I have autism, and I always thought this was a symptom of my autism, but after researching it recently it seems that most others with autism are the opposite, they need background noise or music to concentrate.

I have industrial deafness, that is an audio processing disorder that is associated with background noise. This also affects my reading.

If there is any form of background noise, I can’t understand speech. Eg, if I turn the air conditioner on in the living room, then I can’t understand what’s said on the TV, even at reasonable volume levels. Turing the volume up can help, but not a lot.

If I’m standing next to the fridge and you walk up to talk to me, I can see your mouth moving, I can hear your words, but I can’t understand anything, the small noise of the fridge compressor completely wipes out my comprehension.

If we are in a busy cafe with lots of people talking at once, I can’t understand the staff when they ask to take my order, even if they are right in front of me, speaking clearly directly at me. It’s like my brain can only concentrate on the background noise and it has no processing power left to interpret foreground words.

This is the same with reading and writing. I am a software engineer, so I spend all day writing code. Many of my colleagues like to listen to music while they work. I cannot. If I put on music, then I can no longer write. Nothing comes out. My mind is blank, concentrating on listening to the music. Even instrumental background music affects me.

So to answer your question, I can’t read with background noise. Perhaps you could check if you have a form of industrial deafness too.

My city started doing a similar thing. Their contracted recycling plants started rejecting the truck loads because they were seeing less than 40% recyclable content in the shipments. Lots of people overestimate how much of their trash is recyclable, and over-utilize the recycling bin.

Apparently the recycling plants will accept as low as 50% recyclable content in the load, anything under that they for a prolonged period, they start rejecting the loads.

So for a year our city was just taking the recycling bin loads to the landfill. Years ago most cities could just sell it directly to China, ship it over on enormous garbage boats, but even China has stopped accepting our nonsense.

Our city had to do a big re-education campaign, and send out new stickers for the bin lids, to get residents to put only recyclable things in the recycle bins.

I carry a jailbroken Kobo with wifi disabled. That solves most of the issues you have described here. I sideload DRM-free ebooks. I can’t stand reading text on my phone’s LCD screen (and OLED is worse), but eink screens are totally different, my eyes like them.

Does not need external light either

Lamps exist

That’s exactly what external light means. If you need to sit near a lamp to read your book, then you are relying on external light.

Btw, I agree with the point in general you’re trying to make. Physical books and physical note taking still have a place and are often gone forgotten and underutilized. They can promote greater information retention, due to the tactile experience being mixed into the reading/writing experience.

I used to love doing this too, until I realised that helping someone build a PC is the same as signing them up for a lifetime of tech support for free.

“I bought a new printer and plugged it in and it’s not working? Why doesn’t it work? You built the PC, it’s your fault.”

“My ISP told me I need a new wifi router, so I plugged in the new one they sent, now my PC doesn’t have any internet. You built the PC, why doesn’t it work?”

“My colleague told me I need to upgrade my antivirus so I got a Norton subscription, I installed it and now I can’t receive any emails. Come and fix it, you built the PC.”

All 3 of these are real experiences I’ve had. There are countless more. These days I say “I’d love to help you build a PC, but it’s been 15 years since I’ve used windows, I don’t really know how to install it or set it up or use it. I’d be happy to build a PC with a Linux based OS for you.” By that time they’re already finding someone else.

Yes, this is what I was thinking of, thanks for filling us in.

That’s the same one I got.

I remember reading a couple years ago that’s not actually how plane wings work. The actual way is much more complicated and hard to explain and hard to teach, so they just teach it this way because its an intuitive mental model that is “close enough” and “seems right”, and it really doesn’t matter unless you’re a plane wing designer.

Nobara uses a custom kernel with lots of performance tweaks and wine-compatibility patches. It has had NTSYNC for almost a year already. Also, NTSYNC is not much faster than FSYNC, that many kernels and distros (including SteamOS) have been using since 2021.

(dimming my bedroom lights)

Thats terrifying. Your desk outlet should not share a circuit with your bedroom lighting circuit, that makes no sense (unless you’re talking about a desk lamp).

And regardless, if a 700W load can make your lights dim, then there’s a major wiring issue in your house. Don’t plug in an electric cooker, kettle, or space heater until you get that checked out.

If I’m reading that correctly, that shows the system is drawing around 100W just sitting idle.

Something is not right there.

Either the power meter is way out of calibration, or there is a configuration issue with your PC. Maybe you have a performance setting that is causing the CPU and GPU to not idle down ever? Or a rogue antivirus software that is cranking the CPU constantly?

Are there any spinning disk hard drives in your PC? They can sometimes use around 5W each on idle. That was the biggest cause of idle power consumption on my old xeon server, with 8 HDDs.

PSU choice can also affect it. Eg, if you buy into marketing and buy a monster 850W PSU, but it’s idle all the time and only uses 450W under load, then the PSU is spending the whole time outside it’s efficiency curve, and can end up causing more power draw than expected.

That makes sense, thanks!

I always thought it was “this differs from that” and “it’s different than that”.

You’re wrong. In this expression, the “quiet” part means the “unsaid” part. If someone tells you a secret, and they say “please keep that quiet”, it means “don’t tell anyone”. If you’re driving in the car and the kids are being rowdy in the back seat, you would say “keep quiet back there”, it means “shut your mouth”.

To say the quiet part out loud, means “you said the thing you intended to keep unsaid”.

That’s a lot of different distros in one week. How do you give each one enough time to evaluate it before you choose to move to another?

This is beautiful. Please keep us updated on how this turns out.

I’ve only been to another country once in my life. In 2018 I was invited to present at a scientific conference held in Sicily, and my workplace sponsored my travel and accommodation costs.

After 6 days there, my takeaway was an unfavorable view of the local Sicilian people. This is obviously not representative of every person in Sicily, or Italians in general (Italy is a big place with lots of different regions), but I’m not in a hurry to go back to Palermo.

RRTANGENTABACUS

I know it primarily as a cheat code in Star Wars pod racer on N64, but I’ve seen it in other games too, and even referenced in different non-gaming contexts. I still don’t really know what it means.

When I was a kid I remembered it as “RR-Tan-Genta-Bacus”. It wasn’t until decades later I realised it is real words “tangent”, “abacus”.

if you identify as “scandisk/defrag watcher”, it’s for you

I am who you describe, and this made me realise that a progression/idle game based around a disk defragging mechanic would be amazing, and would scratch a deep itch for many people.

Is that the same police officer who unloaded an entire clip into a teen’s abdomen repeatedly firing her handgun, pulling the trigger because she thought her taser wasn’t deploying?