I really only prefer TUI because it bypasses most of the worst aspects of modern GUI design

There’s way too much “pop-up ui” infecting PC from mobile. I want a solid-state UI. Don’t make me hover over anything to show a pop up, or swipe, or stupid shit like that.

Stop making these shitty disappearing scrollbars that are way too thin! Scrollbars are the single most important UI element on the screen. They need to be LARGE and they need to STAY VISIBLE AT ALL TIMES

These are both UI features that suck for dodgey rdp connections. The kind where you click and wait 10-30 seconds for the update. Windows has gotten egregious about these kinds of UI decisions making it very hard to make changes over a lousy RDP connection

If it’s my first message to someone or first message in a long time I’ll start by saying who I am just in case they’ve changed numbers or lost my contact info or whatever. But obviously I’m not going to do that every few weeks/months

No, whole.

I have no clue what MultiPlex theaters are

So back in the earlier days of cinema, you’d go to the Cineplex to see a movie. A Cineplex would only have a single screen for viewing movies while the multiplex would have multiple screens for seeing movies on. This started with the first duplex theatre in 1915 and later the first triplex in 1966, shortly followed by theatres with 6+ screens which is around when the term “multiplex” started being used. Basically for anyone born after the 80s (therefore anyone under the age of about 40) the term is largely obsolete since most theatres have at least 4 screens and qualify as multiplexes, plus the industry has seen so much consolidation that smaller independent theatres with 1-2 screens are pretty uncommon now

Would requesting a mac with the argument of having access to a Unix shell potentially work? In college my IT instructor used a Mac with a windows VM via VMware Workstation and it pretty seemless. He’d use the Mac for most stuff then jump over to the Windows VM for windows specific stuff, and then diving into the native Bash shell for anything else. Honestly it was a pretty sweet setup

I mean this happens. Traditionally it was companies with lots of digital artists for improved software compatibility, but these days it’s really more done for developers and anyone else just as an employee perk to put them on their preferred platform.

Honestly, for administration purposes having a proper native Unix shell running standard utilities is extremely handy, especially when you need to manipulate files, such as working with disk/VM images for example

Yeah getting paid to sit there while windows wastes 20+ minutes of company time updating is always a treat

Meanwhile I got local admin because the IT guy who’s no longer there couldn’t be bothered to install a couple of utilities for me and most of what I actually do is manage SaaS services in a web browser

Y’know what, I honestly haven’t looked at what the PCIe lane layout is like on newer chipsets. Maybe it’s gotten better since I last really paid attention like 5+ years ago. I remember in early-mid AM4 there was a lot of grumbling about how there’s only 20 PCIe 3 lanes followed by early PCIe 4 platforms that would give only 16-20 lanes with another 8 or so PCI 3 lanes. I also didn’t really pay much attention to AMD before AM4 given how far behind Intel they were. But I could be entirely out of date now that I think about it

So hardware that may still be perfectly usable but predates NVMe should be tossed out then?

The exact same thing you already have to do to upgrade the memory on such a computer, you go buy used/old stock DDR3 or cannibalize from another system. Pre-NVMe systems are DDR3 era and older. Time goes on, interfaces update and anyone looking for compatibility with their older system will need to either use an adapter or buy used/old stock. If there’s enough demand like with motherboards there can be a random Chinese brands making new hardware for old platforms using a mix of new and cannibalized parts

I did similar when preparing my wife and I for windows 10 EOL. I went back to Linux on the new drive, my wife to Windows 11. Honestly both have a similar amount of issues (mostly wake from sleep challenges on Linux, although my PC wasn’t great about waking from sleep on Windows to begin with) and most importantly my wife can still play Fortnite and I can have fun trying new stuff out and reveling at how every single game I try just works on Linux whereas 5 years ago it was more of a 50/50 chance whether or not a game would work

Does require you to have the PCIe lanes for it, BIOS support for booting to PCIe (which Intel 6th gen core CPUs were the first to support. 4th gen never did but some had m.2 slots and NVMe support for secondary drives and the 5th gen X99s had some receive BIOS updates to support but that’s its own can of worms) and both Intel and AMD have historically been pretty bad about being stingy about PCIe lane availability

Plus to run more than a single NVMe on a single slot your motherboard either needs to support PCIe bifurcation which is almost exclusively an enterprise feature or they need to have the right lane configuration available to support that x16 slot handing out 4x4 lanes (or 2x8/2x4 for dual NVMe)

Yeah my recent IT experience is similar. I redeployed monitors that had “vista-ready” badges on them during the monitor shortages of 2021-2 I’ve replaced so many of those analogue to digital adapters (usually because the computer only has 1 digital output and 2 displays to drive, or 1 HDMI and 1 DisplayPort but the displays only support HDMI and I only have VGA to HDMI adapters, etc.)

The challenge simply comes down to the fact that displays tend to last so much longer than the computers they’re connected to. Heck my wife is using my decade old 1080p monitors because they were an upgrade over the even older 720p monitors she had before which may well find themselves mated up to my kids’ new computer

A couple of years ago I got my wife to finally play Portal and Portal 2 for the first time. Its been long enough she was entirely unaware of any of the memes about the game so she immediately fell in love with the companion cube and cried when she realized she had no choice but to incinerate it, even going so far as trying to find a bug to exploit to bring it with her

When they do you can still play 2009scape! Has up to 5x XP modes in case you want a less grindy experience, a single player mode and a brilliant community

Worth noting that OSRS is really just a fork of RuneScape from around the mid RS2 days, (if I remember correctly it’s based on a full backup someone found of their codebase, so it started as “hey look we found this old version of the game in a box in one of our offices, wanna play?”) and now it contains more new content than original content. Heck way back in the day the idea of a sailing skill was always a silly joke that nobody took seriously, and I’m talking back when Hunter and slayer were being added. Yet here we are.

I see lots of people suggesting non-work things, but that gets old fast and depending on your work environment can be stressful as you might get caught “not working”

I’d be trying to take on new projects. Start by getting to know your coworkers. If you have other people in your department, talk to them about what they’re working on, things they’d like to see done. If you’re the lone person in your area of work you could alternatively walk the floor and start talking to anyone who could be the stakeholder for a future project. Learn what their pain points are, where the current practices have blindspots.

You mentioned being a safety admin, I’m guessing that’s industrial safety right? Start looking into whatever the current buzzwords are in the industrial safety field and make it a project you take to your boss and try to get funding. Find ways to improve the current processes and data tracking. If you don’t already use a fancy incident tracking system outside of Excel, start doing some research and getting some numbers from vendors and have a chat with your boss about how using an actual purpose built database can improve compliance (that’s about 70% of my duties right now is managing and configuring my organization’s SAAS risk management database, but we also have ~10k workers in the field so it’s highlighting useful data points in the data we’ve already collected primarily)

Unless your position is stuck below a manager with zero flexibility for process improvement, there’s always new projects to be discovered and started to improve existing processes

I know there’s already too much content on the Web

No such thing!

I’ve had good luck sharing my own interests instead. A few years ago I got super into watching SpaceX’s rocket launches because it’s honestly spectacular and they know how to do a really good livestream, plus watching the booster come back from orbit and softly touchdown is pretty incredible (I’ve had a hard time enjoying the live streams since Musk’s involvement with Trump of course)

But popping over to a coworker and going “hey there’s a rocket launch in 2 minutes, wanna take 8 minutes and watch it with me?” is a brilliant ice breaker

When my wife and I first moved in together she was an avid Markiplier watcher, and we watched all of his first? 24 hour stream. At like 3am he opened up probably way more than he wanted to and talked about how he struggles with interpersonal relationships, and how he always ends up pushing people away, as well as his incredibly unhealthy work ethic and I honestly can’t remember the rest but he basically described how he always tries to portray himself very differently from how he is in reality, even in private with friends. Ever since then I can see it where he really does seem to always be playing a character of some sort (and the character definitely does change at times), plus people he’s collabed with and referred to as friends seem to eventually disappear (except for Ethan, he seems to be the one who’s always stuck through it all)

Basically he’s got some demons that I really hope he’s been able to find healthier ways to cope with