old school car stuff i should get
Back in my teens, if I needed something for the car, the only choices to get things were the local Kmart and mail order through the JC Whitney mail order catalog. I only did the mail order thing once and then said screw that and got whatever I needed at Kmart.
Auto parts stores were always around, but the same is true now just like it was then where everything always costs more there. Since I'm not wasting my money at those places, I buy online.
There is some stuff that's tough to find unless you specifically know what it's called. These are a few of them:
Lace-on steering wheel cover. This is not a brand but a cover type.
The lace-on type is, without question, the most annoying type of steering wheel cover to install. Once installed however, it fits best, feels the best, and most importantly does not shift around once it starts to age. Other covers get loose after they've been on the wheel for a while, but the lace-on doesn't if installed properly. The worst thing that happens with one of these is it starts falling apart when it gets really old, but again, it doesn't shift. All you get with one of these is a box with the the wrap and tie, which is all you need. If you're really good at installing one of these, you don't need to cut excess tie when done and can just tuck it in.
Vent trim decoration strips. Serves no purpose other than to look cool, but I like these because it has a luxury sport appearance to it.
These things size to fit and press on. They don't damage vent flaps and can be removed easily. There are two types of car brands this works on more than any other. Any BMW owner who wants the sky/blue/red "M" stripes on their vents, and Toyota truck owners who want the vintage style yellow/orange/red stripes on theirs. For others, you just get the color that matches the paint color of the car.
Magnetic dome lamp. I don't need this for the interior but rather the trunk.
I've owned hatchbacks, SUVs and sedans, and not a single one of them ever had truly good lighting back there. This is where modern super-bright LED really saves the day. They even have motion sensor type for cheap. RV guys use these for interior closets but they also work in trunks and the rear storage area of SUVs.
Mini MagLite. I can use my phone's camera flash bulb like a flashlight just like everyone else can, but it's nothing compared to a real deal MagLite.
If it's night, I'm sitting in the car, drop something and it either goes between the seats or worse yet under the seat, the phone's light isn't good enough to find the whatever-it-was I dropped. If there's anything that needs to be seen at night in the engine bay or at the tires, same thing, the phone light isn't good enough. Even if it's to find something in the center console or glove box, again, the phone won't cut it. A mini MagLite however, specifically a red one (easier to see when going to retrieve it compared to black), will blast enough light. Two AA batteries is all it needs. No recharging crap required. If it gets wet, it still works. If it's even dropped on concrete, again, still works.
Waterproof memo pad with Rite in the Rain pencil. I qualify this as necessary car stuff.
I've been meaning to buy some of these for a while now. For me, the sole purpose of having this is to jot notes for extra long term storage. Specifically, car info (ex: fuse info, windshield wiper length, maybe insurance policy #, etc.) that I might need later. If the info goes in the phone, it would be the way of things that the one time I really need to bring up those digital notes, I won't be able to. If I use a regular memo pad, that paper over time may become unreadable even just sitting in a glove box. All the paper on a waterproof memo pad is treated and therefore lasts longer. The Rite in the Rain pencil is what that pad should be complemented with because it never needs ink and always works.
well, that didn't go well
I was, repeat, was on Kubuntu 26.04 LTS. Not anymore. I'm back to 24.04 and am staying with it. For now.
It wasn't just the Wayland graphics platform breaking things that was the problem, especially since you can switch back to X11 (which I did do). Enough annoyances happened in 26.04 to where I said screw this, I'm going back to 24.04, and did.
The last I spoke of this, I talked about workarounds when using 24.04. Since I did a fresh install from scratch, I learned more this time around, meaning fewer workarounds were required.
I also gained back over 25GB of space on the new install because I had a Virtualbox image I forgot to remove on the previous one. Oops.
Speaking of which, While I was doing the 26.04 thing, I did briefly try Boxes, as you can convert a Virtualbox VDI to a Boxes QCOW2, which by the way is done using qemu-utils on Ubuntu/Debian:
qemu-img convert -p -f vdi -O qcow2 "/path/to/disk.vdi" "$HOME/disk.qcow2"
I used that for a Windows XP Virtualbox PC I have (mainly for legacy Garmin stuff), but it didn't work when I tried to load it in Boxes. Maybe I did something wrong. Not sure. Whatever. I just went back to Virtualbox. It was easier to perform an "appliance" export out of Virtualbox and just import to the new install.
So yeah, back on 24.04. For how long? Time will tell.
i have never financed a burrito
Some say an example of modern financial stupidity is that you can finance anything. All you have to do is go to Chipotle, use the Klarna app, do the BNPL (buy now, pay later) thing, make your purchase and ta-da, you've officially financed a burrito.
Is this any different from making the same purchase on a credit card?
No.
If one goes to Burger King and orders a Whopper Jr. w/cheese, then pays for it on plastic, that is absolutely a BNPL purchase. Until the card is paid off, that burger was literally financed.
Is it a bad decision to finance a burger? No. If over time the burger ended up costing 3x more due to payments with interest charges because the card wasn't paid off, the bad decision came from how the finances were handled and not from the burger itself.
Lately, I've been seeing a ton of videos on how so many people are in crushing amounts of debt. On the majority of these videos, one thing sticks out more than anything else.
Nearly everyone shown is under the age of 35.
Are people younger than 35 flat out stupid with money?
Yes.
Maybe not all under-35 people are mouth breathing knuckle dragging morons in how they handle their finances, but most are.
For example, Middle Aged Dude would buy a trunk organizer, because that's a genuinely useful thing for the car. An under-35 on the other hand would buy an illuminated gamer chair.
Another example is Middle Aged Dude would buy microfiber cleaning cloths, while an under-35 buys a t-shirt that says "sucks" on it.
And, of course, only an under-35 would be dumb enough to finance a burrito and go into real debt for it. Middle Aged Dude would just go to a gas station and buy a packet of peanuts instead, or say to hell with that and just cook food at home that's already paid for.
small square short tabs in firefox 157
The new Firefox 157 is actually really nice, with one exception. Rounded menus and rounded tabs everywhere, and it sucks.
But it can be fixed.
Getting rid of the roundy-everything:
1. about:config
2. Set toolkit.legacyUserProfileCustomizations.stylesheets to true.
3. Go to Firefox profile folder, go to folder chrome. If the folder does not exist, create it.
4. In chrome folder, create blank userChrome.css file.
5. Put the following in userChrome.css and save:
:root {
--border-radius-xsmall:0 !important;
--border-radius-small:0 !important;
--border-radius-medium:0 !important;
--border-radius-large:0 !important;
--border-radius-xlarge:0 !important;
--border-radius-circle:0 !important;
}
Making tabs smaller so they're not bloated and stupid:
1. about:config
2. Set browser.uidensity to 1.
Restart browser. All menu and tab edges are now square to get all the space back you lost from the roundy crap.
Why is square better than round here? Easy answer. Easier to click on things you want to click. That roundy garbage made it more difficult to click on everything. Both tab and menu edges were effectively chopped off. Going square puts things back the way they were, which made more sense.
Remember what I said about upgrading? This is an example of being able to fix things when they get jacked up from an update/upgrade.
there are reasons upgrading sucks
Kubuntu 26.04 LTS was released back in April, but I've resisted upgrading from 24.04 LTS for two reasons. The last upgrade went not-so smoothly, and I hate upgrading.
My experience upgrading from 24.04 LTS to 26.04 LTS was as follows:
The graphical installer spit back an error that it couldn't upgrade, but without giving me too much info as to why, so I did it the Terminal (Konsole) way...
sudo apt update
sudo apt full-upgrade
(reboot)
sudo do-release-upgrade -m desktop
...which told me something called go-mtpfs was causing some issue. The installer said I had the option to ignore the error and continue, or stop and find the "correct" version/release or whatever. I stopped, ran into Synaptic Package Manager, uninstalled go-mtpfs since it's just for Android stuff, then ran the above commands again. No errors after that, and things continued normally.
Out of the entire upgrade process I only had to answer something like 3 or 4 yes/no questions. Just boot loading stuff for the most part, if I remember correctly.
After reboot, done. This was how it went for both computers.
Getting to the desktop was fine, but where things broke had to do with a switch from X11 to Wayland, so I had to switch back to X11, and that fixed almost everything.
I had to change window settings to turn off crap like floating taskbar, "wobbly windows" and a few other things. The fortunate part is that I got things back to looking and acting how I prefer.
Some things were fixed and improved. I now have sound events for connect/disconnect of USB devices (24.04 LTS never got that right), 7-Zip works better, GIMP now has a light mode to get rid of the default dark mode garbage, and LibreOffice while at a newer version still looks and acts the same, which is good.
The last time I upgraded from one LTS to the next, it went... meh. Some stuff outright broke where I had to use workarounds to fix things. For this upgrade, there were fewer workarounds. That's about the best I can say about it.
Why I hate upgrading
Back in the Windows 7 days, I purposely locked down the OS so absolutely nothing auto-upgraded. Windows updates were shut off. Main browser at the time was Firefox ESR, with extra configuration to block auto-updating (I only updated when it was absolutely necessary). For docs and spreadsheets, OpenOffice 4.1.7 with updates off. For other software I used, same deal. I brought whatever I was using up to the software version I knew did everything I wanted, then stopped updating.
I ran Win7 like that for years with no problems whatsoever. The only time I ever blew up 7 was when I did dumb stuff, such as trying to edit large videos the computer couldn't handle, or using a crappy USB stick or whatever.
The upgrade hate comes from knowing that a) turning all the updates off results in a very pleasant, easy and fast computing experience, and b) turning updates on can and will jack things up.
Unfortunately, no modern OS can be run 100% no-update style like Win7, and that's mainly due to the web browser. Chrome, Firefox, some forked thing, whatever, doesn't matter. The browser has to be updated or certain web sites will break on attempt to use them. And since the browser doesn't run as an island unto itself like it used to, the whole OS needs to be kept updated.
At least the Linux issues I dealt with could be fixed. The desktop environment crap I mentioned above is an example of that. After upgrading, some stuff got enabled I didn't want, so I turned it off. Or, if it were something that majorly frustrated me, I could junk KDE temporarily or entirely by switching to Xfce or any number of others.
It is when I'm not "allowed" to fix issues that I want to start throwing things. Win11 is, of course, notorious for this. For five years -- FIVE -- no small taskbar option. Only now does Win11 finally have it, along with being able to put the taskbar on top, bottom, left or right side of the screen. That will make some people jump for joy, but the point is that for FIVE years, it was a completely unfixable problem with stock 11. In Linux, the wait time to fix a problem is fewer than five minutes if you know what you're doing.
There may come a point in the future when I switch off KDE in favor of something more lightweight and custom code in all the features I want. That might be Xfce or something lighter like fluxbox. KDE Plasma is what I use, but I know the only way to really get a web browser's meat hooks out of the GUI and back to being an island unto itself is with a lightweight environment.
For now, 26.04 LTS works, such as it is.