Have you ever decided to do something truly devious with your Linux computer? I'm talking the elite hacker shit. I'm talking the stuff they don't dare talk about at Defcon. I'm talking crossing a line you can't uncross, the things that get your civil rights revoked and summon the black helicopters. Things like watching a DVD or inkjet printing a photograph you took with a digital camera.

Normal people can't just do heavy shit like that, man. A lot of them won't even make it through installing VLC, watch them try to grok the difference between Fedora repos, Fedora Flatpaks and Flathub. Then, how many of them do you think will figure out how to go to File > Open Disc. Your uncle that hunts and pecks at 2 words a minute can't fit that idea in his head because "Play DVD" is taking up too much room for "Open Disc" to fit.

Then it bombs out with a cryptic error message that doesn't even display in white text in dark mode, because your Linux computer doesn't have the DRM shit required to play a DVD. That is going to require one of these:

sudo dnf install libvcss libvcss-data libvcss-common libvcss2 ffmpeg ffmpeg-common ffmpeg-dvdcss

and if that was an APT command, that'd be the end of it because it would work. NOT ON FEDORA. I've never seen one of those "install seven packages" commands work on Fedora. Ever. Because DNF is more pedantic, it's libvcss-common4.2.2beta now, stop deadnaming the penguin flavored DLL.

Oh and your inkjet printer? No we don't do that anymore. We do driverless basic bitch document printing now, we removed the drivers from any repos out there and made it so that DNF won't install the ones offered by Epson themselves, because this shall not be done. You want to put a glossy photo of your house cat, in a frame, IN THE PRIVACY OF YOUR OWN HOME?! I mean, CUPS+Gutenprint supports like 5,000 printers by name and model number, and your perfectly functional Epson XP-830 is extremely not on it because we saw what you did that one time and we won't forgive you.

Seriously, software management on Fedora is goddamn unlivable.

This part attaches a Raspberry Pi in a slightly stupid case I have to an external hard disk. There wasn't really a way to print it without at least some kind of support material...except leaning back at a 45 degree angle. This printed entirely without supports.

Before we kick this off, I was enmoderated on this community a few months ago, and I haven't had to do a single bit of moderation in that time. Not a single user banned, not a single comment deleted. This community has been absolutely excellent to each other, and I sincerely thank each and every one of you for that.

Without further ado, let's have one of our community sidebar picture contests!

It's the holiday season, and I'm sure a few of us woodworkers have hand built some wooden gifts for our friends and loved ones. To enter the contest, please leave a comment on this post with a picture or two of your gift project along with a brief description. The project with the most community upvotes wins.

The prize will be your project displayed on the community sidebar until the next contest (where the New Yankee Workshop sign is at time of writing) and the choice of topic for the next season's contest.

Votes will be tallied on the evening of Dec 24.

Let's see the wonderful stuff y'all made!

I have gone from an rsync-based backup system to a borg-based one. I now have a Raspberry Pi-based server that will live on my LAN in another building, and I have a pair of HDDs I'll use locally. I'll plug one in for a week, and then swap to the other, that way I've got backups in cold storage should some uncouth jabronie write a ransomware virus for Linux.

The coolest part is the backup software checks to see if the drive is mounted, if the drive is attached but not mounted, it mounts it, and if it can't do that it fails gracefully. Still doing a bit of polish but so far it's working okay.

I've got a NAS. I've got a Music folder on the NAS. I've shared it with SMB.

I've got two users on the NAS, an admin account with read and write, and a guest account with only read privileges.

I used Dolphin on a KDE box, I clicked Network > Shared Folders (SMB) > The_NAS > Music. It threw a login window, I logged in as the admin.

How the fuck do I log back out to switch to the guest account? I know SMB is Microsoft's doing so it's pure weapons-grade gonorrhea but...why is this extremely obvious usability feature missing?

Abstract: I installed an 18 year old sound card in a modern-day Linux PC and the damn thing just worked.

Shit talking my dad

My father is an IT professional, AS400 class, "I remember when it was called the System 38" rank. When it comes to PC hardware, he can usually identify a PC when shown one. Doesn't really give a shit. He buys Dells because they gave him a line of credit. He shops by buying the second most expensive XPS they offer. He's been doing that since Core i7s had three-digit model numbers. I know because I've got one of his old machines in the other room. And I'd like to beat the teeth out of the four-flushing worm-headed sack of monkey shit that sold it to him.

This machine was surprisingly full of option cards for a PCIe-era box. Graphics card? Fine. USB 3.0? Was new in those days, that's a reasonable cost option. Gigabit ethernet NIC? You mean like the one built into it's motherboard? Soundblaster X-Fi? Huh. See, the bottom section of the motherboard IO shield has this curious plastic blanking plate. Pick that off with your fingernails and it pops free, revealing six 3.5mm jacks. The motherboard has functioning built-in surround sound. And yet they sold my father a goddamn Soundblaster. They did this enough to manufacture blanking plates specifically for that job. Corporations are bullshit.

Installing an 18 year old Soundblaster in a modern Fedora box

So, I've got a reasonable self-built gaming PC, I run Fedora KDE on it. It's got a Realtek 7.1 something something chip built in, but only 3 plugs in the rear. I happen to own an old Dell 5.1 surround sound speaker system. You can attach these things together, in Linux you have to use HdaJackRetask to reassign the rear jacks to put out the rear, front and subwoofer channels properly, and once you've got that done you'll be treated to these eardrum rupturing pops as the sound chip turns itself on and off to save power. Changing a couple files somewhere in /etc can fix that...until you reboot the machine, to make that change permanent you have to change some other file somewhere else...

Then I had a thought. I own an old but functional PCIe Soundblaster designed specifically to drive surround sound PC speakers and an open card slot in my machine. Why not?

I go to extract the card from the old Dell, noticing a cable is plugged into the front edge of the card. Memories of old sound cards of yore having passthrough cables from the optical drives went through my head before I realized it was the HD audio cable from the front IO panel. Oh yeah. So when I installed it in my new PC, I made sure to move the HD audio cable from the motherboard to the sound card.

Booted into Fedora, open the audio settings, select 5.1 surround, and it works. The driver is built right into the kernel, nothing to install or configure. Then I thought to test if the front IO worked. I plugged in a headset, and I got audio out of the headset and the speakers.

Nothing I could do would get it to detect the plug and mute the rear IO. I dug through alsamixer and such, no dice.

I tried a bluetooth headest, that worked fine. Because a Bluetooth device is kind of a whole other sound card, it just...stops sending audio data to the sound card.

Head tilt.

Shut down, switch the HD audio cable back to the motherboard, boot.

With no headset attached, audio is sent to the Soundblaster and out the 5.1 speakers. Plug a headset in the front IO, it auto-detects and switches to the onboard Realtek chip. The speakers go quiet and I get stereo out of the headset. Turn on my bluetooth headset and sound goes there.

It...works. I got audio to just fucking work. In Linux.

I made what passes in my house for french onion soup (I follow Alton Brown's recipe, replace the apple cider with another can of canned beef consomme) and it produces more than a human should eat in a sitting.

I made my soup fresh yesterday, had me a bowl or two, meanwhile the rest stayed on to simmer, and it reduced some more. The leftovers spent the night in the fridge, and I went to cut myself just a slice of the cheese as a snack, but I decided what the heck and fixed myself a whole bowl of soup, and you know it was better today. I think the extra time to reduce helps it out a lot. Doesn't make the crouton nearly as soggy.

I used my toaster oven to melt the cheese. Took more time than the oven but my oven's broiler can go from underdone to burned in a second, the toaster gave me some room.

Served with the same wine I made the soup out of. I've certainly eaten worse meals.

I was watching Randy Feltface with my cat sitting on my lap (not pictured, you degenerates will never see my lap), and I started just belly laughing at the bookshelf on gumtree skit, and I'm drunk enough to start wondering if my cat enjoys the sensation of my laughter as much as I enjoy the sensation of her purrs. A human is a ball of anxiety that can't purr to soothe itself and a cat is an utterly ridiculous creature that can never laugh at its own silliness. We'd be entirely screwed without each other.

It was not designed to be fixed. This required breaking more than one glue joint. But I did it. Amazing how much of my face was packed into all those tiny parts. It had little springs in it. "fun."

Years ago, I installed a 2 meter radio in my truck, I stuck it where the ash tray goes. Well, this meant that to plug in an antenna you had to take the dashboard apart, so I ripped the radio out.

I just don't like being alive enough to deal with that shit anymore.

So the stock ash tray is back installed. The cigarette lighter works so I got back my second power socket, the bulb in there is burned out but who gives a fuck, and I just AIPed the radio's power line under the carpet.

I went to microwave a microwavable burger, and it tells you to nuke it for awhile, leave it still for a little while, then nuke it for a little while longer. While I was leaving it for the little while, the sumbish beeped at me like "Hey trouser simian, don't forget your processed bullshit."

A lot of the laws of physics I've studied, like Boyle's Law and Charles' Law, describe the behavior of "An ideal confined gas."

I've had to tell several flight students to unlearn what they've learned about that in the meteorology chapter, because, for example, in a confined gas, increasing the temperature causes an increase in pressure while the density stays the same. In the Earth's atmosphere, increasing temperature does nothing to the pressure and decreases the density. Because the Earth's atmosphere isn't "confined," there's no lid, the air is relatively free to change volume. Heat the entire planet up and the atmosphere will just get a little taller.

But, I think, even if we put a magical vacuum tight shell around the planet 200 miles up, making the volume finite, I think the atmosphere would still act like an unconfined gas, because 1. it's so vast that it never homogenizes, parcels of different temperatures, pressures and moisture content take days to slosh across the available space, and 2. the Earth's gravity will cause a pressure gradient; most of the air is at the bottom and if you heat it up, it may not change volume but the pressure at the top will increase.

So I guess there has to be an upper limit to the volume and/or mass of air that can be "confined" and it's somewhere below planetary scale.