You may well be right… sigh, how time flies. Yet I have two perfectky good fw audio interface/mixers I want to keep using.

I am happy that things have converged over time to a single, truly versatile multi-bus capable port (USB-C/Thunderbolt 3) … however, the vendors IMHO should be legally bound to supply down-converters for all the peripherals that used the older buses for the next 10 years, transitively for 2 generations of buses.

If USB-C supports bus ‘X’, then there should be inexpensive and easy to purchase down-converters from USB-C to ‘X’. If Bus ‘X’ replaced bus ‘Y’ in the last 10 years then there should be a down-converter available from bus ‘X’ to ‘Y’.

One problematic example is Firewire… Apple used to make Thunderbolt-2-to-Firewire800 dongles, but they stopped and now they’re rare as hens’ teeth and ungodly-expensive.

They still sell Thunderbolt-3-to-2 dongles, but how long will they keep selling those?

Oh, and while I’m wishing for ponies, the drivers/specifications for all such adapters should be open-source and royalty-free.

What I find interesting, then, is what advantage the trilobites may have gained by using a basic mineral for the lenses vs. organic chitin. Chitin must have a transparent form in order to function for the eyes in modern creatures? Hmm.

I read in one paper that trilobites may have actually formed some kind of dual-layer in their lenses to compensate for the double-refraction property of calcite.

Ah! So the same as the rest of their hard parts, I suppose. I suspected as much, but couldn’t seem to find any paper that explicitly stated this.

Thank you!

In regards to use of calcite vs. chitin: doing a quick search: https://www.ualberta.ca/en/earth-sciences/facilities/collections-and-museums/treasury-of-trilobites/index.html

Were trilobites also unique in using calcite in addition to chitin in their exoskeleton? Do any extant arthropods use calcite in any significant way?

The more general vuln is CVE-2023-45853 apparently, in zlib through version 1.3

https://ubuntu.com/security/CVE-2023-45853#status

is this general to any Linux distro using zlib or just Ubuntu?

Yes, I know they are update services; fair point you make, that those not technically-minded should probably leave them on.

However I personally do not appreciate OS updates, no matter their purported criticality, being installed without my express permission. I am aware of Group policies, but Win11 Home does not officially support them (though one can install gpedit.msc manually; however according to sources I researched, not all policies set will even be honoured by the Home edition).

I did consider scheduling it, just hadn’t gotten around to trying it out.

If could, I would wipe Win11 and use native Linux but this laptop is too new and support is poor on it; it’s gone as soon as practical :)

When I have to boot into Win11, I run this right after as a shortcut from my desktop (right-click and Run As Administrator):

net stop usosvc
sc config usosvc start=disabled
net stop wuauserv
sc config wuauserv start=disabled

… be sure to set your Wifi points as metered to block Update as well.

Note that anytime you go into certain Settings / Control Panel pages, Win11 silently re-enables the above services! Crazy. (Someone should really write a patch for that…)

Sad anyone has to put up with this BS but, we do what we gotta do.

Ah, good. I wonder why it isn’t used more often – this wouldn’t be such a huge problem then I would hope. (Let me guess – ‘convenience’, the archenemy of security.)

I don’t know much about NPM (having avoided JS as much as possible for my entire life), but golang seems to have a good solution: ‘vendoring’. One can choose to lock all external dependencies to local snapshots brought into a project, with no automatic updating, but with the option to manually update them when desired.

That’s what I ended up doing. A dumb monitor is just fine, as long as you don’t need a huuuge screen. The main thing is to find a good external speaker though that doesn’t auto-sleep in the middle of one’s show…

Or, please consider Devuan as well, to ensure there are distros without hard dependencies on systemd, an expansive attempt to cement IBM/RedHat’s control over the direction of Linux through foundational changes to the init, filesystem, login, homedir, and other components…

Please don’t bother replying to change my mind… never gonna like systemd no matter what. If it works for you, fine. Some of us still find it wholly unnecessary.

I put on my robe and wizard hat

When our last TV which was ‘smart’ died, we just bought a big lcd monitor at the pawn shop. We already were only using Kodi on an Android box, so a monitor with external speaker is fine. (Seemed spyware free last time I checked, but beware no-name android media boxes on=from eBay etc., use a tiny or old spare PC instead if you wish).

One must ‘sail the high seas’ tovget content, of course…

No, I know that – I honestly want them both to die :p

Both have been a blight on software development for decades.

Can Oracle kill javascript as well, please? Please?

Recommend “Human Resource Machine” as well :)

What? Oh no, I had not written down the recipe for using gasoline to cook my spaghetti! Whatever shall I do?

We should do more than block them, they need to be teergrubed.

So they should switch to element.io, or host their own forum thingie on a VPS somewhere. Why is Discord essential? (Hint: it’s not)

Simple, cut the cables on one, if the crane malfunctions, ask supplier why?