Very weird it can’t play videos at all.

I’m sure it can. My guess: either VLC is broken and a different or lighter player would work, or OP is picking the wrong videos (for a really slow CPU, you want older/less compressed codecs—I bet it would do MPEG1 just fine, and might even have acceleration for it).

Plot twist: the cat is actually from next door . . . but will drape himself over the package to claim it anyway, because cats.

Is a vote a bad thing?

In general, no. In this specific context, they may be trying to grind the union down by forcing them to vote on one unsuitable offer after another until they ratify one because they’re tired of voting or because of government pressure, instead of attempting real negotiation. I don’t think it’s going to work, but they may be trying.

Declaring work-to-rule rather than a full strike was a very smart thing for the union to do here—it reduces the other side’s options for applying pressure. Can’t have the government order them back to work when they’re already working. Which, I’m sure, is why they did it.

Author admits smartphones are ubiquitous, and doesn’t at all consider, in a hypothetical situation where everyone unanimously agreed to stop using them, where all this e-waste will go?

Pretty much every single smartphone in use right now will be ewaste 20 years from now, and most of them will be within 10. So we have that disposal problem already regardless. Hypothetically, if everyone were to get rid of their phones, we’d at least stop creating even more future ewaste.

No, but not for want of trying.

The good thing: half of them have come to their senses.

The bad thing: half of them haven’t.

Gentoo is quite happy to allow you to copy your world file and config files from one system to another, then just issue emerge --emptytree world and take a couple of days’ vacation somewhere while the system rebuilds itself as specified. That’s been an option for as long as I’ve been using it, so at least 20 years. Other than the speed, the only issue is that you have to know where to find all the config files, of which there may be many distributed across /etc and ~ (and maybe other places if you’re really unlucky).

(Figuring out how to word the emerge command so that it downloads as many binary packages as possible to shorten the wait is left to the interest of the reader.)

Minority browsers. Since I daily drive Pale Moon, I’m among the people affected. It’s suspected that they test only the 3-4 most popular browsers, and whether anything else works with their code is up to luck.

You may think browsers with tiny market shares aren’t important, but all new browsers start out that way. I fear for Ladybird if it ever makes it past the alpha stage, for instance.

It blocks anyone not using one of its preferred browsers, among other things. It’s become the gatekeeper for a large fraction of the Internet.

Well, until the issues around Hans Island were settled (which happened only a few years ago), our only land border was the one with the US, so they’re just being very technical while operating on outdated information.

And we never do find out for sure how either of them died. 😅

You can also do it the 3D printer way: most “wood” PLA has sawdust mixed into it, and the better grades are supposed to be able to take stain and such (I’ve never actually tried).

I guess battles of wills still count as combat. 😅

The site formerly known as Twitter would be more respectable these days if it were a porn site.

Well, if they devolve into civil war, they immediately become less of a nuisance to everyone else. Unless it spills across the border or the side with control of the nuclear arsenal is nihilistic enough to make use of it.