It’s a tool first and foremost. If you’re professionally using a power drill all day everyday, you’ll want a very good one that’s powerful, reliable and comfortable to use. If you professionally type all day everyday, you’re absolutely entitled to use a keyboard that perfectly fits your preferences in terms of feel, comfort, feedback and layout.

BallisticNG. Incredible WipEout homage, Linux native, VR compatible, runs locked at 60fps on Deck. Fun tracks, cool ships, nice lore. Physics and mechanics are by default more geared towards classic PSX games (1, 2097, 3), with “modern” physics and mechanics (Pure/Pulse/HD with absorb, barrel roll etc.) getting an overhaul in the next version.

Very good choice going with Debian. It is simple, clean, can be as minimal or as “bloated” as you wish, and once you’ve worked out the kinks it will happily run for years without maintenance (except updates of course).

There’s a steep learning curve because as a user you’re expected to configure stuff yourself (although defaults are most of the time very sensible), but if you’re willing and able to truly learn Linux and the terminal and you’re familiar with your hardware, it’s one of the best platforms out there.

You and me brother.

Which machine did you choose? I went for the Lelit Bianca, never regretted it.

Don’t know if it’s better, but for free, Firefox Focus includes an ad-blocker for Safari.

My ADHD brain panics if I need to catch a scheduled train and if I’m not actually there at least 1/4h in advance I melt into a puddle of anxiety.

But city trams and metros are absolutely fine. If I don’t catch this one, there’s gonna be another one in a few minutes. No worries.

Busses that are scheduled every half hour at most drive me mad tho. Did I miss it because it was 10 mins early because fuck schedules or is it gonna be 15 mins late?

Public transport in Europe is often in a sorry state, but trust me, it’s nothing compared to the US. Here in France, a lot of regional trains are very unreliable at best but at least high speed trains on dedicated tracks are fine (very expensive, but ok).

I don’t remember UK rail to be a shitshow and/or that expensive but my only experience is going to/from central London to/from neighboring counties and it was fine.

But in the US, oh boy. About 15 years ago I was living with some roommates in Campbell, CA and we went to SF one day. 1h drive mostly on shitty concrete motorways, including probably around $5 of gas. They were heading north for a romantic getaway so I went back to Campbell by myself. It took almost 4 fuckin hours, on maybe 4 or 5 different private companies, and cost me like $25 to get back.

Public transit in the US is so fucked up im almost convinced it’s by design.

True coffee experts chew the beans raw and let saliva enzymes digest the starches.

Ubuntu’s version of Gnome is heavily modified to look and feel like their old Unity DE though. Vanilla Gnome like in Fedora or Arch is a vastly different experience.

pacman -Snstall -yefresh -yefresh -unly-upgrades

Yeah there’s no confusion in French because “étage” literally means “floor above ground”, so calling the ground floor an “étage” makes no sense. It’s called “rez-de-chaussée” (“at street level”) or RDC for short. Same as “sous-sol” (“under-ground”).

Man I love my Firefox/Gnome/Wayland/GNU/systemd/Linux/GRUB operating system!

Debian has had MATE since forever. It’s as simple as typing

sudo apt install mate-desktop-environment

Honestly you don’t even need Ubuntu if you absolutely need snaps. You can install snapd on a lot of apt distros, or you can spin an Ubuntu container in Distrobox in a few seconds.

And that’s why we’re moving away from coding games where I work. Bad people try to cheat, good people can panic and shit the bed.

When I do interviews, I’m more interested in the candidate’s relevant experience, what kind of issues they faced, how they were solved, if they think they could have done things differently, and how they think. Code itself is irrelevant unless I can review a sprint’s worth of PRs.

When I ask more technical questions, I never ask for code but for an explanation on how they would tackle the problem. For example, I often ask about finding a simple solution to get all data relevant to a certain date in two, simple, historized tables. If you know window functions, it’s trivial. If you don’t, your solution will be slow and dirty and painful. But as most devs don’t know about window functions anyway, it lets me see how they approach the issue and if they understand what parts should have a trivial solution to make it simple.

I mean, almost all coffee that’s not freshly ground and brewed in a perfectly clean machine is rancid anyway. I know people who actually associate this taste with coffee itself, and won’t enjoy a cup until their moka pot has been “properly seasoned”.

Your grandma’s drip coffee? Rancid. From the vending machine at work or in a gas station? Rancid. Every single preground package at the store? Rancid. From your brother-in-law’s $2k bean-to-cup machine? You guessed it, rancid. The 10yo nespresso you salvaged from a friend to bring at your desk? Boy you don’t wanna know how much crap gets trapped inside over the years.

Tons of oils. And the darker they’re roasted, the more the oils come out and get exposed to oxygen and get rancid. Once you identify the smell, you can’t unsmell it. These oils stick to everything, especially plastic coffee drippers.

The “break room smell” I’m referring to is the lingering, heavy, overpowering stink of rancid coffee clinging to everything in a break room where the 20-year-old company dripper have gurgles along every morning, that has never seen any cleaning more advanced than a quick rinse of the glass jar.

Rancid oils? Like a “break-room-at-11am”-flavor?

If all the coffee shops in your area serve unbearably sour espresso, there might be 2 possibilities: either all of them suck and can’t properly extract a light roast, or you might be hypersensitive to acidity. Personally, I love acidity and I enjoy fruity, pleasantly acidic espresso as much as sweet, chocolatey shots, but I get that for a lot of people, “coffee” tastes burnt and bitter.

Coffee is naturally acidic. Very acidic. Acid compounds are also among the fastest to extract. The lighter the roast, the harder it is to extract most of the coffee, therefore light roasts tend to be more acidic than more heavily roasted beans. Light roasts are all the rage ATM because they respect the beans’ origin and characteristics and highlight rather than hide the specificity of high quality beans. The more you roast, the more you lose the original character of the beans and get burnt flavors (this is why most commercial coffee is heavily roasted, the more you burn it, the more you hide the flaws of you cheap, commodity shitty beans).

Espresso extraction follows a curve :

• First drips: salty and very thick
• under-extraction: sour and thick
• sweet-spot: sweet, chocolaty and syrupy
• over-extraction: bitter, watery.

Since roast levels affect the ease of extraction, the same ratio on a light roast and a dark roast will be wildly different. a 2:1 ratio for a light roast would be still way under-extracted, therefore a longer ratio should be used to get some sweetness to compensate for sourness, and get a slightly acidic shot (2.5:1 to 3:1 ratio should be fine). Dark roasts will overextract much quicker and get bitter much sooner, and therefore should be shorter to be palatable. A medium roast should be in the Goldilocks zone at a 2:1 or slightly longer ratio.

TL;DR: ask for a longer shot or a medium roast if you want less acidity and more sweetness and chocolatey flavors, a traditional dark roast blend with up to 20% robusta if you enjoy old school bitter espresso, or drown it in dairy, sugar and spices.

Most proper denim pants are sized in inches, even from non-US countries.

But of course vanity sizing is a thing so a size 36 is closer to 38in unless explicitly specified, and most online retailers provide true sizing in cm anyway, so there’s that.

Short answer: yes

Long answer: I own multiple brewing methods. Aeropress, French press, Turkish… and a Lelit Bianca. Nothing gets me as happy as a double espresso. Nothing beats the taste, the syrupy texture, the pure jolt of flavor in each sip. I bought an Aeropress for travel, and I ended up buying a Flair because I want the same espresso joy when not at home.

My Bianca is an absolute joy to use. I have completely internalized my workflow, making an espresso at home is so natural to me that it’s by far the easiest method. But brewing with the Flair is painful. It’s the least practical method of making coffee I know. And yet, I’m ready to go to such a length just to have delicious espresso when away.

As you can see, I kinda like coffee, but I love, live and breathe espresso.