Personally, I didn’t really mind Wesley in the later seasons and a few of the Wesley-centric episodes were pretty good. It’s really the first season, and even more so the first few episodes of the first season where he was annoying as all hell. Oh look, boy wonder saves the ship, yet again. Unfortunately that kind of seems to have stuck with the character, despite the show toning down his antics significantly after that.

If you think that’s fun, just wait until you get to the verbs of motion.

Junk also tend to accumulate in rivers and lakes. Once it’s in there it’s out of sight, out of mind - and even if you know it’s there it is often difficult to remove.

When it finally gets cleaned up by bringing in the magnet or a barge to dredge it up or whatever, you’re seeing years if not decades of stuff that’s getting pulled out all at once.

With David Brin’s Uplift books, I’d just start with Startide Rising. It’s not so much a sequel to Sundiver, but another standalone book set in the same universe. There’s a couple of very minor references to Sundiver, but you’re not really missing anything if you haven’t read it going into Startide Rising.

While Startide Rising is fantastic and is probably one of my favorite sci-fi books, I found Sundiver just wasn’t that good. It’s not really bad per se, but it was David Brin’s first novel and that really shows and has some issues with pacing, an unreliable narrator, and things like that (IMHO). It’s also more of a mystery/detective novel set in space whereas Startide Rising is space opera, so the whole feel of the two books is very different and can just boil down to what sort of books you like.

I actually had read Startide Rising twice without even knowing Sundiver existed before looking it up online and realizing it was the second book in a series. I’ll probably pick up Startide Rising for another re-read sometime in the future, but for Sundiver once is probably enough.

The third book The Uplift War, is also quite good, and similar to the other two it’s more of another standalone book that’s set in the same universe, with some minor references to the previous two. I wasn’t as much of a fan of the last three books - they are a trilogy more than a standalone books, and you’d probably want to have read the previous three books before tackling them (or at the very least, Startide Rising) because things aren’t going to make a lot of sense if you just jump right in. I found them a long read and they got really weird at the end. Like Sundiver I’d say once is enough for books 4-6 too.

That’s my experience with Asus going back over 25 years now. To me, Asus has always been substandard products sold at premium prices. If I wanted a substandard motherboard, I’d buy ECS and save a bunch of money. And to be fair to ECS, I’ve had some of their boards that have worked just fine, which is more than I can say about the Asus stuff.

It certainly could. That’s the gamble you’re taking.

I usually replace drives after 5 years if they are doing anything I consider important. So those drives to me would have 1-2 years left in them. Of course, I have seen a good number of drives I have repurposed to things less important still manage to rack up impressive numbers of hours.

I have an old film scanner (was pricy back in its day) that doesn’t have drivers for 64 bit Windows, and anything newer than Vista. So I have an old XP box that can talk to it.

That’s all I use that computer for, so it’s otherwise fine with its circa 2009 configuration. Haven’t had to do any fixes or workarounds.

I’d say not really, Tolkien was a writer, not an artist.

What you are doing is violating the trademark Middle-Earth Enterprises has on the Gandalf character.

How do they compare to TVs? At least the last time I looked into it, pretty much every TV was terrible compared to even a halfway decent computer monitor.

For me, it wasn’t just the story, but also just randomly going out and exploring, checking things out, and finding cool (and sometimes scary) things.

It’s one of those games that I’m hoping in like 10 years or something I’ll have forgotten enough of it that if I go play it again it’ll be mostly all new again.

We actually moved from JIRA to Azure DevOps. Part of it was that Atlassian dropped the server version of JIRA and we weren’t too keen on moving to the crappier cloud version.

I’d say it’s different. Some things JIRA does better, some things Azure DevOps does better. You eliminate some pain points, and end up with some new ones.

DuckDuckGo is not Bing, though they get most of their results from Bing so they end up pretty similar.

And yes, I would say it’s better. Not that Bing is particularly good and their search results have also taken a nosedive. But they are still way better than the garbage results I get out of Google.

I’ve never been a fan of dual booting myself. The computer just ends up spending all of its time in one OS or the other. Plus Microsoft doesn’t seem to like to play nice with your bootloader.

I just started using Linux on secondary computers. Once I had gotten things down so the experience was smooth on those machines, moving the main desktop from Windows to Linux was pretty seamless.

That’s one of the reasons I lost interest as a kid, as I really didn’t know what to do and you could totally wander into an area you just weren’t ready for yet. For that reason, I liked FF2 (FF4 everywhere else) as that one pretty much guided you along on rails.

I was thinking about that game as I was scrolling this thread. That’s one I should revisit myself. I played that game a lot when I was younger, but managed to never complete it as I always lost interest sometime during the World of Ruin.

That’s actually just what I did. New PC runs Manjaro Linux. So far all the games I’ve thrown at it work just fine.

Maybe I should have done that with the old PC, but I’m lazy and Windows 7 was working well enough.

Not anymore since it no longer works.

I was still using Steam on Windows 7 as late as last month. Losing access to Steam was one motivation to finally upgrade my computer.

It’ll probably end up worse than that. Turn off secure boot and Windows may still run, but it will no longer verify and all these sites will now refuse to work on your computer. So if you like to run Linux, even dual booting or running Windows in a VM for those things that absolutely require Windows won’t be good enough anymore.