data1701d (He/Him)

“Life forms. You precious little lifeforms. You tiny little lifeforms. Where are you?”

- Lt. Cmdr Data, Star Trek: Generations

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: March 7th, 2024

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  • I mean, it’s in “a galaxy far, far away”, and pretty much all of Star Trek takes place in the Milky Way Galaxy - the only time they ever leave is in, true to its name, TNG:”Where No One Has Gone Before”, when the traveller sends them to M-33.

    It could be conceivable that anything that happened in Star Wars is just in a very distant part of the universe that would take millions or billions of years for any ship to get from there.

    Though honestly, I personally like to imagine that Tom Paris really likes Star Wars, but when he brings it up, everyone thinks it’s just another one of his campy 20th century films.


  • What about fan gender-non-binary babe nerds?!

    On another note, is there any sci-fi series that has a non-binary character who’s just a normal human and not non-binary for reasons of space magic or being an alien? I mean, Adira from DIS sort of fills that box, since all other people we’ve seen joined with symbionts were cis (more or less), but the symbiont means not quite.

    It still really drove me nuts when they revealed T’Lir in the IDW comics to be an Organian in disguise, although I guess we don’t know how Organian gender works; maybe there are cis Organians, and that makes it a bit better?




  • I also recommend dd on a live USB, but with some advice.

    First off - and I’m really surprised nobody’s warned you - be EXTREMELY CAREFUL with dd; it is a very powerful tool, but with great potential for data loss. Check your command over and over again to make sure it’s doing what you want before running it, and make sure you have a backup beforehand; it will happily mow over any disk you tell it. Also, do it when you’re fully awake, not at 1 AM or something.

    I would call myself an experienced dd user, and even I messed up once recently; I was trying to create a bootable USB when I was really tired. Instead, I overwrote a drive. Luckily, it wasn’t my root drive, and I had a full backup of its contents, so I was able to reformat the drive and restore from backup.

    Also, don’t run a bare minumum dd command like dd if=/dev/whateverdevice1 of=/dev/whateverdevice2; it’s going to be an absolute pain in the rear.

    dd bs=1M oflag=sync status=progress if=/dev/whateverdevice1 of=/dev/whateverdevice2

    • bs=1M: The size of block it tries to copy at a time. Play with this a bit, as different drives have different optimal block sizes.
    • oflag=sync: Basically, most operating systems don’t actually write data to the drive right away, but store it in a buffer in RAM to be written later. This is usually fine, but sometimes, you want to be certain that data has actually been written to a drive; this flag turns off that buffering so that when dd is done, the data will for sure actually be on the drive. In lieu of this, you could also just run the sync command afterwards, which forces it to write the current buffer to disk, but I prefer the dd way. It should also do it automatically during shutdown, but I have had cases where a system hangs during shutdown and I’m not certain if syncing is done or not.
    • status=progress: Gives the command a progress bar. It’s just really darn convenient and allows you to see how much time is left, how fast the drive is going, etcetera. I don’t know how anyone uses dd without this. Otherwise, it just shows nothing, and you’re left anxiously wondering when it will be done.
    • if is input drive, of is output drive. I prefer lsblk for looking at the list of drivers.

    You’ll usually need to run dd with sudo.

    Once you do a successful copy, you’ll need to extend your BTRFS partition using GParted or similar. If you have a partition after your main one, like swap, you’ll need to delete the swap partition before extending, then recreate the swap partition and update fstab accordingly.




  • It’s nice that they still put out Trek physical media.

    It’s just really weird that SNW stuff seem to be the franchise’s only 4K Blu-Ray releases (besides film remasters and Kelvin timeline, of course) - everything else with a decent resolution has only been released in 1080p. Like, objectively, I can hardly complain about 1080p, and any more than that for LD and PRO is probably pointless, but it’s really weird that PIC and DIS don’t have it for the seasons that were filmed for 4K.

    Also, if they’re not going to renew PRO, can they at least give it the dignity of a complete series set, or at the very least a season 1 Blu-Ray so I don’t have to buy episodes 1-10 and 11-20 separately?!





  • Also, depending on the time of year, some E series models can drop to pretty low prices on clearance. E series used to suck, but they’ve upped the build quality and they’re pretty good budget Thinkpads now. Most things should be swappable (check Hardware Maintenance Manual to be sure), so back in 2024, I was able to snap an E16 gen 1 with 8 GB RAM 256 GB and upgrade it to 24 GB RAM, 2 TB storage for not too expensive.

    The really nifty thing about the E16s is they have dual NVME drive slots; I just kept the OEM 256 GB drive in it and eventually threw a Windows 11 LTSC install on it, as I unfortunately have to use Windows to do a few assignments, which luckily only come up every couple weeks, usually.