As an abstract concept, Linux From Scratch is like ultimate god mode. That walks you through everything in extraordinarily overwhelming fashion to build a operating system from scratch.

Gentoo is like LFS on easy mode with a package manager to help you stay on top of a working system. It is still like maybe demigod mode. The main thing with Gentoo is that you have access to compiling everything from source, so you can integrate any changes you would like to make to packages within the package manager.

If you understand a UNIX operating system on a LFS/Gentoo level, Arch is like both of these, but with binary packages.

Debian is primarily for a more complete base system with stability where they make long term support kernels. Debian is primarily for creating custom tools on servers and for reverse engineering hardware. Most hardware drivers come from Debian.

Red Hat is the goto for commercial server stuff. Many Kernel maintainers and developers work for Red Hat. Fedora is up stream of Red Hat and has most of the tools from Red Hat. The book The Linux Bible is the goto book for learning IT and networking and is written around Fedora/Red Hat.

So the reason for the bla bla bla is because understanding the purposes of each of the distros will guide you to essential documentation. This is the key to intermediate level Linux; when you understand where to look for information across all distros.

• LFS will walk you through any components in tutorial detail if you can find the entry point and ground your understanding.
• Gentoo is likely to have similar tutorial guides and information that has easier entry points.
• Arch is like the giant warehouse of components. Arch has the wiki which is the principal documentation on the components themselves. What Arch is not, is tutorial. The wiki is an encyclopedia. Use it as such.
• Debian has the bootstrapping stuff and documentation to port onto new hardware or explore.
• Red Hat/Fedora have the information and tools for the kernel and networking. If you want to mess with something like the CPU scheduler or configuring numa architectures, these are the places to look for documentation.

These are general loose guidelines. For your monitor resolution issue, I would start with Gentoo and Arch. I had a similar issue when I tried Arch back around 8-9 years ago, but I do not recall the details and it has probably changed considerably since the X11 to Wayland transition.

I’ve been on most pain meds and stuff. If you haven’t tried Diclofenac, maybe ask for it or give it a go. That is a muscle relaxer with very few down sides and has made a big difference for me lately unlike anything else I have taken. It does not screw with the mind or stomach in the same way as most other things. It just needs to go with food, but like it doesn’t mess with adhd meds or other down sides really. A neighbor had hip surgery and was like, I should take this, and wow did it make a difference. My lows are much more manageable and I can do stuff I haven’t been able to do in years.

I also have poor blood flow in my legs from being a cyclist with enormous legs. If you place a heating pad under your lower thighs and calves as much as possible, it may greatly help with circulation and blood flow while accelerating your recovery significantly. That is also part of advanced recovery with endurance races, especially when combined with compression tights. If you feel cold feet at all, it will likely help in recovery to add some heat to improve blood flow and circulation. The taller you are, the more import this is too. Like I can’t even fully heal cuts or road rash on my lower legs without adding a heating pad routine, but with a daily routine of an hour or two, I will fully recover in a couple of weeks even with really bad stuff.

As far as visiting here around LA, you really need a solid plan of where you want to go and what you want to do with every link known and connected. It is not like most places where you can just wing it like a tourist in the tourist targeted way. Sure there is Disneyland, and that is all inclusive and encapsulated. Laguna Beach down here closer to me is cool to walk around. They have a big art show once a year called pageant of the masters. There is Venice Beach too. Downtown LA is a major disappointment to see. You’ve likely seen it countless times in films because of its proximity to Hollywood, but you will quickly see how it was strategically framed and often digitally augmented to make it appear much larger than it really is. The stars walk and Hollywood Blvd are in a run down neighborhood. There are no historical sites or significant things to see in the area that are relative to the past or film. You learn that all you see in movies and shows is hacked together temporary junk that looks like a dump just outside of the image frame.

I forget the name for it but there is a ringed distance around the film studios where the unions Mark the boundary for day work without the studio paying for accommodations or paying transportation costs. Almost everything you have ever seen that was filmed in Hollywood happens within this boundary. So when you’re traveling around the region you might have strange familiarity in places at random like deja vu. One of the cool things, US wise, is that so much stuff is imported through the port of Long Beach, so there are many small businesses scattered throughout the LA basin selling stuff that is only available here or places like Shenzhen. Through you probably have similar around London.

That is about all I know of use. I’m boring by most people’s standards. My interests are generally too niche to even talk about or too subtle to call a real destination, and I value the nerdy stuff over the experience and emotions.

GL and have fun!

Mine was riding a bicycle to work, and fighting two SUVs in 2014. Both of them were total losses, and they only managed to break my neck and back. Empirically, I have chronic damage to my thoracic spin between the shoulder blades that makes posture very limited. It is the rarest region for people to injure, so my back issues are very atypical. The underlying cause of my issues are unknown, which leaves me in a doomed limbo in life. I actually had very serious damage to C1 and the base of my skull that was nearly lethal. So all the neurosurgeons see is an ambiguous unremarkable radiologist’s report from an MRI, and the extremely concerning initial damage to a region of my spine that could be a ticking time bomb, and want nothing to do with the risk involved with trying to find the cause or a solution. I have had to come to terms with that and it doesn’t really bother me much any more. I was supposed to die in 2014 but I am only half dead now, so whatever, roll with it. I’m not sharing for the sympathy or whatnot. I’m always worried that asking anything personal might make the other person uncomfortable in some way that is off putting. So I often lead by example and just put myself out there to help gauge or imply my level of interest, openness, and straightforwardness.

I have never heard of disability support for a flight. What does that entail? I cannot sustain sitting upright beyond 45 degrees at the very most. Even then I need my legs up in a way the takes all tension and strain off of holding up my head, arms, and shoulders. Like lying here in bed right now, I’m proper up on pillows where my elbows rest on the bed and forearms over my torso, so that only my wrists and hands are engaged with my phone. My back is completely neutral in this position so my pain level falls to a consistent white noise where I can hear my internal dialog clearly. I can also use my bedside stand for a laptop in a similar neutral position. I can be upright and walk around just fine for an hour or so each day, but that builds stress about like lifting weights in a gym. I can actually go for much longer if I try, but I won’t be able to sleep very much for several days afterwards. Then I turn into a mindless zombie, and multiple days in a row are killers that can last for months without sleep. So I only exist in my little isolated prison safe from the killer zombie me. I don’t think the airlines have a zombie containment zone, but who knows, I had no idea they had any real disability remedies beyond midget sardine accommodations.

Women will buy from women in a bike shop but not from men in most cases. Likewise, the demographic of male cyclists that shop in brick and mortar retail stores, is very partial to female staff. Therefore, by the back office numbers, a girl is statistically far more valuable for shop staff in almost every circumstance regardless of personality, intelligence, or skill. I would like to say otherwise, but the numbers in the shops with ~60 employees across 3 stores and years pointed otherwise. The thing that really sucks is how women’s retail stuff for cycling is always a loss or breaks even at best. The lack of volume leads to major issues with overburden inventory over time. Overburden is why most nice shops fail within a decade or are a hobby business with someone willing to inject considerable funds in the $100k-$300k range to bail out the shop about once a decade. Every time a wrong part is ordered or a poorly planned size run of clothing sells lopsided, or some niche lineup of bikes is suddenly unpopular, it chips away at cash flow and eventually strangles the business slowly from the back office causing a default on a major distributor’s credit account. This causes all the mainline distributors to pull the shop’s credit for cash only access. Next preseason order cycle, the margins will be garbage and no popular products are accessible. No shop will last more than 2 years like this.

So like, I hired any female cyclist at a much higher starting wage. I was the Buyer and back office manager for the chain. From my perspective, I viewed women on staff like a life vest and triage. My job was to keep the thing alive for as long as possible without losing access to credit. Women were an opportunity to triage a large open wound where my alternative is to give up entirely on 5%-15% of the entire market.

Maybe that is an interesting counter perspective. I only cared about the unbiased numbers. In most instances I rarely interacted with these people. And at work, I have a strict policy of ‘never shitting in my own back yard.’

The sad thing is how close we are to getting into a space civilization and so much more but how we can’t get our shit together long enough or priorities straight. One m-type astroid accessed in low Earth orbit – there are several already there – has more mineral wealth than all that humans have ever accessed in the Holocene on the surface of this gravity prison with its differentiated gravitationally sequestered artificial resource scarcity that hoards all the good stuff in the core. All we have are the scraps that have landed on the surface after it solidified and got mixed around. The m is for metal. Those are remnants of differentiated, read - concentrated, cores of planetesimals. That kind of wealth makes resource scarcity obsolete and creates both wealth and infrastructure resources to get into space colonies. Space colonies cannot have waste systems. Their primary constraint is heat radiated into space. The wealth to fund and create such a sustainable environment fixes much of what we fail at now. It moves populations into space too. We’ve known about how to build the stations since Dr. O’Neill did the studies in the 1970s about only using established materials science and engineering to create the O’Neill cylinders at up to 9 kilometers in diameter and 30 kilometers long with just steel and concrete. The wonder of such innovation would accelerate our passage into the next age of technology – biology. One day the masters of biology will look back and pity us in our primitive stone age of silicon. The foundations of that world are stones of the future orbiting around us now.

That is what I see when I look up. I see the twinkling reflections of cislunar stations much brighter than the background stars, a place where most humans live a few centuries from now. It is a remarkable place after the end of the age of scientific discovery at the beginning of the engineered expansion, but still centuries from my Parsec 7 that I call home.