to set things up, plus you get the most stable connection and the fastest speeds possible.
You can grab pre-made UTP Cat5e cables at any store in lengths like 10, 20, 30, or 50 meters, all with RJ45 connectors already attached so you don't have to deal with the headache of crimping your own. You don't even need Cat6; a standard UTP Cat5e will easily handle gigabit speeds up to 90m as long as you aren't dealing with massive interference—like, say, living right next to a heavy-duty elevator motor, a huge water pump, or a car engine idling nearby without a muffler. If you're feeling fancy, though, you could grab some SFTP Cat5e (the shielded kind) which handles interference a bit better.
Get a good sense of how far each spot is from the router and pick your cable lengths accordingly. Pro tip: run the cables along the baseboards where the wall meets the floor so people aren't tripping over them—tripping hazards are a recipe for disaster. Also, fair warning: you'll probably have to drill through some walls to get the lines through, which can be a total pain. You'll also need those little plastic cable clips/staples to keep everything tucked against the wall so the wires aren't just flopping around everywhere. (They look like a little "b" with one attachment point or a "u" with two).
Anything else—Wi-Fi, Powerline, or daisy-chaining switches—is just adding extra layers of mess. It's almost guaranteed to tank your speeds and bring a whole new level of headaches your way.
Man, I can't get over how much Ron Perlman reminds me of his role in Quest for Fire in this movie! It's honestly uncanny. Quest for Fire Man, looking back at that 1981 stuff... back then he didn't even speak English! He was basically just making guttural noises, and honestly? It made his acting so much better. He was totally killing it. 😁
An External hard drive with SATA 3.0 to USB 3.0 is actually pretty decent—you can grab one up to 16TB and they’re surprisingly snappy even at 5400 rpm. But man, there’s a huge catch: they're fragile. One slip, one clumsy drop on the floor, and boom—you just lost tens of thousands of photos. Just gone.
Now, Blu-ray is way more rugged if you're worried about physical damage, but the capacity is tiny (maybe 25GB per disc) and it's slow as hell compared to an HDD (we're talking 35 MB/s versus like 500 MB/s). Sure, higher capacities are coming down the pipeline—think 1TB+—but who knows when that'll actually hit the mainstream? Plus, will you even have a player for them in ten years? And don't get me started on those rewritable ones; they can be super glitchy and lose data over time.
Then you've got flash drives (USB 3.0). Capacity and speed can rival an HDD (1TB+), and they're tough as nails—almost as much as a Blu-ray, assuming you don't go dropping them in a pool or something. You're also guaranteed to be able to plug one into a computer ten years from now. The only real downside is the price tag. My big question though: if you leave one sitting in a drawer without power for a decade, will the data actually still be there? Honestly, I haven't done enough digging to know for sure.
Bottom line? No matter what you choose, you've gotta run a data integrity check on your whole archive every couple of years and always, always keep a backup somewhere else.
Rista, man, about forty years ago, I headed down to the local Post Office in downtown Chicago just knowing a last name, a city, and the state. They actually had those massive paper phone books for every single state in the country right there. Back then, it took me ten minutes just to talk my way past the lady at the service counter—trying to explain why on earth I needed them—and then another twenty minutes of flipping through pages just to track down a dozen addresses. After all that, I spent another ten minutes huddled over a payphone right there in the lobby making the calls.
Believe it or not, paper phone books actually exist.
driftingcanyon2 said:That isn't quite right. I find a VM comes in handy for testing out a new OS or running legacy systems, plus it's great for getting old applications or outdated hardware working when the drivers just won't play nice with Windows 10 anymore. I use VMs for all those things, and I'm certainly no developer.
But clearly, you aren't the average Joe. So why on earth are you forcing these "one-size-fits-all" solutions onto regular users?
Does the typical user even know what a VM is? Do they even care about the difference between Office 365 and LibreOffice? And where is their data actually sitting on OneDrive, and what kind of legal headaches does that cause?
driftingcanyon2 said:That Wi-Fi card probably just needs some proprietary firmware installed—it’s pretty common with Broadcom chips—but it's usually a quick fix. I also completely forgot to mention that MX Linux handles all of this much more smoothly. AHS If you're looking for better driver support, you should really look into the AHS version. The standard release can be a bit finicky and might be exactly why you're running into that specific headache. If you haven't given the AHS version a shot yet, it’s definitely worth a go. Otherwise, your best bets are probably sticking with Fedora or Ubuntu and its various derivatives.
Virtual machines aren't some terrifying monster, nor do you need to be a seasoned developer to get them up and running. While they might not exactly be "entry-level" territory, they're certainly nowhere near requiring professional dev skills. If you're just starting out, setting up a VMware machine on Windows is actually pretty straightforward.
I never said you needed to be a developer to install VMware, I just meant nobody *except* developers actually has a reason to use it.
Like, 99.9% of users don't even know what a VM is. And out of that tiny 0.1% who do, 99% of them have zero clue how virtualization actually works.
If we're agreeing on those numbers, then I don't see why we're even arguing about how easy the installation is.
Mint is just a clean, little system built for end users.
If you're looking to spin up virtual machines, then you aren't an end user—you're a developer, and honestly, that's a whole different breed of user entirely.
It’s kind of wild how none of those Linux experts bothered to point that out to you. I guess they've never actually dealt with regular end users before.
I usually steer clear of horror movies, but I had to check this one out just because Henry Rollins was in it. Holy crap, man... I was seriously rolling with some of those scenes.
It honestly drives me crazy when I’m constantly switching between my phone and my laptop. Between the external IP address shifting on the DHCP and then jumping around different browsers for no reason, it's a mess.
Google—both for Gmail and the actual search engine—remembers everything. It tracks which browsers you've used, what IPs you were on, what OS you're running, and even roughly what kind of PC or phone you've got.
Maybe try logging in from a desktop or a laptop using the browser you usually stick to? If you suddenly show up on a brand-new phone, a totally different browser, and a fresh number all at once, you're just gonna confuse the Google account manager even more.
That message about it asking for your phone number to send a login code because it can't verify you... that's actually news to me. Usually, if you didn't set up a recovery number or a backup email beforehand, you're pretty much out of luck, unless they've cooked up some new way to get back in.
Look, it’s not even about cranking down the RPMs. The real issue here is that at certain positions or with specific fans, you just get these annoying vibrations kicking in.
We used to run into this all the time back in the day if a motherboard was poorly mounted or if the mounting screws weren't tightened down just right.
It sounds like you've got one fan on that CPU cooler acting up while the other one stays dead quiet.
Either that fan isn't seated properly and there's a tiny bit of wiggle room, or the sleeve bearing is totally shot—if it's the latter, honestly, just toss it in the trash.
Tighten everything down, and hey, try using some foam padding as an insulator on all the connection points. Throw some under the whole setup too, like under the motherboard, just to soak up those vibrations.
That low-noise fan is basically just shoving air into one single spot. It’s totally possible the heatsink can't vent that much air out the sides fast enough, so you end up with this constant buildup of pressure inside the heatsink. That fan is just way too powerful for how much air the sink can actually move.