I owe much of my career to trying to set up Linux From Scratch two decades ago. While it’s a much better experience installing Linux nowadays, there’s a lot to be said for the experience spending your weekend debugging a system will give you.

What you think of as important may change over time, as well - with the solution as written, you’d need to decide what the “subject” is at compress time, but what if you later realise that’s the last ever photo of grandma, or the AI decides that you were wearing different shoes than you actually were. Worst case, you need to rely on some detail in a photo later, like to absolve you of a crime.

Normal rekeying is pretty easy, if you’re careful - push out the core (the “follower” will hold your spring pins in place), dump out the old key pins, swap to the new key, and put in the new key pins, replace the core. Even when I’ve completely screwed it up (pushed the follower too far so the springs came out, mixed all the key pins together so I had to work out which was which, and more) it’s not been more than a 10-minute job.

They moved Ctrl-Alt-Backspace behind a config iirc - too easy to hit by accident.

Having just finished up 6 episodes on G. Gordon Liddy, knowing nothing about him beforehand, I second the recommendation of Behind the Bastards.

A Strobe Tuner is fantastic if you play music. I’ve been using the open source one by Adam Foster for years, but heard the A4Labs version is good too.

There’s plenty of it in the UK too.

Ilya Naishuller has some fun stuff - check out his video for Leningrad - Kolshik if you haven’t already.

Fantastic Planet’s score was also sampled heavily on Quasimoto’s “The Unseen”.

“I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to space.”

They’re great work laptops, as long as you treat them as basically disposable. If I have a problem, just turn it into IT and grab another, pull down the repos and I’m off. Wouldn’t buy one with my own money, though.

They do make colour laser printers - but in the past 5 years, I’ve needed to print in colour maybe 3 times, and I just took it to the copy shop where it’d be better quality than I can do at home anyway.

Almost all the printing I do is either stuff to sign like contracts or boarding passes / tickets, and those are moving digital more and more.

I always figured that’s what the pattern buffer is for - the replicator can make a person atom-by-atom from energy, but the buffer holds the ‘consciousness’, and that’s the unreliable bit. Thomas Riker happens because the transporter system copies Riker into the buffer twice due to interference, so when the replicator fires up it creates two Riker bodies and puts one copy into each, sucking down some extra power from the ship to compensate for the missing energy.