Canadians have two moods. The first is “I’m sorry”, the second is “You’ll be sorry.”

Second mood activated.

Not the person you replied to, but I’m in agreement with them. I did tech hiring for some years for junior roles, and it was quite common to see applicants with a complete alphabet soup of certifications. More often than not, these cert-heavy applicants would show a complete lack of ability to apply that knowledge. For example they might have a network cert of some kind, yet were unable to competently answer a basic hypothetical like “what steps would you take to diagnose a network connection issue?” I suspect a lot of these applicants crammed for their many certifications, memorized known answers to typical questions, but never actually made any effort to put the knowledge to work. There’s nothing inherently wrong with certifications, but from past experience I’m always wary when I see a CV that’s heavy on certs but light on experience (which could be work experience or school or personal projects).

I also unplugged the psu for a while. It makes a slight buzzy noise after powering the computer, but I do not know if this is normal.

I’d recommend starting with the PSU. A buzzing noise is not a good sign. This article has details on how you can test your PSU: https://www.howtogeek.com/172933/how-can-i-test-my-computers-power-supply/

You can perform a basic test with just a paper clip or a bit of 16 or 18 gauge wire.

It sounds like the PSU is giving some power, given that the keyboard lights up. The issue could be isolated to one or more rails, e.g. it’s not delivering anything / enough on the 12V or 3.3V rail. I’m guessing 5V is OK since that’s USB voltage and your USB keyboard gets power. You’d need a multimeter to check individual power pins on the PSU connector.

Edit: if you have access to a second PC, you can swap PSUs between them. If the problem follows the PSU then that’s the faulty component. If the problem stays with the original PC then it’s likely motherboard, CPU or RAM.

If you can determine that the PSU is OK then the next step is to try booting with the bare minimum amount of hardware. That’s motherboard, CPU and one stick of RAM. If that won’t boot then you try with a different RAM. If it still won’t boot then the issue is motherboard or CPU. Before you replace either of those expensive components, try replacing the cheap CMOS battery as another poster recommended.

That’s just what happens to CEOs of publicly traded companies when they have a bad year. And Intel had a really bad year in 2024. I’m certainly hoping that their GPUs become serious competition for AMD and Nvidia, because consumers win when there’s robust competition. I don’t think Pat’s ousting had anything to do with GPUs though. The vast majority of Intel’s revenue comes from CPU sales and the news there was mostly bad in 2024. The Arrow Lake launch was mostly a flop, there were all sorts of revelations about overvolting and corrosion issues in Raptor Lake (13th and 14th gen Intel Core) CPUs, broadly speaking Intel is getting spanked by AMD in the enthusiast market and AMD has also just recently taken the lead in datacenter CPU sales. Intel maintains a strong lead in corporate desktop and laptop sales, but the overall trend for their CPU business is quite negative.

One of Intel’s historical strength was their vertical integration, they designed and manufactured the CPUs. However Intel lost the tech lead to TSMC quite a while ago. One of Pat’s big early announcements was “IDM 2.0” (“Integrated Device Manufacturing 2.0”), which was supposed to address those problems and beef up Intel’s ability to keep pace with TSMC. It suffered a lot of delays, and Intel had to outsource all Arrow Lake manufacturing to TSMC in an effort to keep pace with AMD. I’d argue that’s the main reason Pat got turfed. He took a big swing to get Intel’s integrated design and manufacturing strategy back on track, and for the most part did not succeed.

Being a private company has allowed Valve to take some really big swings. Steam Deck is paying off handsomely, but it came after the relative failure of the Steam Controller, Steam Link and Steam Machines. With their software business stable, they can allow themselves to take big risks on the hardware side, learn what does and doesn’t work, then try again. At a publically traded company, CEO Gabe Newell probably gets forced out long before they get to the Steam Deck.

We need a pithy, demeaning nickname to sum this up, something that’ll really get under his thin skin. I’ll suggest PINO, “President In Name Only.” Open to suggestions tho!

As a Canadian, I’m all for targeting red states where possible but I fully expect the blow back to hit all Americans. Tariffs are a relatively blunt instrument. If we put a 25% tariff on softwood lumber for example, I don’t think we get to say that only purchasers in red states have to pay it. Every American purchaser has to pay an extra 25% for those 2x4s, or car parts, or potash, or crude oil, or electricity, or aluminum, or steel, or raw minerals. Those purchasers will inevitably download that cost onto their customers, which means that ultimately American consumers collectively are going to foot the bill.

Some of these Canadian response measures will even come back to harm Canadians! There are plenty of instances where Canadian companies sell raw materials to US companies and then Canadian consumers buy back finished products that incorporate some of those materials. As such, some of the added cost of Canadian tariffs is going to be paid by Canadian consumers. Regular citizens on both sides of the border are in the some boat, and Trump put us there with his stupid, stupid choice. Canadian or American, we would all do well to remember that because I’m sure that Trump would love nothing more than to see us divided and hating one another.

I’m sorry for the economic damage that this fight is going to cause all of us, on both sides of the border. Please remember that Trump started this fight, and Canada will not roll over. I think Liberal leadership candidate Mark Carney summed it up best in this BBC interview. The whole interview is worth a watch, but the link goes to the highlight to which I’m referring. Here’s the transcript of that highlight:

Interviewer: It’s pretty clear that [Trump] thinks [Canada] can be pushed around.

Carney: We can’t.

However, it’s worth mentioning that WireGuard is UDP only.

That’s a very good point, which I completely overlooked.

If you want something that “just works” under all conditions, then you’re looking at OpenVPN. Bonus, if you want to marginally improve the chance that everything just works, even in the most restrictive places (like hotel wifi), have your VPN used port 443 for TCP and 53 for UDP. These are the most heavily used ports for web and DNS. Meaning you VPN traffic will just “blend in” with normal internet noise (disclaimer: yes, deep packet inspection exists, but rustic hotel wifi’s aren’t going to be using it ;)

Also good advice. In my case the VPN runs on my home server, there are no UDP restrictions of any kind on my home network and WireGuard is great in that scenario. For a mobile VPN solution where the network is not under your control and could be locked down in any number of ways, you’re definitely right that OpenVPN will be much more reliable when configured as you suggest.

I use WireGuard personally. OpenVPN has been around a long time, and is very configurable. That can be a benefit if you need some specific configuration, but it can also mean more opportunities to configure your connection in a less-secure way (e.g. selecting on older, less strong encryption algorithm). WireGuard is much newer and supports fewer options. For example it only does one encryption algorithm, but it’s one of the latest and most secure. WireGuard also tends to have faster transfer speeds, I believe because many of OpenVPN’s design choices were made long ago. Those design choices made sense for the processors available at the time, but simply aren’t as performant on modern multi core CPUs. WireGuard’s more recent design does a better job of taking advantage of modern processors so it tends to win speed benchmarks by a significant margin. That’s the primary reason I went with WireGuard.

In terms of vulnerabilities, it’s tough to say which is better. OpenVPN has the longer track record of course, but its code base is an order of magnitude larger than WireGuard’s. More eyes have been looking at OpenVPN’s code for more time, but there’s more than 10x more OpenVPN code to look at. My personal feeling is that a leaner codebase is generally better for security, simply because there’s fewer lines of code in which vulnerabilities can lurk.

If you do opt for OpenVPN, I believe UDP is generally better for performance. TCP support is mainly there for scenarios where UDP is blocked, or on dodgy connections where TCP’s more proactive handling of dropped packets can reduce the time before a lost packet gets retransmitted.

After thoroughly shuffling, the exact order of the deck is one of 52! (52 factorial, or 52 * 51 * 50 * … * 2 * 1) possible combinations. That is such a large number that it’s possible, even likely, that the exact ordering of your deck has never existed before and will never exist again.

Anything that pushes the CPUs significantly can cause instability in affected parts. I think there are at least two separate issues Intel is facing:

• Voltage irregularities causing instability. These could potentially be fixed by the microcode update Intel will be shipping in mid-August.
• Oxidation of CPU vias. This issue cannot be fixed by any update, any affected part has corrosion inside the CPU die and only replacement would resolve the issue.

Intel’s messaging around this problem has been very slanted towards talking as little as possible about the oxidation issue. Their initial Intel community post was very carefully worded to make it sound like voltage irregularity was the root cause, but careful reading of their statement reveals that it could be interpreted as only saying that instability is a root cause. They buried the admission that there is an oxidation issue in a Reddit comment, of all things. All they’ve said about oxidation is that the issue was resolved at the chip fab some time in 2023, and they’ve claimed it only affected 13th gen parts. There’s no word on which parts number, date ranges, processor code ranges etc. are affected. It seems pretty clear that they wanted the press talking about the microcode update and not the chips that will have the be RMA’d.

I’m not sure it fits 100% with what you’re looking for, but I’ll take chance and recommend Slice & Dice (Google Play, Apple App Store). Free demo, no ads, single in-app purchase to unlock the full version. This game is easily the best value-for-dollar mobile game I’ve ever purchased.

Oh for sure, those are a communal resource.

Because the toxins your body is reacting to are already in your bloodstream. It’ll take time for those to get metabolized by your liver, and how much or little you vomit won’t change how much work your liver has to do.

have they fixed that yet?

They likely never will, because as far as Google is concerned that’s a feature instead of a bug. You’re at their mercy as long as you’re using their launcher. Personally, I switched to Niagara Launcher for this exact reason.

…is this loss?

That was actually the rest of the comic:

The plow. It allowed early river valley peoples to generate semi-reliable food surpluses, and those food surpluses triggered everything that came after. I can’t take credit for this argument, I first encountered it in this episode from the first season of Connections.

This seems a lot more plausible to me. Exit wounds tend to be pretty gory.