Oh, and on the “fail often” thing…
Get a basic/old/free pc/laptop and install Proxmox on it.
Loads of tutorials out there, but the basic installer will get you to a “I’m learning” stage.

Create a VM, install Debian, play around.
Then: create a new VM, install Debian, create a snapshot, play around until it does what you want, restore the snapshot, do the steps that got you from vanilla to what you want. Create snapshots along the way as checkpoints. Snapshot, tinker, restore snapshot, advance.

Proxmox is amazing for learning VMs and server things

Raspberry pis are an easy intro to actually using computers (instead of using something like windows).
Raspbian is great (based on Debian) and there is a HUGE community for it.

So yeh, it’s a great started for $25, as long as you have a PSU and SD Card. And an hdmi cable + monitor + keyboard at your disposal (and a mouse if you are installing a desktop environment (IE something like windows, whereas headless is a full screen CLI).
And don’t get your hopes up for a windows replacement.

But… Why not run a Virtual Machine? If you have a windows machine, run VirtualBox, create a VM and install Debian on it?
That’s free. You can tinker and play.
And the only thing you are missing from an actual raspberry pi is that it isn’t a standalone device (IE your desktop has to be on for it to be running), and it doesn’t have GPIO (ie hardware pins. And if this is your goal, there are other ways).

If you really really want a computer that is on all the time running Linux (Debian, a derivative (like raspbian) or some other distro) - aka a server - then there are plenty of other options where the only drawback is lack of GPIO (which, in my experience, is rarely a drawback).
And that is literally any computer you can get your hands on. Because the raspberry pi trades A LOT for its form factor, the ethernet speed is limited, the bus speed is limited (impacting USB and ethernet (and ram?)), the SD card is slower and will fail faster than any HDD/SSD. The benefit is the GPIO, the very low power draw, and the form factor - rarely actually a benefit.

I’d say, play around with some virtual box VMs. See what you want, other than Fear Of Missing Out (things like PiHole? They run on Debian, or even in a docker container). Then see if you actually want a home server, and what you want to run on it.
It’s likely you won’t want a raspberry pi, but a $150 mini pc that can actually do what you want.

I think the collab would be more likely.

Ideally the government would create public domain fonts for their official languages.
If they publish in that language then they should support the font for that language.

Funding such an endeavour as a single studio/designer would require making over 6000 characters for the font ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JIS_X_0208 ).
I’m sure modern unicode could do wonders to reduce that number (kanji has ~2,000).

I’ve had “cmd” default to “CmDust.exe” which is a program installed by Codemeter (a hardware dongle licence thing).
Considering I used to type “cmd” and get CmDust.exe, I was happy when Terminal became easier to launch. And Terminal is great to use, imo

Yeh, it’s come as standard on windows for a few years now, right?
I don’t ever remember installing it on any windows computers I’ve used and it’s always been there

I’ve always opened it with “terminal”.
Terminal is a program, and it can do WSL, powershell and batch. It has tabs and other modern features.

Pretty sure CMD only does batch

EndeavourOS is nice. I’ve been using it for 10 months.
Only issue I had was that my windows dual boot messed up the booting. Plenty of tutorials about fixing it tho, so wasn’t too hard

The MRI machine asked him for a signature, saying it has never seen such a beautiful and healthy body. The gurney clapped

To clarify, that’s the collision of 2 dark matter particles.
Not the collision of a dark matter particle and something else.

researchers report that they have detected the invisible scaffolding based on gamma rays that result from the collision and resulting annihilation of two dark matter particles.

So, that’s 2 particles of this unobservable (or, difficult to observe) matter interacting with eachother in an observable way.
Very cool

I’m amazed it’s France before Germany.
But I’m also so happy that this is happening.
The greatest war in history and all the horrors behind it should never be forgotten/hidden/suppressed/rewritten.
Everyone commited atrocities in that war. Nobody is without stain.
Document it all, and make it all widely available

I clean my windshield if someone is too close behind.
The wind always carries some spray over the top and hits their car and they have to wipe their windshield.
It might seem petty, but seems to trigger something subconscious that makes them back off a bit.
It always seems to work

a high-risk warning from the UK’s NHS England Digital.

Huh, I didn’t think the NHS would be doing security research like this

The majority of Europe survives.
Although their sockets are recessed.

Are they actually free?
Are we maybe misunderstanding YouTube… A company?

I doubt it.
Tripping over a cable is as likely to damage the socket as it is to rip the cable out of the plug.
Any appliance that increases risk by being unplugged should probably not be using a consumer connection…

I think the 3 pin layout caused a lot of headaches, and the integrated fuse required a user-servicable plug.
So it would have to be a split-shell design of some type, where the appliance cable would have to be cable-gripped to the same part as the plug/socket pins.
Thus, a bottom-entry (heh) cable grip and a removable back plate that can only be unscrewed when it’s unplugged.
This was all in a time of bakelite. Plastic wasn’t flexible.

But no, I think tripping over an early bakelite g-type (I think it’s officially a g-type) plug cable would likely shatter the plug and pull the pins out of the socket… If it didn’t also damage the socket.

Heck yeh! Great work.
I think most critique has been covered.

I consider too-many-indentations to be a code smell.
Not actually an issue, but maybe there is…

There is nothing wrong with your code, and no reason to change it (beyond error catching as you have discovered). It runs, is easy to follow, and doesn’t over-complicate.

I like descriptive function names and early returns (ie, throw or return on all the conditions that means this function shouldn’t continue, then process the parameters to return a result).
This could massively clean up what’s going on.
There could be a “getUserCommand()” that returns the desired number, or 0 if it’s invalid.
If the returned value is 0, then break.
If the returned value is 6, then print values; then break.
Otherwise we know the value should be 1-5.

You could use an Enum to define the choices.
This way, the print lines and the conditional tests can both reference the enum. It also removes “magic numbers” (IE values that appear in code with no explanation).
In something simple like this, it doesn’t really matter. But it improves IDE awareness (helping language servers suggest code/errors/fixes). And Makes the code SOO much more descriptive (Ie “choice == 3” becomes “choice == Choices.Product”).

No, the cable comes out perpendicular to the pins (ie parallel to the wall).
Which pretty much guarantees foot-pain orientation

This is big data.
Like, people have talked about big data, people think they know what big data is.
Big data is the kinda thing that lets target know a shopper is likely pregnant then act on that information.

The difference is that a company has leveraged this against a different kind of public information - physical information (licence plates, in this case) - and developed and deployed the tech to gather the relations of that public information (alpr/anpr cameras), and has made it commercially viable (selling a useful analysis of that big data to police).

Maybe they sprinkle in some AI to help with pattern recognition instead of having to rely on data scientists to do their wizardry. Maybe that’s what makes this finally viable. Replace the expensive analysis with AI stuff.

But there is nothing new new here.
Alpr/anpr has been used to track cars for ages.
On the small scale, making sure people pay for parking/tolls/speeding/congestion-zones.
On the medium scale is just logging that data, and letting LEA query it (with a warrant?) to track a vehicle.
This is now on the “big-data” scale. This is matching patterns against events and drawing conclusions.

Haha, same.
Had a dual tuner pcie card.
Had a great library of recorded movies, had it all set up to rip DVDs, photos were backed up to it and a slideshow album was set as the screensaver.
I just missed the netflix integration, and there was never any decent replacement for that unfortunately.
It was glorious.

Windows media center was really really good for live TV.