Unless you work a trade, I would go with Harbor Freight for everything except cordless tools. If you wear the Harbor Freight tool out replace it with something higher quality. For cordless, I don’t know. I have Dewalt and wonder about others. I mostly avoid cordless now.

For trades, see what your coworkers are using. Do you want them borrowing your batteries? (No) Do you want to borrow theirs? (Do you want them to dislike you?)

Negative 20 is in fact less than five and twenty, so I think you are both technically correct.

A friend of mine had a sphinx that was the most aggressively friendly cat I have ever met. His parents kept their house pretty cold, so the theory was that he would snuggle anyone who would let him to stay warm. That might have been true initially, but he really seemed to like people as he got older. He would purr and rub on complete strangers. One of the friendliest cats I have ever met.

I am using CentOS 9 in WSL. I don’t particularly care what distribution I use because I mostly using a bash shell as a software development environment. I prefer apt to flat packs and use ubuntu 20 on an embedded system that I write code for at work. I keep wanting to get more experience with KDE and gnome, but I haven’t been good about using my free time to mess with OS. As long as I have vim and a prompt that uses vi input, I am pretty content. (Does this make me sound old? The kids at work have trouble following what I am doing when we pair program.)

Don’t forget Bigfoot, the rake, and skin walkers.

The Joycons were an absolute disaster and ruined the portable experience. I got 4 of them repaired. When they inevitably broke again, I gave up and bought a pro controller. Precariously balancing the Switch on your lap or setting it on furniture so you can use a pro controller is not a handheld. Still had lots of fun with the games on it, but the experience should have been better. Nintendo has building controllers for decades, you would think they could at least begin to approach competency.

I do dumb things like edit my network configuration do some stuff and log out. Then I can’t login the next weekend because the IP address is wrong. Also:

Ifconfig eth0 down

And I am booted from ssh.

Your cat is Canadian.

Cell carriers in the US releasing 3G+ technologies branded as 4Gs should have gotten the FTC on a crackdown, but regulatory capture and it is all just marketing fluff. The sales flacks selling it can’t even answer questions like “what kinds of bandwidth can I expect to see? Do I get a minimum QoS?”

I am friends with a guy that wrote a bug that caused a major PageNet outage. He’s almost famous his bug was that bad.

I am ready for some Frunji (sp?), the sport of kings!

I was at a Texas Rangers game in the late 90s or early 00s and two kids were playing in the seats in front of me. The older kid played boogers wiggling all ten of his fingers at his opponent as a trump card. I still think about that. That little innovator is an adult now.

My first Linux installation was done using Red Hat CDs that I purchased for around $20. Probably around 1996. Patching was difficult. Drivers for many pieces of hardware didn’t exist. Remember Plug and Play was pretty new at that time frame. Lots of manual resolution of things like driver interrupt conflicts (boards had physical jumpers that you could move to change which IRQ they asserted). Looking back on it, I can’t believe any of us were doing it. But the eventual payout was wonderful. I can’t imagine what 1996 me would think about how easy something like the latest Ubuntu is. I would probably be pretty awed because I have a decent understanding of the massive amount of work that has been poured into the ecosystem now to make it what it is today.

All that said, I will always have a soft spot for Solaris on an Ultraspark. That shit worked great.

I had an HP laptop in the early 2000s, the hard drive crashed (my wife set some mail on top of it and the mail had a large advertising magnet in it). I bought a replacement. When I opened it up, the hard drive connector was HP proprietary. A replacement drive from HP was $475 for the same size that I paid $80 for an industry standard drive. I bought a replacement laptop instead and have been warning people against HP for the last 20 years. Many people come to me for IT help (entire extended family), so I am sure I have hurt HP some. Their printer drivers are the biggest bloatware crap too. Absolutely scum company.