deo

It's funny. I thought I would just play through my SO's gargantuan library for a long while, but I'm pretty sure I've spent more on new games than I did on the Steam Deck itself at this point. So, yeah. They made the right call.

Try F1 instead of F12. It should be under Setup -> Boot, and then just make your USB the first entry, save, and exit. And just so we're covering all bases, the usb should be plugged in before you reboot into the bios settings and it may be under a name that doesn't say "usb" anywhere (for example, the name of my usb in the bios settings contains the manufacturer and size in GB in addition to some other nonsense that i think is a model number).

I don't know how. I also have to just reinstall it, but i'm gonna leave this here in case you find out!

Exactly. The plastic we want them to eat is already degraded to some degree by the elements or usage, and is thus the low-hanging fruit. I'd assume it's much easier to digest, since it's partially broken down already and has plenty of convenient micro-fissures to exploit.

Except it doesn't hold up in the elements all that well, though (at least in a form that is still usable, the plastic is still there, just in little pieces and/or without the desired structural integrity). Plastics degrade when exposed to sunlight and oxygen (photo-oxidation). Combine that with mechanical action of waves, and now you have a bunch of little plastic bits floating in the ocean that are even harder to clean up (but easier for the bacteria to eat!). A glass or metal bottle will hold up much better than a plastic one, over a long enough time period.

But they even break down when exposed to temperature cycling and mechanical stress over long periods of time. I'm sure you've also noticed old plastic food containers, get harder and harder to clean and start getting cloudy: that's the plastic breaking down and micro-fissures appearing on the surface, thanks to repeated exposure to dishwashers, freezers, and still-hot leftovers. Once again, a glass dish is gonna hold up much better.

They have to use special additives for plastics intended for long-term outdoor use (the additives are like sunscreen for plastic, they absorb the UV so that the plastic doesn't) to combat these reaction pathways. And I'd bet money that if plastic-eating bacteria end up becoming a problem, there will be additives we can use to discourage them for appropriate applications.

But you'll notice that in the case of plastic in landfills, there's no UV light from the sun, basically no oxygen, and any mechanical stress or temperature cycling isn't enough for fast breakdown of the plastic polymers. These conditions are also very different from, say, your kitchen counter or hospital storage rooms. If the plastic-eating bacteria prefers the landfill habitat (or literally cannot thrive in any other environment -- which is not an uncommon phenomenon; in the article, they mention difficulties culturing bacteria for study in a lab environment), then we have a perfect tool for breaking down landfill plastics that won't impact in the slightest the plastics things we want to keep. Similarly, the kind of bacteria that could be useful for ridding us of fishing lines and nets floating around in the ocean would most likely not be well suited for non-aquatic environments.

i dunno why you gotta call me out like that...

I will keep it there for future historians.

great, now i have spit coffee all over the place. thanks for the laugh!

There's also a time component. Food can be quick, cheap, or healthy: but you can only choose two (at most). If people have to work for too many hours for shit pay, "unhealthy" becomes an undeniable option.

Hmm. So far, i've only been considering tiling-is-the-default solutions, but maybe you're on to something. If I can get my fancy keyboard combos to do tiling stuff just how i like it, there's no reason why that has to be the default mode of operation...

As long as i can make my keybinding changes in a text file that i can throw in my dotfiles repo, i'm ok with a bit of tinkering. i like configuring stuff, but only once lol. Openbox sounds like it ticks a lot of my boxes.

If I do go with a DE+alternative WM instead, i'm leaning towards xfce rather than kde, since (as i understand it) xfce is a bit more lightweight. The laptop is getting old, and the hardware wasn't anything to write home about even when it was new, so any extra performance i can squeeze out of the thing is a plus.

Firefox has a setting to disable autoplaying of videos (default setting is to autoplay muted for some reason). It's in Settings > Site Permissions > Autoplay.

"Also, I have shared your email address and phone number with everyone I know, so enjoy the spam asking for donations to politicians who whole-heartedly support the issues you just told me you disagree with!"