This reminds me of the death penalty. Killing someone because that person killed is still killing someone.

However society choses to do it, it’s still killing someone. Because killing is bad so if you kill, someone will kill you. Oh no, it’s not a murder. It’s a state employee that works in the correction department. Killers are not okay. The executioner is only applying the lethal will of society towards killers by unaliving them. It’s not murder, it’s justice!

But it was maybe a few months old at best. Maybe it had a defective battery from the start but I contacted Xiaomi and I’ve been told it was “normal” in “winter”. Then when I looked online for this issue with Xiaomi phones, the people on the forums said it was “normal”, and that I expected too much.

In the end it was probably a defective battery. I couldn’t believe that they were selling millions of these and that people always just kept them warm all the time. Like, they have a proper winter too in some parts of China, and I can’t imagine millions of people having their phone dying on them as soon as we get into sweater weather.

But obviously this left a bad taste in my mouth. This and having to ask permission to root my phone.

I decided not to buy another Xiaomi phone when the one I previously had would turn off when it was a bit mildly cool outside.

Like, I would take it out of my pocket to look at bus schedules but it would turn off after a few seconds of being exposed to 5°C, saying the battery was dead. Another time I had it attached to my bike handlebar and it kept turning off because apparently 13°C with the wind was also too chilly. Every time that fucking Xiaomi phone was feeling a bit chill, the battery would just die. And not even in freezing temps!

I looked online and everone of the fanboys on the forums kept saying that this is normal, battery performance degrades in winter, that iPhones do the same, and apparently all other phones do the same. In short, I had unreasonable expectations.

Yet, all my other phones’ batteries didn’t die within seconds of taking them out of my pocket, even in winter.

So, I don’t have to bother with their names anymore.

It’s a good question but I just read this on Wiktionary and Wikipedia and it’s obviously difficult to be certain.

Both Wiktionary entries in English or French are saying the etymology is from papillon. Then the Wikipedia article for the papillote candy says that the word papillote in cooking is from this, but there’s no citation. And the origin of the word for the candy is also discussed there as being unsure.

However, the French Wiktionary page on papillotte mentions that it’s the feminized form of papillot, which describes a small butterfly using the diminutive “ot”. This is grammatically cromulent. Like chien for dog, then chiot for puppy, or île and îlot.

The papillotes for cooking are not arranged in a butterfly form, but it’s easy to see how it could come from wrapping food like this . So by extension it can also be used to wrap anything using a type of paper, like hair.

As a native speaker, I tend to agree with the proposed etymology, as it kind of makes sense. There’s other words based on papillon so it makes it more likely. Like the verb papilloter to describe fluttering. Or bow ties, that are called nœuds papillon (butterfly knot), also because they look like butterflies.

Still, sometimes the simple deductions are also the ones that are wrong. It could also come from papier, because papillotes can be made of paper. However the spelling is not helping because if it came from papier, it would be spelled papiotte. It could just be a coincidence than ends up working both ways.

You probably could, as papillote is something cooked wrapped in aluminium or parchment paper. The name comes from a candy that was wrapped in shiny paper and looked like a butterfly. So by extension now it’s also for any food that’s cooked wrapped in something. You can have a vegetable papillote, a salmon papillote, or a veal papillote.

In French moths and butterflies are called papillons. There is sometimes a distinction between butterflies and “night butterflies” (moths) but in the end, they are all papillons.

I was using E16 years ago and liked it but eventually switched to Gnome (2, I think), after waiting for E17 for too long.

What made me quit was the wait. All the other DEs at the time were releasing new versions frequently but Enlightenment took forever.

I hated school because there was a bunch of kids mocking and laughing at me for most of it.

I guess some popular kids had good times by pulling my pants down or constantly hitting my chair during class. They must reminisce and miss those times, when they were laughing with their peers.

That must be why Google’s greenhouse emissions went up 50% in five years. ChatGPT’s legendary efficiency.

Keep defending those power wasting glorified autocomplete. In no way are we doomed as a species.

We can just continue tu pump more and more into the air. “AI” will surely find a solution for that anyway.

It probably consumes as much energy as a family house for a day just to come up with that program. That’s what happens.

In fact, I did a Google search and didn’t have any choice but to have an “AI” answer, even if I don’t want it. Here’s what it says:

Each ChatGPT query is estimated to use around 10 times more electricity than a traditional Google search, with a single query consuming approximately 3 watt-hours, compared to 0.3 watt-hours for a Google search. This translates to a daily energy consumption of over half a million kilowatts, equivalent to the power used by 180,000 US households.

I’m not a cable expert by any means and can’t answer all the questions, but I can tell you that the protocol used by cable is called DOSCIS. So it might guide you into some of those answers.

And the coax cable itself doesn’t go very far now because it’s connected to a fiber network somewhere in your neighbourhood.

Badgey?

I’m always a bit amazed of how things have progressed and on what Linux can still run.

This is an extreme example, but it’s also possible to run a modern Linux OS on SBCs like a Raspberry Pi Zero, and still have something somewhat usable depending on your needs.

To have a computer half the size of a credit card with more RAM than my full tower rig from 2001 is amazing. And it can even run software from that era with dosbox or wine.

My 15 years old laptop is still supported and can still read 1080p on YouTube, using Linux.

Linux devs just recently decided to drop support for 486 CPUs and some early Pentiums.

There’s just no competition.

In a dark dark town, there was a dark dark street, in the dark dark street, there was a dark dark house, in the dark dark house, there were dark dark stairs, down the dark dark stairs, was a dark dark cellar and in the dark dark cellar… Three skeletons lived. But not the ones you’re thinking about.

Maybe it’s their neighbours.

With boot disks. When installing an OS, it was common to have the installer ask if you wanted to create a boot disk in case anything happened to the MBR. They also came with the OS if you bought it prepackaged.

There was also a trick that would boot a Linux system from DOS using loadlin.

Back in my days (late 90ies), smartphones were not a thing. I had to dual boot into Linux, face a problem, reboot into Windows, search for a solution or a package, then reboot into Linux. A second computer was very useful. But now, yeah, most issues can be solved using a smartphone.

However I tried to format a micro SD card with an OTG cable and image it for a Raspberry Pi using my smartphone lately, and I never succeeded. My phone doesn’t have an integrated micro SD card reader nor the option to format one. All the apps I found that were claiming to format SD cards did nothing but show me ads. Just another Raspberry Pi would have been more useful than a smartphone at that moment.

I’ve always liked the message an image like this conveyed. Being independent, going your own way, liking a bit of type 2 fun. But at the same time if you take it literally, it reminds me that doing precisely this is often frowned upon for different reasons.

According to the principle of leave no trace, you should ideally stick to the already established trails. The parks in my region all require visitors to stay in the trails, and camp in designated sites unless it’s the back country. It’s kind of difficult to do something like this in the real world without being kind of a jerk.

Also, life is discriminatory and we have evolved a fucked up way of socially distancing ourselves from people that society considers eccentric.

So even if I understand the message, it also makes me think about how doing something like this can often be hard and isolating.

Rack-It Mobility Front Rack

I never really liked Skype but seeing a major corporation buy proprietary software and its servers, then shut it down, makes me glad that I’m still using IRC with some of my friends. Try buying that.

Anyway I’m getting old now because Microsoft doing something like this just reminds me of their EEE strategy.

It was the same on the municipal level for me. I can call 311 or write to them, but it was kind of nice to be able to tweet at my neighbourhood and have people interacting with them and me on local issues.