I’ve settled on using wsl2 on a windows machine. I run Ubuntu and kali in wsl as virtual machines on my main windows computer. I was an early user of linux and bsd but have found it’s just plain easier to run day to day on windows.

I run both Ubuntu and kali simply because I haven’t been able to make sound work correctly with Ubuntu on wsl but it works great in kali, plus kali has all the pentesting stuff so I can play around with that in my free time.

I’m not sure if they would be classified as influencers but have you ever fallen into the rabbit hole of youtube reaction channels? I fell into it because of a band I like was being heavily reacted to on youtube but I quickly noticed there is a cycle of right wing propagandists like Tom McDonald and other music type people who get featured on these reaction channels. The majority of the reactors I watch are black but they sell their souls for the traffic they get from what I assume are mostly bots that watch and comment in support of the right wing propaganda.

The first time I watched one of those reaction videos I was awestruck by how the reactor was so agreeable to the theme of “I won’t apologize for being white”. I know it’s only tangibly related to the topic here but I have been bothered by it and wanted to share and see what other people think.

I am convinced the reactors or paid to favorably review this stuff.

It’s fascinating how some of that generation have turned out. My parents are in their mid 70’s and are on an edibles kick right now since they “are to old to be smoking”. Their neighbor is the same age and has bought into the whole war on drugs and just about every other bit of propaganda authoritarians have put out in the last 50 years. The neighbor is a good source of daily excitement and stories that my parents like to tell us when we see them.

The top photo was taken (I suppose by a satellite?) with a polarized filter and the bottom photo looks like a drone shot without a polarized filter. The polarized filter will make the water appear more blue and ‘see through’ the non polarized photo shows the sunlight and smoke reflecting off the water.

I am quite unsure what any of this has to do with the fact you can look at both photos and see clearly that most of the buildings are burnt to the ground in the second photo. Does the lack of a polarized filter in the second photo indicate that those buildings really didn’t burn to the ground?

It’s complete shit right now. 5 or more years ago I could quickly find an answer to a very technical question with no problem. Now it is useless for anything. Just today I was looking for a shop near me that can perform a front end alignment on my RV, I searched for “Tractor Trailer front end alignment near me”. The entire first page is either tire shops that do not offer front end alignments, car tire shops that don’t even sell the correct size tires I would need for a tractor trailer, or shops 2000 miles away in various directions. It’s horrible and I think it would be faster to look in the yellow pages for what I need in this case. I never found a shop using google.

Also today I was searching for the tires I need in the shopping tab there were ads for tires that google had labeled as wal-mart but when I would click the link it would take me to a Chinese scam site.

In 1999 / 2000 I started using Mandrake because I missed the days of using a terminal instead of a GUI. That got me into setting a web and mail server up and running things from home once I had stable internet. I have always had an on and off relationship with Linux and the other *nix. Currently I have a few servers running around the house for various things all running Ubuntu but besides upkeep and making changes I don’t touch them much until my ADHD kicks in and I want to learn something new then I burn out for awhile and repeat the cycle. I am probably the outlier here that uses windows daily and Linux secondary these days.

Man Mandrake brings back some memories. It was my first linux install solely because they had the fastest shipping time for install cd’s and at the time I was on dialup so I couldn’t just download anything I wanted. I ran it for several years and ended up on a few different distro’s and freebsd for a bit.