Lettuce eat lettuce

It’s the ease if use. In Windows, you select an option called kiosk mode, select a user account or create one to use, then tell Windows what webpage/site URL to use for the locked down browser interface. Then you click go and that’s it.

You have a locked down, reasonably secure single-use kiosk for your Company HR portal, in-house web app, or training portal, literally takes less than 5 minutes, and is so simple, I could walk a non-techie through the whole process easily over the phone.

Things like cage are already more technical and tough to setup than that, by a large margin.

It’s great if you need something more powerful, or you want a bunch of kiosks that you can roll out on a low power SBC. But for one-off basic kiosks that use a little mini-tower, Windows kiosk mode is pretty great.

Not something I use personally, but a super easy, #JustWorks kiosk mode.

It’s the only thing I think Windows does better than Linux.

Don’t get me wrong, you can turn Linux into a great kiosk device, but it takes a lot of technical labor.

In the IT space, I often need to set up a basic kiosk device for HR portals, safety training stations, etc. In Windows, this takes 5 minutes tops.

If I had the programming chops, it would be my #1 project to work on. Even if it only worked with a specific DE or distro, I would be alright with that, as long as it was as easy and quick to set up as Windows Kiosk mode.

It’s better to buy them food or give them homeless care packs. There are good lists online of things you can give to homeless folks that will help them a lot, socks are a main staple.

I give all three depending on the scenario. I almost never have cash on me, so I don’t hand out money very often just because of that.

It’s important to show them compassion and care. Homeless people are often treated like trash by most people. Saying a kind word to them and giving them a small gift might be the only instance of kindness they experience for days, possibly weeks.

😆

Pixel 6a with GrapheneOS here. Been using for about a year and a half, and loving it.

An oldie but a goodie lol.

For sure. I always try to be extra kind to service folks, first, because it’s good to treat people well. But also because you never know what strings they can pull for you in a pinch.

Years ago, my connecting flight got canceled a few minutes before it was supposed to depart, obviously a ton of people were screwed trying to get where they were going.

I was in line for the service desk to get rerouted and saw the main service desk gal getting chewed out over and over by different pissy passengers, as if she had personally canceled their flight just because she was bored.

She kept telling everybody that all the flights were booked and it would be at least 10 hours before anything would be available.

When it was my turn, I could tell she was exhausted dealing with all the angry people ranting in her face. I just apologized to her about how sucky the whole situation was and said very nicely, “I’ll take whatever flight you can get me, but I understand things are crazy right now.” she thanked me and started to give me the same speech, then paused and told me to wait outside of the line while she, “checked something real quick.”

A minute or two later, she came back out and motioned me quietly back over. She leaned in and said she had, “found me a seat on a red-eye leaving in a few hours to my destination if that worked.”

I thanked her a bunch and was home early the next morning while all the other people were still crashed out in the airport waiting for all the other flights.

Two stories:

I work in IT. Most people are nice and reasonable, but every now and then, there are jerks.

For the most part, everybody gets equal treatment from me, but if you are a super polite and friendly person, I’ll bend the rules for you. I’ve given a few people unauthorized hardware upgrades, boosted their ticket priority, helped them bypass company restrictions, etc. Little favors for being so chill and easy to work with.

But in the other side, a handful of folks have gotten my evil side. One guy in particular, a real douchebag. Super angry all the time, a jerk to me and other employees, was always spamming us angrily to fix his stuff. He would constantly lock himself out of his account because he would angrily type the wrong password over and over and then call us all pissed because he was locked out and couldn’t get any work done.

One morning he did it again, called the help desk and I was the lucky one who picked up. He ranted at me about how he had an important meeting in less than an hour and his account was locked out again, (because he kept typing his password wrong like an idiot.) He swore at me and yelled about how the password policy was bullshit, blah blah.

I had enough and told him that, while I could reset his password, unfortunately we recently updated our servers and it would take roughly half an hour for the change to take place. He yelled about how he was going to miss his important meeting and all that, but I just kept gently apologizing and reminding him that I didn’t come up with the password policy and all of it was above my pay grade.

He hung up furious and I smiled, made a mental note to reset his password in half an hour, and marked the ticket as resolved. Still don’t feel bad about that.

Second story: In college, whenever there was paper due that I had procrastinated on, if it could be submitted to an online portal, I would create a fake Word document, fill it with random characters, and save it with the proper name.

Then, I would use a hex editor to corrupt the document, just enough so it would still get recognized as a legit Word doc, but if you tried to open it, Word would throw an error and not be able to open it.

Then I would submit that the night it was due, so it would look like I had submitted my paper on time. Even with small classes, it would usually be at least 2-3 days before the professor or TA would get to my paper, sometimes up to a week, and that whole time, I would be working on my real paper.

I would get a message or email from the professor a few days later letting me know that for some reason, my paper wouldn’t open, and requesting that I resend it.

I would then respond with something like, “oh hmmm, that’s weird, not sure what happened. Sure thing, I just uploaded it again, please let me know if that worked.”

Of course, the second time I actually uploaded my real paper. Did that trick a half dozen times or so, never got caught lol.

Different distros for different uses:

• Debian with KDE for my casual servers and Docker boxes.
• Nobara for my main gaming PC.
• Linux Mint with Cinnamon for my general purpose PCs and my #JustWorks uses.
• Arch for my pimp mobile test machines.

Noob friendly? Linux Mint. It’s not the prettiest, but it looks nice enough, especially if you tweak the themes a little, which is super easy.

It’s a fantastic all-around distro, and if you use the default Cinnamon desktop environment, it’s rock stable and super easy to navigate.

It’s what I use on all my personal laptops and also what I set my parents up with when I switched them from Windows to Linux.

At a place I worked at previously, there was a guy who got fired because the company found out that he had been hiding cans of beer in the water tank part of the toilet.

Yes…you read that right, he would “take a bathroom break” so he could pound a beer a few times throughout the day lol.

I wouldn’t critique it that much honestly, except for the fact that he operated heavy equipment for his job, so yeah, not safe at all.

A health company where they have that poor of security practices? Get the hell out ASAP! When they get ransomware, (and they will,) you do NOT want to be on the hook for trying to recover their systems.

Trust me, I had to help recover from a ransomware attack at a small company a while back, it hit early in the morning, I got there a little before 8am once I got the call.

22 hours later, we had only just finished wiping and re-imaging every computer, let alone getting all the software reinstalled, configured, tested, backups re-synced, etc. It took weeks to get everything fully recovered, and that was with a team of half a dozen people.

In the meantime, CYA hardcore. Document all security issues you can find in email and make sure whoever is in charge is aware and is on the email chain. There literally could be legal charges brought up if it’s involving private health information.

NCIS, or its variants. I think where I lived, it came on at 9pm, and because my parents didn’t want me to watch it, (violence and all that) it was a convenient bedtime marker.

As a baby Python Dev, I’m glad it’s not just me.

Lol

10 seconds? That’s generous.

Your fear is understandable and valid, this is a dark timeline and a really bad outcome.

But being afraid and panicking cannot possibly help anybody, least of all yourself.

Take a few days if you can to reset mentally as much as possible.

Then, get to work building resistance, it’s more critical now than ever. Find a leftist org near you and get involved. DSA, a local anarchist group, a worker co-op that needs volunteers, a democratic socialist org, anything leftist that is doing real work locally.

If you can’t donate your time, donate your money. If you can’t donate either of those, then help them spread the word on your social media. Post all their links and use your social media to advertise their events and meetups, help make people aware.

On the personal side, protect your health. The conservatives largely want to demolish healthcare, especially for underprivileged folks. Your health is so critical, especially now.

Quit your vices or at least, reduce them:

• Quit smoking/vaping.
• Stop drinking, at least heavily if you do.
• Stop eating junk food/candy.
• Get in shape, hike, calisthenics, walk, bike, etc.

It will not only help protect you from an administration that wants you to have less coverage if you’re sick/injured, it will help your mental health and save you money, sometimes tons of money.

Final advice for money, save it as much as you can. Practice frugality, get together with friends to cook and share meals. Get involved socially with people, learn about your community, build solidarity.

We will get through this, I believe in you, and I believe in the human drive for true freedom, equality, and community. Don’t let that flame burn out, we’re in this together, and only together can we come out victorious. ✊

Was in a public restroom years ago, I was the only person in it at that moment, taking care of business.

About a minute after I had sat down in the stall, I hear the main door to the bathroom smash open and a male voice desperately saying, “Shit! oh fuck me! Ohmahgaw! Holyshitomagaw! Fuck me!!!”

He slams open the door a few stalls down from mine, all the while never stopping his stream of profanity. I hear his pants ripped off and his belt hitting the floor, and what follows is a massive explosion of farts, liquid-sounding poop, and the entire time, he never stops loudly blaspheming lol. “Ppfffftt!!!OhhhhfuckkkPPRRrrppSPLASH!!!Ohhhmahgaww!PPrrrppprrtttShiiittFuggggohhh!PrrrtprraaaPPSplashhhh!!!Awshhiii!!”

I had to hold in my laughter while trying to wipe, pull my pants up, flush, and haul ass out of there before screaming with laughter the moment I got out of the bathroom lol.

Poor guy, I don’t know what he ate, but it came back with a brutal vengeance.

My current company just got bought out earlier this year, we are in the process of rolling all our stuff into their IT infrastructure.

I was lucky enough to get to use Debian as my OS on my old company laptop because I was the only IT at this company. Last week they finally issued me my new corporate laptop, which of course is Windows because the company that bought us out is a 100% Microsoft house.

One of their sys admins was on a call with me to get the laptop set up and working on their VPN, MFA enrollment, it was supposed to be a “quick 15 minute call.”

I watched him as he fought remotely with my machine for almost an hour. The VPN wouldn’t work no matter what he tried, then the GUI started acting up, then RDP wasn’t working right, then MFA wasn’t working. This was a brand new installation from their golden image too on a brand new high end laptop.

After about 20 minutes, I told him I was gunna stay on the call muted and to just let me know when everything was working properly. Then I hopped back onto my Linux laptop and spent the rest of the call getting actual work done while their new Windows machine was pooping the bed.

He didn’t actually even get it working at the end of the hour lol. He had to remote in later that evening to finish doing a bunch of registry fixes and file purges to finally get the VPN to connect.

My experience exactly. My current company is rolling out new W11 laptops as the old ones age out.

I’m consistently amazed at how poorly Windows 11 runs on these brand new, $1500 enterprise grade machines. They all have the latest Intel i7 chips, 16GB of DDR5 memory, Nvme 1TB drives, 1440p beautiful screens, and they perform like ass.

Constant lockups, stuttering, slow to wake up, slow to open programs, the fans constantly spin up super loud with almost nothing running in the foreground.

I see frequent GUI glitches and bugs, literally had the WiFi stop working on one yesterday, just wouldn’t connect to anything and the tray app wouldn’t pop up when clicked. Had to restart the whole computer and log in again to get it to connect.

Meanwhile, the 11 year old retired desktops that I repurposed for internal company resources like Open Project, Uptime Kuma, and Ansible are running plain old Debian with KDE Plasma and are rock solid. They never crash, never freeze up, are always super responsive, and are fast to update. The longest one of them has taken to update was maybe 3 minutes?

Windows on the other hand… Lets just say there’s a reason I push updates at the end of the day.