I got caught up on that too.
I don't do anything with yarn, but will sometimes use fabric to make puppets and other toys with my kid.
Even buying the cheapest fabric from the lowest priced outlets (cheaper than even the random alphabet soup brands on amazon) in bulk, it adds up so fast when you're actually creating things!
I'd say spending SOME money and time on your most fulfilling hobbies is damn near a necessity for a healthy existence.
And yeah sure, plenty of people don't do that, and plenty of people literally cannot afford to do that here in my dear old US of A.
But you know what else I see a lot of people doing in the US? Fighting mental illness and talking ever more openly about the need for revolution and violence.
You could fit so many more birdies into a medium format sensor!
I'm not doing much photography now but I was way into it a decade ago. I did it professionally on the side, which helped justify some of my nice full-frame gear. It's nice when taking photos at a dimly lit wedding reception.
Your mention of Gear Aquisition Syndrome followed by a picture of a motherfucking peregine falcon in flight still took my breath away for a second there!
I barely spent any money on my hobbies this year. I'm not some kind of sucker!
I merely spent thousands of dollars on materials and tools to build the supporting infrastructure for them!
I also have some very expensive computer parts waiting to be assembled. But they aren't for any hobby of mine! They're for the kid so we can play stuff without him using a computer twice as old as he is. 😉
I don't think I ever messed with the Windows 3.1 OS on my family's 486, but from Windows 95 and onwards I've done multiple installs of all the consumer versions of windows and was an avid user of win2k at the time. And for Windows 11 I have only ever installed it in a VM on a Linux machine to test Windows tools that are part of our builds at work.
I've also installed the last couple versions of Linux Mint a few times on some newer and older PCs. And some other distros in VMs for various reasons.
ALL of my recent Linux installs have gone far more smoothly and quickly than ANY Windows installs I remember.
Old windows? Better.
New Linux? Best!
Yeah, for all the undeserved hype about AI that we and I'm sure plenty of C-suites know about, there is still the issue of fiduciary duty to their bosses (shareholders).
If you're a tech CEO that knows it's all crap, but the market conditions are such that going all-in on AI is going to triple your share price for no good reason, you'll probably be in a "get that money or we'll find somebody who will" situation.
But that's also why executives get so much of their compensation in the form of stock. There's no need for shareholders to get off their asses to demand short term gains they can cash in on when the decision makers are one of them and playing the game game.
The term "AI" today is almost like the term "computer" decades ago.
As in, "this new vehicle is more efficient than ever thanks to a new aerodynamic shape created not on the drawing board, but on the computer."
Remember when the segway was a mysterious to-be-revealed "it" that we were going to design our cities around in the future?
I 'member.
IIRC from various board schematics at a previous job, typically you have the battery connected into the relevant voltage supply with a diode. So when that Vcc line for your memory module or real time clock is powered externally, the battery just sits idle since there's no voltage drop across the diode to get current flowing from the battery.
It works well because it's analog and fast and solid state. And yeah as long as you don't bump other parts or break something, if you swapped the battery on a powered system it should be fine.
Oh we have men of character forming militias alright.
The character is just a lobotomized and racist Elmer Fudd.
Nope I don't have experience installing older distros. I used some Unix systems in the late 90s (Sun Solaris) and really liked them even though I wasn't yet the Linux/FOSS enthusiast I am now.
Your comment does not surprise me at all, though. For any rough edges Linux has had over the years, at least the motivations of the developers creating it have been in the right place all along. That is, making software for themselves and users, as opposed to the innumerable forces of enshittification within tech giants like Microsoft.