The secret is to give yourself as Elitez Hacker objectives things like “least maintenance time required” or “maximum computing power lowest energy consumption” (or it’s companion “silent yet powerful”).
Maybe “I’m fed up with the constant need for tweaking and the jet-plane-like quality of my heater-that-does-computing-on-the-side” is the real mid-life crisis of techies.
Curiously, judging by my recent upgrade parts search, the peak of the capability-to-power-used curve on PCs (at least gaming ones) seems to have peaked about a decade ago.
Signed, a fellow Old Sea Dog Of Tech who has also gone through the same change over a decade ago
That’s not mid-life, that’s entire-life.
The way I went about it was putting Linux on a separate disk and then getting the bios to boot from it, leaving Windows untouched (though I can access the files from the Windows drives inside Linux if I need to).
Unless your machine is really old, it should have EFI boot so the Linux installation just registers itself with the bios as a boot possibility but doesn’t actually force anything or change the Windows boot. Then on the bios you have a menu where you can chose were to boot from, and Linux will appear with the name of the distribution you used (because that’s how a distro normally registers itself with the EFI boot during installation) whilst probably your Windows 7 can be booted by choosing the drive were Windows is (because it’s still using the old style of boot process which is based on putting a boot partition at the start of the drive were it’s installed).
My Windows is still there, totally unaware of there being a Linux on the same machine.
The way I suggest you go about it is to check how to get into the bios (if you don’t know already) and the booting stuff in your bios to see if works as I said and you get it, and to see how Windows has its boot set-up there (as I said, for Windows 7 the bios should be booting a disk rather than an EFI entry). Download a Linux distro and put it on a USB flash disk or even an external HD and then try and boot from there (if you can get your bios to boot from the USB Flash disk or external HD then you understood the principle of the thing) - you can even just play around with that Linux distribution you booted from an external source and see if you’re ok with using it (i.e. if the UI is not confusing).
Then if you want to go ahead with it, get yourself a separate SSD (256GB is fine), install it and then you can install a Linux distribution from a USB Flash disk or external disk into it. Just install that Linux entirely in the new drive (since the drive is all for it you can let it just do the automated method of “install on drive”). Don’t tell it to do anything with the Windows drive (if the new drive is not empty - i.e. you got it second hand or were using it for something else - MAKE SURE YOU KNOW FOR SURE WHICH ONE HAS Windows so that you mistakenly install into that one, if the new drive is empty it will show as empty in the installation UI so you know it’s not the Windows one) and Windows will still be there and you can still boot from it if you need to (the point of checking out of how booting worked in the bios beforehand is exactly to make sure you know were is the boot menu on the bios, how to use it and which entry in the boot menu is the one that boots Windows).
In my case I actually had an old Linux in there which I overwrote with the new one that I now use and an old complicated boot mechanism were booting went via the Windows booting stuff which was the one showing me a boot menu, all of which going via a WIndows Boot partition in the same disk as the Linux installation so working around all so that Windows still booted was quite a headache and included some pretty nervous moments, but in your case if you just use a new empty drive for Linux and just chose in the Bios what to boot, it should be pretty straightforward.
Worst case you just have to go back to using that Windows 7.
I went with Pop! OS because it was recommended as being good for gaming and it has out of the box support for Nvidia Graphics cards, which is what I have.
It just worked, no fuss and a quick check on my personal Linux management and gaming on Linux notes folder shows no actual notes for my Pop! OS desktop system (for the games in it I do have a couple of notes, but no for the OS), which means I’ve had zero problems with the actual system so far (I write the notes down if I get a problem I need to figure out how to fix, just in case I get the same problem again and have to fix it again).
Mind you I haven’t mucked about with things like replacing my windows manager or using Wayland instead of X-windows since I don’t see the point in changing what’s not broken and works fine in a system which is supposed to be for relaxing, not experimentation.
I was doing the same thing (I too run my computers into the ground, though I also didn’t want to move to Windows 10 because of all the analytics at the OS level sending data to them MS added to that version, plus and frankly, it worked so I couldn’t be arsed).
I also switched some time ago, pushed by Steam’s impending end of support plus more and more stuff coming out without Windows 7 support.
However I took the dive and switched to Linux rather than Windows 11, to a great extent prompted by people here reporting good experiences gaming on it (since I already have quite a lot of expertise in it and I mainly just use my PC for gaming) plus it’s part of a broader set of changes to avoid enshittification (such as replacing my TV-Box with a Mini-PC with Linux) I’m doing at home and am very happy with the result.
It’s less heavy than Windows, even booting faster and seems to have extended how long I can keep going before that computer is totally run to the ground, though for that it also helps that once I started upgrading by changing the OS, I also went and did a few partial upgrades of the hardware, like replacing my old CPU with an equally old one but twice as powerfull - which used to cost 200 bucks but now was 17 bucks second hand - a more powerful graphics card and a more modern SSD disk for the games partition (it’s actually a modern M.2 SATA on a 2.5 inch housing adaptor, and that’s as fast as SATA ever got and to get better than that you need a PCIx M.2) - basically I did the upgrades I could do on the cheap without changing motherboard and everything else that depends on it (like memory and a newer generation CPU) and which would still be compatible with the Windows 7 boot partition I still have around (though I haven’t actually been booting it). Since I went from Windows 7 to Linux rather than Windows 11, none of the hardware upgrades was wasted in just making up for the extra bloat on Windows 11 and the machine definitelly feels a lot more performant.
As for games, most just work, about 1/3 need extra tweaking to work well or work at all and only 1 or 2 so far I couldn’t get to work at all.
Curiously at least one game - Borderlands 2 from Steam - that didn’t work on Windows 7, works on Linux. Also I can now run games whose minimum Windows version is 10 which I couldn’t before.
Also since all non-Linux games are running on the Wine compatibility layer, Linux is actually better backwards compatible with older Windows and DOS than Windows itself, which is nice for Patient Gamer types like me.
I think that with Linux in it my PC is actually compatible with more games than it was with Windows 7.
I seriously think it’s one of my best decisions in years.
There’s a whole different angle to game fun which is exploring game mechanics and the complexity that emerges from their combinations and interaction with the game space and the behaviour of independent game entities.
For example (and highly simplified), in Terraria the player has to balance the location of resources, their search and extraction of them, the actual movement, location and needs of the game monsters and NPCs, and their own progression up the “research ladder” (only in Terraria the “research ladder” is implicit and based on which resources have you managed to get your hands on and what have you built with them).
Whilst some of the fun in that game is in exploring a procedurally generated world, the drive to do so and the main fun in the game is to solve the complex problems that emerge from the interaction of those things: you explore to find resources that let you make equipment that allows you to explore more dangerous or harder to reach places to find more complex resources to make more complex equipment and so on and meanwhile the more advanced equipment also lets you do no stuff (IMHO, just merelly “shovel +1 level” equipment improvements are nowhere as satisfying as getting access to new kinds of stuff that let you do new stuff).
Examine games like for example Factorio, Minecraft or Rimworld and you find the same kind of global game loop: do stuff to get stuff to be able do more difficult stuff to get more advanced stuff and so on and all the while the complexity of your choices increases because the combination of options you have goes up as, often, also does the complexity of the World you now have de facto access to.
The AAA world however went down the path of story-like games which have one core linear story (the main quest) and then a bunch of mini-stories (side quests) and were game progression comes from advancing the core story and gaining levels (which themselves are generally just the mathematical result of doing stuff and advancing the core store and doing side stories) that let you do the same things only better and maybe a few news things, ultimatelly to help story progression. Stories “officially” drive the player’s exploration (though some players also self driven to just explore just because of liking to explore) and it seems to be impossible to get good stories working well in procedurally generated worlds (as No Man’s Sky has proven, IMHO). There is often some amount of the same mechanics as I describe above for open world indie games, but they’re not the core of the game and what drives the player.
And yeah, if your game is story driven and you can’t procedurally generate the game space with good stories, you’re going to hit limits in the size of the thing, either on the size of the game space that has to be handcrafted to work well with the stories or in the amount of stories being insufficient for the game space leading to lots of boring game space that feels empty like it’s just filler.
There are quite a lot of ways of making an open world game with infinite replayability without requiring massive maps, but they’re not in the style AAA gaming has been going for in the past decade, they’re more things like Oxygen Not Included, Factorio, Minecraft or Battle Brothers were the game space is procedurally generated, the fun is in conquering the challenges of a map, and once you exhaust it you stop yet end up coming back months later and try a new game with a new map, from scratch, because it’s again fun and there’s no “I know this map” to spoil it.
The handmade game spaces with custom made “adventures” do manage to have better experiences than those games that rely on procedural generation and naturally emerging situations for providing gamers with experiences, but they’re mainly once of and rely on sheer size to remain entertaining for long.
I would get two of the local small (about 50g each) cured cheeses made out of goat and sheep milk a week and eat them, and was having trouble cutting down on blood sugar until I stopped doing it and that one change with all else being roughly the same consistently reduced the blood sugar level increases - since I have Type II Diabetes - between my “running days” (I run 10km twice a week, which by itself has a huge positive impact on it).
Around here there’s also what we call “fresh cheese” (basically cheese that hasn’t been cured) and I usually get a couple of those made of goat cheese and they don’t seem to be a problem.
Of course, this is all a bit so-so and anecdotcal since its pretty hard to control all other variables plus blood sugar seems to also be affected what you consumed days before (I’ve seen blood sugar go up long after the last meal and during a fasting period - so supposedly not because of sugar intake or digestion - which I suspect is due to the sugar stored in the liver or maybe yet another unexpected methabolic pathway).
In my experience of trying to control blood sugar levels with food and exercise, it is exactly as you said: metabolism is crazy, crazy complicated :/
I definitelly need to try that.
Thank you.
Yeah, but they have a lot of calories via fat (especially cheese) and what I’ve seen in my own diet (which includes regular checking of blood sugar levels), if I eat more of it (again, especially cheese) the sugar levels in the blood go up all else being the same.
Don’t ask me the exact details of how the human body does that, I’m not a specialist and this is just what I observe happens if start eating more cheese.
Which is a shame, 'cause I love cheese :(
Yeah, it it makes a massive difference the GI index of the sugars in the food one eats, so for example it’s a lot better to consume pulses (like chickpeas) than it is pasta, since the latter is pretty much just starch and (after cooked) water whilst the former is a far more complex food with also lots of protein and fiber (only talking about macronutrients here).
Mind you, this diet of mine is not because of overweight, it’s to keep Type II Diabetes under control with as little insulin as possible and to get it into remission (so far, it has worked very well having reduced the need of insuline by about 80%), so it’s based on studies that have been done on this and is much more tightly controlled with regular checking of blood sugar levels.
But yeah, a lot of it is to reduce the intake of low GI sugars (I used to be a big consumer of bread, for example, since I live in a country with really good bread, and that stuff is for special occasions only nowadays), which means quite a lot of cuting down on carbohydrates consumption but also means replacing some with better sugars (so, say, pulse or peas instead of potatoes or pasta)
Mind you, part of the problem is that my work is sitting down in front of a computer, so even with regular exercise I simply need a lot less sugars than I used to eat - if was naturally more physically active in most days beyond the whole walk to work and back thing and two 10km runs a week, cutting down so much on carbohydrate-rich foods would’ve been a bad thing.
Still, its pretty amazing by comparison just how much excess of sugars there was in my diet previously and that was even with some care with what I ate and quite a lot of sweets avoidance.
Fruit yoghurt is pretty much yoghurt with fruit jam added, so it ends up with quite a lot more sugar than the natural stuff which has no added sugar, so ever since I’ve had to start watching out for my sugar intake I’ve started only eating the natural one and adding cinnamon or vanilla extract for flavour.
It’s amazing how after a while of cutting sugars from your food you get used to it, don’t feel the need for it anymore and even start finding the most sugary stuff (like certain kinds of sweets) unpleasantly sweet.
The actual spaghetti you add it to has an even higher percentage of carbohydrates - in the form of starch which the human body easily turns into sugars - than the sauce so paradoxically you’ll end up with less sugar in your blood stream by downing that sauce by itself than if you eat it with spaghetti.
(That said, this is for uncooked spaghetti: when you cook it it grows by absorbing water which reduces the fraction of carbohydrates in the final product, so depending on the type of spaghetti it might or not end up with more carbohydrates than the sauce).
Oh yeah - I’ve had to start watching my carbohydrate intake for health reasons and it’s amazing just how much of that stuff is in processed food: for example “American Style Onion Rings (frozen)” from Lidl is over 40% carbohydrates - so basically the 450g pack of it has 180g of sugars and the kind of stuff your digestive system will turn into sugars.
One would think it would be only starchy foods (like bread, pasta, rice and such) and cakes and sweets that have lots of it, but no, most processed food is loaded with carbohydrates, often already directly as sugars, probably because the cheapest ingredient to bulk it up is flour.
Mind you, lots of natural or lightly processed foods have quite a bit of it - for example natural yoghurt with nothing added has maybe 6% of carbohydrates (tough yoghurt with fruit is way worse, since the adding of fruit is generally mixing it with fruit jam which has a lot of sugar) and most fruits have quite a bit of sugar (for example, common varieties of apple have about 14% of sugar - so your run of the mill apple comes with 1 spoonful of sugar included - and some varieties have a lot more) which is why there’s this funny paradox that natural fruit juice has a lot more sugar in it than the same amount of Coca-Cola (since when you make the fruit juice you throw away the fiber and most of the protein leaving a much higher percentage of sugar than originally).
Generally, the kind of stuff that has almost no carbohydrates are veggies, like lettuce or broccoli.
After the Emissions Scandal and an estimated 10 thousand excess deaths a year in Europe because of diesel emissions: Fuck the European Auto Industry.
Their dragging of feet on moving to EV technology is also disgraceful.
And don’t get me started on the over-reliance on cars in most of Europe.
All in all, they’re a negative for Europe, not a positive, and if they can’t compete with the bloody Chinese, well, let the Free Market they so love for everything else do a little Constructive Destruction on them,
People generally do it because they’re in a political party, plus you get paid for it though I think it takes many months for it to come in (never really worried enough about it to keep an eye out for that money coming into my bank account) and it doesn’t add up to much per hour for what’s a really long day (from about 6 AM to around 10 - 12PM depending on how long it takes to count the votes of one’s polling station).
It’s an interesting experience if a bit tiring.
It’s the most boring thing of the technical side of the job especially at the more senior levels because it’s so mindnumbingly simple, uses a significant proportion of development time and is usually what ends up having to be redone if there are small changes in things like input or output interfaces (i.e. adding, removing or changing data fields) which is why it’s probably one of the main elements in making maintaining and updating code already in Production a far less pleasant side of job than the actual creation of the application/system is.
Yeah, it’s exactly the same in the very opposite end of Europe (and about as poor) - Portugal - which I know becaused I maned the polling places a couple of times and read the rule book.
Yeah, I’ve been there - it’s how I learned to upgrade and eventually assemble my own PCs: I couldn’t just buy a new one every time it started to run slow with newer games so I learned which parts gave the better bang for the bug (back in those days it was often memory) and would upgrade them and eventually hit another bottleneck and upgrade that part and so on, and once in a while I did need to to a big upgrade (i.e. the motherboard, which usually meant also new CPU and new memory).
I was also pretty lost - at least to begin with - back then, but, you know, doing is learning.
Anyways, I still keep the “no waste” habits from back then (for example, recently I upgraded my CPU with one which the benchmarks say is twice as powerful, only my CPU is from 2018 and I didn’t want to upgrade the motherboard so the replacement had to be a CPU for the same socket type, so something also from that time. Ended up getting a server class CPU for it, which back then was over €200 but now, 2nd hand, cost me just €17).
Over time have learned to prioritize other things also and learned that sometimes spending a bit more upfront saves a lot more over time (for example, if I aim for stuff that produces less heat (i.e. that use less power to do its work, which in todays technical lingo is “lower TDP”) and I might spend a bit more but save it all and then some in lower electricity costs over time.
Point being that with a bit of reading and looking around you can learn what you need to better chose what you get, even if 2nd hand, in such a way that the results are less of a hassle and sometimes even end up saving more money (such as how parts that use a lot of power even 2nd hand can, in year or two, add up to something more expensive than newer parts which consume less because the 2nd hand ones eat so much more power).
Also as one gets more financially able to afford it, it’s normal to trade personal time savings for money, in the sense that I don’t really need to have a fragile setup held together with chewing gum and string which is constantly giving me problems and I have to waste tons of time on it just to keep it going, when at least for some things I can get a ton of extra convenience and save a lot of my time by spending a little bit more money. There is a monetary value for one not to have to worry about something breaking all the time and having to constantly tweak and maintain it, you just have to find how much is it worth it for you (I can tell you peace of mind and no-hassle It’s worth a lot more for me nowadays than back when I was a teen).