It's happened again, I've come back from a walk in the (light) rain and the left shoe of my current pair has just sprung a leak. This seems to be part of an annoying trend over the past several years, where after 2 to 5 months of buying a new pair and wearing them about daily at a primarily office job, the left shoe will develop a leak. The right shoe always emerges unscathed. I'll always avoid puddles if I can help it, so it seems as though the water just gradually seeps in as I walk. If I can get back home quickly, I try to dry them out, but sometimes they develop a mildewy smell and it's just never the same again.

I have a few theories, but none really convince me:

• I walk fast, am left leg dominant, and my left foot is ever so slightly larger than the right. Maybe more strain on the left shoe? The sole does end up slightly more worn than the right.
• But the same shoe size still comfortably fits both, so is there even a solution to be found?
• People travel on the right where I live, maybe there's an asymmetry of the walkways?
• I'm cheaping out and can't justify buying shoes over $80. In half of the cases, I notice the sole starting to separate from the upper part. But again, why the left in particular and why only these past few years?
• Or I'm meant to wear heavy boots. The only kinds of shoes that have escaped this fate in recent years have been my snow boots and steel-toe boots, which I wear almost daily in the winter.

Would be interested to hear any similar stories or better reasons from those more knowledgeable about shoes and shoe defects than I am.

Most file managers I've encountered default to icon view. One of the first things I do is set the default to detailed list view. Might be a preference for seeing names and dates over many identical folder icons, or just an old habit from using Windows. But I'd be curious to hear about the benefits of icon view and why it's usually the default in Linux GUI file managers.

What does everyone else use and any reasons to prefer one over the other?

In words with left- and right-handed letters on the keyboard, like "word", sometimes I will instead type "owrd" because the command from my brain seemingly is processed faster by my right hand than my left. It rarely, if ever, happens the other way around. In recent years, I think this accounts for as many as half of my typos. Interested to see if this happens to other people and how I could try correcting this.

Searching gives me the impression there's a million ways to solve the same problem on Linux, and I find myself profiling answers into about four categories at a glance:

• Succinct: one or two-liner, a single config file, or just a few clicks
• Long-winded song-and-dance: Full train of thought interspersed between various commands and logs, several config files (some of which don't already exist), or installing an obscure package that is no longer maintained
• Specific to a desktop environment or version I don't have
• Just looks wrong

I'll usually just take solutions from the first category, which almost always works, save for differences between updates and versions. Solutions in the second category also seem to end with a 50% chance of the OP unable to solve the problem. If I'm desperate, I'll try the second one, but it often ends up not working, eventually leading me to come up with a much cleaner solution of my own.

Curious if anyone else does this too and if those one-liners are really better solutions or if it's just confirmation bias.

Sometimes I wonder what the thought process behind the gaming aesthetic was. RGB (*if tunable) itself is fine and adds a nice opportunity for personalization, but are those tacky fonts, crystal-facet enclosures, and overall showiness just tasteless or do any gamers actually prefer that look?

I've realized that the display size, in inches, is sometimes in the name or model number of electronics that are sold not just in the US. Do people outside the US also talk about buying 55-inch TVs, 14-inch laptops, and 27-inch monitors? Does it naturally roll off the tongue or does it seem strange to anyone?

If it's all inches, why didn't measuring screens in centimeters take off?

Got myself a Dell Latitude ~~E4310~~ E6410 and Thinkpad T510 for free, both with discrete Nvidia graphics soldered to the mainboard. I've installed Linux on them and just went with the nouveau driver since the proprietary Nvidia driver for such old cards is no longer in the Debian 12 repo. Not going to do anything cutting edge on them, but it does leave me wondering:

• I read that I could, with some effort, install the proprietary driver manually. Am I missing out on anything at all without them, or is nouveau mature enough and the graphics old enough that I wouldn't notice?
• Is nouveau with old discrete graphics better or worse than having just Intel's integrated graphics?
• Does power consumption vary significantly between nouveau and proprietary drivers?

EDIT

Answering myself after going down a rabbit hole with the T510:

1. The dGPU is the NVS 3100M, which does have some level of hardware acceleration support under nouveau, so at least it isn't draining power for zero benefit. However, the dGPU is unable to go past its lowest power state without manually manipulating /sys/kernel/debug/dri/0/pstate (I did not try to) and I suspect that this is what kneecaps 3D performance. There should be a marked difference, but I won't be doing any serious work on these machines, so I'm leaving everything as-is.

2. This situation is worse than having just integrated graphics due to the inherent power consumption of the GPU core while unable to benefit from higher power states and other optimizations.

3. Power consumption is probably less, but for much worse performance. At least it is a much better fallback than leaving at maximum.

• A later variant has the BIOS option to disable the dGPU, mine is an early variant with no options

A recent trip to the dumpster netted me a couple of old laptops (from around 2012). The batteries are completely flat and will not take a charge. I plan on using them as beater computers around the house, so battery life doesn't really matter but would be nice to have. The cheapest no-name batteries available for them are about $15 each. A used OEM battery with about 75% health is a dollar more.

For those who bought the cheapest aftermarket battery, was it worth it? Were the batteries surprisingly good or am I better off with a used but original one?

On Windows Vista and every subsequent version of Windows, if I search for a file and include the entire C:\ drive, I might very well have time to make tea or a sandwich while the search results come in. On Windows XP, using the search dialog with the animated dog, I can search the entire C:\ drive and expect it to be done in a minute or two, if not in seconds.

It can't just be nostalgia; I can replicate these results on period-accurate hardware today. What changed with Vista to make file searching so much slower, even with indexing enabled?

On occasion, I'll have to work with markdown files, sometimes with inline LaTeX. I'm surprised how limited my options are, or I'm looking in the wrong places. Pandoc does the job, but the lack of a integrated graphical workflow isn't my cup of tea.

Has anyone found a good graphical markdown editor that can handle inline LaTeX and doesn't pull a gigabyte of dependencies? Preferably also can render the final output to PDF.

A lot of recent medical advice says that hydrogen peroxide in first aid is counterproductive. Of course, what I'm about to say is one person's anecdote. But I find that if I just leave the occasional cut or scrape alone or wash it with soap and water, it'll tend to get a bit inflamed (very locally) and hypersensitive, which is very annoying when it's on my hands. On the other hand, If I just rinse it out and slather some H2O2 on the wound, it kind of chemically "cauterizes" the wound, prevents irritation later on, and heals just as well.

Am I just doing it wrong, or does anyone else find that hydrogen peroxide is good on minor wounds, despite recent medical findings? I don't mean to cast doubt on legitimate medical research, but I'd like to understand why H2O2 seems to work for me when research says it should be counterproductive.

Or historical exploits/trojans/etc. that deserve more attention? I've mostly heard about lucrative vulnerabilities that concern Linux servers, but what about the end-users on desktops? Or is the Linux desktop market small enough that we mostly just see one-off instances of users blindly running malicious scripts?