I tried booting an old Surface off a USB stick with stock Ubuntu once – probably either 20.04 or 22.04. (I tried this in June 2022 but didn’t make a note of the versions in my journal, unfortunately.) I was able to get it to boot, but I couldn’t get touch/pen controls working so I decided against replacing the OS. I didn’t have enough enthusiasm to bother experimenting with it further – I assume it probably needed the custom kernel.

No; I just thought it was probably a typo but wanted to make sure I’m not missing a pun or something.

Shouldn’t that be Seibaa (セイバー)?

I think this is just using SpeechDispatcher from the system – so it’s not a Firefox specific thing. I get a similar (but very slightly different) voice on my own system by default – which matches what I get when I run a command like spd-say --wait "Hello world" from the command line.

I’m pretty sure SpeechDispatcher can be configured to use a different synthesis engine – Arch’s wiki has some suggestions: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Speech_dispatcher – but I haven’t dug into it yet.

I thought it might be Mugi at first for the blonde haired character, but この and me misremembering the date K-On came out threw me off I guess. Looking at it again, I think you’re right – and early 2009 would be spot on for an ad in Japan.

I haven’t seen Evangelion but looking through a list of characters the blue haired character there could be Rei.

Thanks!

Lots of characters in the background of this one – e.g. Rider, Saber, and Tohsaka from Fate/Stay Night, Astro Boy, etc. I’m not sure who the characters are on the front of the cart (where it says この before being cut off) or directly behind Konata’s bags though.

I don’t know about KDE in particular, but I’ve had problems with USB mice waking various Ubuntu systems when they’re not directly connected (i.e. there’s a hub or KVM in between it and the computer). The workaround I used for that was to remove the mouse input (e.g. by carefully pressing a physical button on the KVM) – which was good enough for me – but I think there is a programmatic way to block particular classes of input from waking the system if some device is waking your system inappropriately.

Doing a quick search turned up this: https://askubuntu.com/questions/252743/how-do-i-prevent-mouse-movement-from-waking-up-a-suspended-computer – I can’t vouch for any of the specific techniques there though.

Worth noting that while I had a problem with the mouse specifically, other hardware could be causing your system to wake up.