But it’s not ‘gaming’, it’s ‘learning’. And for all of those there’s plenty of walktroughs around if you get stuck. I’m currently playing the newest Monkey island and it has the spirit of old titles, but it has a ‘hint book’ where you can just practically skip puzzles you can’t figure answer for. That one relies heavily on the old games at the story tho, so it may not be the best one to start with.

But yeah, that might be a concern. You can try a lot of those out at Internet Archive before setting up a dosbox, so it’s atleast cheap to try and see how it goes.

Get old LucasArts SCUMM games for them. Secret of Monkey Island, Indiana Jones, Day of the Tentacle and so on. With those you need to understand English for both understanding the story and to actually progress the game.

Scratch is good, but if you want something with a bit of syntax search for Basic256 (or any other basic interpreter). There’s also games like Autonauts which have basic programming in them (altough Autonauts gets pretty complex on higher levels).

If I browse a piece of software from play store and click ‘install’ it’s “installing” and if I do the very same with F-droid it’s suddenly “sideloading”. Fundamentally every language is just made up, but on this occasion the newly coined term is used to obfuscate things and attempting to paint things something they are not.

I can claim all day that grass is blue and sky is green, but no one will take me seriously. Same thing should happen with ‘sideloading’ vs 'installing. Or if you really insist, sideloading might be something like injecting code to a system in a way which is not normally possible, like how some rootkits for devices work. But ‘sideloading’ is very different from ‘installing’ and installing anything on a general purpose computer doesn’t include any particular tool (like play store). I can install things on my workstation with ‘apt-get install’ or from source via ‘make install’, but the end result is still that a piece of software was installed.

I always killed processes with ps -ef | grep <process-name>

From top man-page global commands:

• k :Kill-a-task

       You will be prompted for a PID and then the signal to send.
  

Give users that choice

That’s the one thing they want to get rid of. Security and other bullshit is just a theater around it to get validation for even bigger walls for their garden.

Whole thing is well worth a read, but just from the title alone I was ready to write a long rant about the term ‘sideloading’. Gladly that’s covered on the text too:

It bears reminding that “sideload” is a made-up term. Putting software on your computer is simply called “installing”, regardless of whether that computer is in your pocket or on your desk.

Where in the FUCK in Outlook currently is an option to use preformatted text? It’s not a style I could pick nor I could find an option to make my own. I send copy-paste from terminal every now and then and if it’s formatted like normal text it’s nearly useless. It used to be a text style I could pick, but this new-new-new-classic-new outlook doesn’t have it anymore.

Well, I guess it is safe to assume you are an enthusiastic murderer.

As it happens, I am. I wander around doing all the murdering I want to. It just happens to be none at all.

Why not try someone a bit more relevant than Hans Reiser, there’s plenty to choose from. Like Eric Raymond whose work, at least indirectly, influences more or less everyone using a computer on a daily basis.

I absolutely agree with your statement. Hell, even the GNU project (RMS mostly) had their own scandal a while ago, so if you really insist on being pedantic about this matter feel free on removing practically every piece of open source software from your systems.

other techies I’ve worked with had humanities degrees

My sister, who’s been an occupational therapist, personal assistant and on other ‘soft’ jobs recently got hired as a helpdesk employee just for that reason. Apparently it’s easier to teach a humanist to reset M365 passwords and do simple troubleshooting than teach a techie on how to deal with humans (which is a major part of being an on-call support for anything).

When I watch Iron Man or Batman talking to a computer, I don’t see some pinnacle of efficiency, I see inefficiency.

Things like Jarvis from Iron Man are far beyond of just translating speech to computer commands. Like in the first Iron Man where Jarvis pretty much manages the whole process on manufacturing the suit and can autonomically manage a fleet of them. I could see benefit if some kind of AI could just listen on a engineers discussion and update CAD models based on that, taking care of that the assemblies work as they should, keeping everything in spec and managing all the documents accordingly. But that’s pretty much human-level AI at that point and specially the current LLM hype is fundamentally very different from it.

You could try to ping your machine from another device and see if it responds. I had issues with older nvidia card on a old system where it would lock up keyboard/mouse and video but the underlying system was still running and I could ssh into the machine and debug the problem that way. Another computer is obviously preferred but in a pinch a cellphone is better than nothing.

Since no one has yet mentioned, by default if you’re running tar as a non-root user it extracts files with owner/umask of the current user and if you run it as root (or superuser) it’ll preserve ownership and permissions. From tar man page:

–no-same-owner

Extract files as yourself (default for ordinary users).

–no-same-permissions

Apply the user’s umask when extracting permissions from the archive (default for ordinary users).

As mentioned, with root the defaults are to keep UID/permissions as they are in the archive. (–preserve-permissions and --same-owner).