When I was little. I thought my parents were the smartest people in the world. Then when I went to school, I thought my teachers were the smartest people in the world, because they were way smarter than my parents. When I got to high school, I thought my maths and English and science teachers where the smartest people in the world, because they were way smarter than my primary school teachers.

Now 20 years later, I’m friends with lots of people who teach high school, and secretly they’re not that smart. All they need to do is learn the material from the curriculum and teach it to the students.

Enormous respect for what they do, I couldn’t do it, but it’s not a job that requires higher than average intelligence.

Well said. I’m a software engineer, and I get frustrated with my job, and my butt gets sore after sitting for 10 hours straight most days, but not a single day goes by that I’m not immensely grateful I get to live in a time when I don’t need to work in the sun doing back breaking work on a farm like my parents did and their parents did. Both my parents and all 4 of my grandparents spent their whole lives toiling as general labourers picking crops, planting cane, repairing equipment.

You’re probably right, it’s been years since I read it, and I was simply piggy backing off other criticisms I’ve read about the book by others saying similar things online.

Yeah. It’s full of really common pop-fiction tropes. But the writing is so beautiful you don’t notice it.

It really jumped the shark when in the second book the guy who is a virgin and can’t talk to girls suddenly became the god of sex and literally out-sexed the sex nymph who had been sexing men to death for years.

An eReader’s literally only job is to format, reflow, render and display ePubs. If you have one that can’t do that, then it is a fancy coaster at best.

I like the books, superficially they are a treat, the prose is brilliant, the words feel nice on my brain.

But reading just a little bit deeper than that, you start to realise the story is pretty empty. The characters are hollow. The first two books are pretty much the same story loop over and over again. The characters making the same mistakes and learning the same lessons over and over again.

The way the author writes female characters makes you seriously worry about the authors relationship with women, and if he even knows any women.

Surprised I haven’t seen someone yet mention Magician by Raymond E Feist. That whole first riftwar trilogy is great. Also the spin off Empire trilogy with Janny Wurts.

Seconding those who mentioned the R.A. Salvatore books including the Dark Elf series and the Icewind Dale series.

There’s not really any advantage of using txt files over open standard drm-free epubs. You can still generate them yourself using txt editors or publishing software, you can still load them over USB. But epubs give you quality of life features on eReaders like title pages, table of contents, chapter headers, formatting markers like bold and italics.

She has huge tracts of personalities.

As someone who has been dealing with exactly this issue with my new employer’s enterprise ICT department, I have some insight to share.

When you have thousands and thousands of laptops that you need to manage, it becomes a burden for the in-house IT department, so they often farm it out to a Managed Service Provider (MSP). This is particularly common for organisations like schools and hospitals that often don’t even have an in-house IT department. The MSP will install policies and management software on the laptops to ensure the OS is up to date, the antivirus is not disabled, the VPN is configured correctly, passwords are changed regularly, etc.

Yes of course there are linux-native solutions for each of these things, but the MSP doesn’t support it, doesn’t offer that service. To keep their service prices affordable for enterprise organisations, MSPs usually hire the lowest cost technicians and support staff. These poor underpaid staff probably have never even heard of Linux. The MSP can increase their marketable value by advertising the certifications they’ve attained. The certifications are provided by Microsoft and are related to Microsoft software and systems.

If you have a small fleet of devices and an in-house IT team that has a bunch of Linux enthusiasts, and a user base who drives demand, then it is possible to support Linux. But it requires a lot of effort and dedication. My old employer did that. They had a fleet of around 5,500 devices (a mix of desktops and laptops), mostly Windows, approx 500 of them were macbooks, and about 50 were Linux. Some of these were users who needed to use software that is available only on Linux, some were like me who are simply more productive and efficient using a linux-based OS. But maintaining, administering and supporting those 50 Linux devices took around 20% of the time of the IT department. That’s massively disproportionate to the number of Linux users.

Not long after I left there, the new CTO put an end to that, they saw and easy cost saving by simply refusing to allow users to have any OS other than Windows.

I’m definitely going to use this one on my wife. It’s a good one.

For tracks I’m familiar with and play often, I can usually tell the difference between 128kbps and 192kbps on an MP3. In very rare cases, with the right song and the right earphones, I can discern 192kpbs MP3 from 256kbps. But I definitely can’t tell a 256kbps MP3 from FLAC. The Wikipedia article on audio transparency says that MP3 becomes transparent on average around 240kbps.

I’ve recently started using the Opus codec. It is higher quality at lower bitrates than MP3. Opus is considered transparent on average at around 160-192kbps.

Personally, I’ve been re-encoding all my FLACs to 192kbps OPUS for storing on my smartphone where space is limited.