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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 8th, 2023

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  • Good on you! I’ve found the best thing to do with upset babies is try to engage with the kid - ask the parents first(!) but babies are fascinated by new people in a way that parents can’t fulfill.

    Story time: I had a crying 6mth old next to me earlier this year so I pulled out the safety sheet (asked the mum if I can show him this), channeled my inner Wiggles and kick-started it with a big, excited interruption to his crying: “wow, look at the plane!” The unexpected, strange interaction short circuits their focus on being upset and he just stopped and started at me like “wtf is this dude on?”. Once I had his attention I started pointing and describing all the pictures, then gave him the page. This turned into a 10min game of point at the picture, say the word or a story then hand it back. My names and descriptions for the people on the page got more crazy each time - after all, his were nonsensical too! I even got a few giggles as I kept it animated with hand gestures and big smiles. That turned into pointing out the windows or different things in the cabin.

    The kid eventually got bored of the games after about 15-20 mins but had already forgotten he was upset and then peacefully interacted with his mum again for the rest of the flight. I got back to my book while he had the sky mag to read along like me and would still point out different pictures to me or check my book, puzzled why they were no pictures!

    I even scored a tiny-dude high five as they were leaving which everyone knows are the best high fives.

    Best flight I’ve had all year!







  • Quite a few products allow for this home use. Aids with training, familiarisation and locking users into their ecosystem. I’ve been able to do this a few times to help learn complex programs.

    Completely legit with Adobe as far as I’m aware - since there is only the one licence available via online check-in so can’t be used on more than one at a time.

    Autodesk is similar - used to have an allowance for a training/home use licence (may have been extra), even the common Office 365 corp licence allows for up to 5 installations and doesn’t really care where you install it.

    Corp data on a home device or using your own gear for WFH is another story though.


  • Got a well specced 4th Gen i7 that does everything I need so unless it blows up, I won’t be upgrading. Started working on the plan this week. Been using Mint on my secondary (non essential laptop) but never had the stones to take the plunge on my main rig.

    Watching MS stepping into the enshittification trend and AI with Win11 means this is the last straw, particularly now I don’t need to rely on keeping up with windows for work. Currently bashing on Linux Mint DE in a VM to test what I need and have working to be happy:

    Outlook/Office - Thunderbird is good but it’s been a while since I’ve used Libre Office but didn’t have much luck with it in the past - trashing the formatting when bouncing between LO & MSO. Hoping the more recent versions are better else office web will have to do for those documents that don’t play nice.

    Steam - make sure I can get it going, several key games. This is the least of my worries after seeing what others have said. NVIDIA graphics may be a bit more painful.

    RDP - I still have another headless win10 media box. VNC as backup. This box will be the next on the chopping block if all goes well.

    Backup - this is the big one. Currently use Backblaze for unlimited backup and love the set & forget nature. No native Linux client so would require moving to their B2 platform with a third party interface - do-able, just need to get off my butt to work it out :p

    File structure - always struggled with this in my playing with Linux, need to become more comfortable with where files live and general directory structure.

    Will slowly pick those off over the next couple of weeks and then I should be good to go.