"The Albanese government's support for the illegal bombing of Iran was a choice between US President Donald Trump & international law. They chose Trump, & shockingly did so for no other reason than the hope it would mean Aukus goes ahead."

~ David Shoebridge

https://www.deepcutnews.com/p/australias-support-for-trump-dangerous

"Indian court rules #transWomen are #women and ‘legally entitled to recognition’"

'In a landmark ruling for the country, after rejecting claims that womanhood was preserved only for those who can bear children, the High Court of #AndhraPradesh ruled that #trans women were “legally entitled” to recognition as women.

...tying the definition of women to pregnancy was “legally unsustainable” and contradicted #India’s constitution'

https://www.thepinknews.com/2025/06/26/india-trans-women-high-court-decision/

#transRights #LGBT #LGBTQIA #LGBTQ

Back in windows xp days, I was trying to reinstall windows on a Toshiba Tecra M4 (the greatest laptop ever made, I miss it every day), more specifically Windows XP Tablet Edition, which is the version of windows that supported this laptop's fancy draw-on-the-screen nonsense.

Being not just regular windows but Special Fancy Windows, it was being a massive pain in the arse. It was being SO much of a pain in the arse that at about 1am I went "You know what, screw it, I'm gonna give Ubuntu a go, however bad it is it can't by worse than this," and like an hour later I was done. Which was already impressive because back then, installing windows and all its drivers etc took all day.

I was (among other things) the Computer Guy at the time, and earned a modest living going round and cleaning up windows boxes that fucked themselves up. Back then, Windows fucked itself up through normal use (at that time normal use for normal people meant email, word, ebay, flash games and porn). It'd get slower and slower until you called me, and I'd come out and unfuck it and make it fast again, and I didn't like being bothered, so I'd leave a lil printout with the incantations to use to periodically unfuck the machine. My goal was to have people call me once, I didn't wanna defrag and clean up the same machine over and over again, everybody's got a computer, I can word-of-mouth my way through the whole town and then go next town over, no need to have repeat business except for when sometimes windows would find a NEW way to fuck itself up lol

(IDK if windows still fucks itself up over time, but I understand that these days it comes pre-fucked but in a different and worse way)

That was a bit of a tangent that I'll come back to in a minute, but it was important. See, I was trying to stop the whole, computer-slowing-down thing, and the only way to do that was to give the customer a checklist of the incantations to keep it fast.

Ubuntu required no maintenance incantations. There was no need for a registry cleaner because there was no registry. No defragger because it didn't get fragged in the first place. No virus scanner because there weren't viruses. There was a bit of bollocking about the first time you set it up, but there was no periodic, ongoing, "Do these steps every month to stop it going treacle-slow" checklist of pointless busywork bullshit.

I figured out almost immediately that you can really fuck up a linux machine if you don't know what you're doing - but windows will really fuck ITSELF up UNLESS you know EXACTLY what you're doing.

And that was the end of my software-fixing career!

No really, just using newbie Linux for a month or so just killed that whole side gig dead. I could no longer say to people with a straight face "Do these incantations periodically or call me to do them for you" when my goal was to find the easiest, most direct and uncomplicated way to sort them out with a computer that didn't slow down. Like, imagine being a bodywork guy and people keep bringing you Reliant Robins that have fallen over at roundabouts, one guy's brought you the same three-wheeled plastic car five times already, would it be right to continue taking his money and fixing his car, could you avoid mentioning that they make cars with four wheels now? It put me out of business. Thankfully I've always been six side gigs in a trenchcoat so I could drop one no biggie, I was still the computer guy, still am really, but now I'm Hardware Guy not Software Guy.

And I started to mull over how to go from a side gig of teaching people how to clean up a computer every couple months because it fucked itself up and got slow by doing email, word, ebay, flash games and porn, into a side gig of just sorting them out with a computer that could do email, word, ebay, flash games and porn without slowing down in the first place.

And then I updated my computer one day and the buttons were on the wrong side of the screen and that was the end of my convert-the-town-to-linux plans.

Like, I was annoyed that the close/minimize/maximise buttons had moved over to the left for absolutely no reason at all (they moved back to the right six years later?), but at the same time I was SO RELIEVED that I'd never really Gone Hard on the Linux evangelizing or seriously started on the whole converting-my-customers scheme, because if I'd gone around recommending people this awesome new way of doing email, word, ebay, flash games and porn, and told them "Don't worry, it won't fuck itself up like windows does," and they'd gotten used to it and liked it, and then they'd woken up one morning and it was all back to front just for shits and giggles?

I'd have looked like the biggest fucking plonker in town.