Any regular hex nut works just fine as a jam nut. Basically, a jam nut is when you jam two nuts together. (It is gay, because the nuts do touch.)

And note that those nylon inserts kinda only work once. The bolt carves a thread into the insert when you insert it, so it will be weaker the second time you insert it.

Honorable mention: cage nuts. A square nut, permanently attached to a fastener that can snap into a special square hole in a 19 inch server rack. When you tighten the bolt against the nut, it tightens against the fastener, so that the nut, bolt, and fastener are secure against the square hole.

Plays the Menards “Save Big Money” Jingle

I’ll just go get my flamethrower.

English has its flaws, but I don’t agree that that is one of them.

If anyone was hoping for women priests, give up on that. The Roman Catholic church would first have to retract both papal infallibility and ecumenical infallibility.

They have made too many definitive statements that women can’t be priests, and they have made definitive statements that their definitive statements are infallible, and must be agreed to by anyone who calls themself Catholic. It’s not even up for debate (unless all of the infallibility stuff is also up for debate).

For example:

I declare that the Church has no authority whatsoever to confer priestly ordination on women and that this judgment is to be definitively held by all the Church’s faithful.

https://www.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/apost_letters/1994/documents/hf_jp-ii_apl_19940522_ordinatio-sacerdotalis.html

They really painted themselves into a corner. While the rest of society moves forward with equal rights for historically marginalized groups, the Catholic church will be stuck with the effects of their early bad decisions (and some recent bad decisions) because they banned themselves from admitting when they are wrong.

Have you imported the tails-signing.key yet? Usually you can double-click on that to import it using whatever graphical gpg frontend is set up on your system. It may ask you how well you trust the owner of the key. You can answer that question however you want without affecting this verification process.

Next, it looks like you run the instructions from this page: https://tails.net/install/expert/index.en.html#verify

Some of those command line parameters look a little paranoid. The basic command you want to run is: gpg --verify somefile.sig somefile.img

It’s not really an order. Think of it as more like a threat.

I eagerly await your writeup on whichever calendar you think I need to know more about.

Unfortunately this won’t happen until October 31st 2600. Starting on March 1st in the year 2600, the Julian calendar (popular in centuries past, and still used in a few places) will differ by 18 days from the Gregorian calendar (the current worldwide standard calendar).

It happens that October 31st in the year 2600 lands on a Friday, and so the Julian October 13th, which lands on that same day, is also a Friday.

There may be a sooner Friday the 13th that lands on Halloween, if you know of other obscure calendars like the Hebrew, Islamic, or Chinese calendars. I don’t know enough about those to check.

The easiest way to disable unnecessary services is to uninstall them with aptitude, or whichever package manager you like. Try terminating services one by one, and see if anything bad happens. If nothing bad happens, you can probably uninstall it. On the other hand, if the system does get wonky a reboot should fix it. Or, you can research the services by name and decide whether to uninstall them. (avahi-daemon for example is a good idea to uninstall.)

To make the GUI not run, uninstall your display manager (gdm, xdm, nodm, or whatever) and uninstall your xorg server or wayland server. There may be GUI programs remaining after that, but they will only be consuming disk space, not RAM or CPU.

If the battery is old and holds little charge, you may save a few watts by removing it and throwing it away, instead of letting the system keep it topped off.

Get a power meter, such as a Kill-a-watt device. Then, experiment with different settings. If it’s consuming less than 30 watts, you’re probably fine. If you live in the US, one watt-year is about one US dollar (or a little more), so for every watt it consumes, that’s about how much you will pay per year for its electricity.

NTFS is considered pretty stable on Linux now. It should be safe to use indefinitely.

If you’re worried about the lack of Unix-style permissions and attributes in NTFS, then getting BTRFS or ext4 on Windows may be a good choice. Note that BTRFS is much more complicated than ext4, so ext4 may have better compatibility and lower risk of corruption. I used ext3 on Windows in 2007 and it was very reliable; ext4 today is very similar to ext3 from those days.

The absolute best compatibility would come from using a filesystem natively supported by both operating systems, developed without reverse engineering. That leaves only vfat (aka FAT32) and exfat. Both lack Unix-style permissions and attributes.

This is why there are so many libertarians who are not Libertarians.

Palestine has a right to exist.

C:WindowsSystem32 not found

You have to escape backslashes

draw .io is closed source.

Sounds like what you’re looking for is an ATX12V plug. It’s a 2x2 connector that normally has two yellow and two black wires. It normally goes into the 2x2 receptacle on the motherboard to power the processor. In this case, the eGPU enclosure needs it for some reason, maybe for more power.

The good news is that the 2x4 breakaway connector (called EPS12V I believe) that splits into two 2x2 connectors is probably compatible with this receptacle. One of the two 2x2 pieces of the connector should fit into the eGPU’s power receptacle, and the other won’t. If it fits, it is probably the right connector. If two of the wires going to that connector are yellow, and two are black, then it’s almost certainly the right connector.

You may have multiple of these 2x4 breakaway connectors. If so, they should behave identically, and you can break up any of them and try to fit the pieces into the ATX12V receptacle.

List of ATX power supply connectors: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_supply_unit_(computer)#Connectors (without images, unfortunately.)

Don’t forget about the big 20-pin or 24-pin main ATX motherboard power connector. Your second power supply, since it is non-modular, will need something to simulate the motherboard’s power button. That’s can be as simple as a switch between the PS-ON wire (green) and any ground wire (black). But hopefully your eGPU has a place to plug in the ATX motherboard power connector, and handles that on-off switching for you.

Yeah, it’s definitely a problem, and genetic information could end up getting linked. Even if a person thinks they might not have DNA in any existing database, whether criminal, medical, or otherwise, there’s no telling what might happen in the future. I can think of a few different ways a person might involuntarily, through no fault of theirs, get their DNA forcibly taken with no legal recourse.

Every path here will have some tradeoffs. But the odds of getting linked are probably much lower outside your home country.

I voted you down because HIPAA absolutely does include privacy provisions, and requires written consent for data use in the way I described above.

My best recommendation would be to go to a testing lab and provide a fake name. It should work. I’ve never been ID’d at any doctor’s office, and one time did even receive healthcare under a fake name with no trouble. Of course, that means your insurance won’t cover anything, but that’s the unfortunate reality of US healthcare. Also, they probably won’t delete your data. HIPAA includes no right to be forgotten, and in some cases, may even mandate retention for several years.

Sorry I don’t have a better solution. I think your best bet is to distance this genetic data as much as possible from your real identity.

Alternately, you could try going somewhere outside the US.

I completely agree that HIPAA is dead. One time when I went to a new doctor’s office, totally unaffiliated with any doctor I’d ever seen before, the doctor instantly pulled all my medical records from several other places. They didn’t even get my verbal permission; they just did it. If that’s the level of security on these databases, and doctors are allowed to access them on old unsupported Windows computers, then it’s almost certain that the databases have tons of undetected data breaches. They’ve probably been scraped completely by multiple attackers.

I suppose mine would be Proton/Steam/Mate Desktop/Gnu/Linux