Our silver cat is a huge fan of tummy tickles.

He specifically requests them, and he’s certainly gone over ten minutes without any hint of wanting to stop, he just “supermans” his arms out one at a time, and sometimes drools a bit.

Cat tax picture:

Sorry, I might have misremembered the exact process (this was probably three or four years ago), though no need for the nasty aggressive attitude (though my apologies if I offended you somehow).

Maybe it was version upgrades (e.g 18.04 to 20.04) instead of updates, or clean installs/new installs/reinstalls? I expect it was some of one and some of another.

At the time I used to (casually) maintain a bunch of Ubuntu computers for a few community projects, small organisations and older people who live nearby. I don’t remember the specifics, I just remember the phone calls of “the printer isn’t working” “Linux has broken my USB pen” etc, and the fix being “remove the snap version and install the deb version”. It caused a lot of problems.

If you were running a previous version of Ubuntu, where you had deb packages which worked, over the course of a few updates, they replaced half of your programs with snaps (without telling you), which were unable to see additional hard drives, USB pens, printers, scanners or cameras, couldn’t use plug-ins, couldn’t use 3rd party templates or presets, and didn’t respect any system settings for fonts/text size, icon placement and so on.

Snaps were fine for “aisleriot solitaire” or “calculator” (assuming you didn’t mind a 5 minute loading time) or other things which didn’t need to interact with any file or system or device, but for actual programs for people trying to do work? Bag of shite.

Now, I imagine some years later they must have fixed some of this rubbish, and I read recently they might have finally done something about permissions, but no, they didn’t ask anyone before they swapped working programs for completely broken snaps. They forced it on their existing users, and some of us bear grudges.

I think it meant to say “Scrounger Guy Hands realises legislation loophole, which allowed him to steal billions of pounds of unearned money off the British Government and the British people, will be closed, leaving his company with a tiny fraction less of immoral profit, whilst still making billions in profit”

I totally agree, but it might be a pretty hard-to-argue Arts Council bid.

Also, if you’re into the empty feeling of nuclear sadness, check out When the Wind Blows (1986) - it’s from Raymond Briggs’s graphic novel - who did “The Snowman” and that Santa Claus one amongst other family favourites. Surely a lovely, fun cartoon to watch with the kids!

WARNING: DO NOT ACTUALLY WATCH WHEN THE WIND BLOWS WITH YOUR KIDS (unless your kids are adults)

The tone and scale is quite different, but the overall themes or message certainly have a lot in common. Both worth seeing.

I can’t remember The Day After as clearly as I can Threads, but I remember it was definitely worth seeing, though I feel like it had a little more of a film/plot/narrative/entertainment element to it, whereas Threads was just quietly bleak and undignified - a gritty soap-opera story in Sheffield, then everyone gets nuked and you see all your favourite characters as they piss themselves and their hair and teeth fall out from the radiation and then they slowly die from illness and starvation, then you watch a documentary style presentation of the tiny remainder of population, scrabbling in dirt, trying to find a still living plant.

Absolutely watch both - all humans should watch both at some point in their lives - but maybe not on a day where you want to have any fun or talk to anyone, or do much except stare into the distance in silence.

Yes please! Most of the streets near me have been dug up three or four times now, over the last few years, for new companies to put identical cables next to the other company’s cables, because they don’t want to pay the rental or whatever it is.

I’m sure the extra telegraph poles are even more annoying.

“The Darkness Out There” by Penelope Lively.

In short, a “nice old lady” tells a couple of young kids about what they did to a young German who survived a plane crash over Britain during WW2.

I think it was there for the “the nice old lady was actually nasty and cruel and the evil nazi was actually just a scared, fairly innocent boy”.

From where I lived, just the lager and cider together was snakebite, and with blackcurrant it was a “snakebite and black” - but I think there was a lot of regional variety (in the UK, at least).

I have heard lager/cider/blackcurrant called a snakebite before though (I remember it causing a disagreement in the pub) - but I’ve also heard it called a “diesel” (which elsewhere was something mixed with guinness). I’m pretty sure you sometimes got different things in different pubs in the same town.

I suppose pre-internet, we were just relying on the drunk people ordering things to decide what they wanted to call stuff (“what was that purple mixed drink called that made me throw up on my own shoes?”).

Mix rice up with tomato sauce, melt a bit of mozzarella cheese in, some slices of pepperoni in it, sprinkle in some basil and oregano… check behind you that nobody can see you commit culinary crimes… delicious.

To (controversially) go one step further, all unsweetened carbohydrate bases are interchangeable.

You can put pasta topping on a pizza, you can put pizza topping on rice, you can put toastie fillings on a potato waffle and it always ends up nice.

Pubs in the UK used to (or still do?) have blackcurrant and lime cordial for this.

“Lager and Lime”, “Lager and Blackcurrant” and “Cider and Blackcurrant” were pretty common 20-30 years ago. A shot of cordial (concentrated juice), then filled up with lager beer.

There was also orange cordial behind the bar, but nobody ever drank “Lager and orange”. I believe it was some form of crime.

Any other member of staff or the public would have corrected it with a marker pen in a second.

I enjoyed the joke but disliked the spelling. I think I am experiencing “ambivalence”.

Yeah, I had a look at it myself last night and it showed up empty to me as well, which is a bit strange. I wonder if their 1.64 iso is corrupt?

Though it will not resolve anything, for the sake of curiosity, I might be tempted to check the previous 1.63 iso to see if it is also empty. If the 1.63 iso is not empty, then there’s a problem with their 1.64 iso file, and see just wait for them to fix it. If the 1.63 iso also shows up as empty, then I guess the mystery continues!

[Edit] 1.63 is also empty, so something odd about how iso is formatted?

How about “Lone Skum”?

Glad you’re making some progress with it! It looks like the 1.64 update is only a few days old, so perhaps it will make its way into the system updates in a few days? (In the same place you found 1.63).

Otherwise, I wonder if the windows .exe or .iso contains the .cab file (can you extract with archive manager or mount the iso?), which could then be installed using the instructions under “1.1.2 Manual (fwupdmgr)”?

Alternatively, if everything seems to be working well with 1.63, perhaps no need to worry for a while?

No guarantee this will work, but there seems to be instructions from the arch wiki here: wiki.archlinux.org Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon (Gen 6)

Try at your own risk of course, but maybe an option if nothing else works?

I’m pretty sure you can do the bios on Thinkpads etc through “fwupdmgr” (I guess it means Firmware Update Manager). I definitely did mine through it.

There’s a bit of info on here: Linux Mint Forums - [SOLVED] BIOS update on Lenovo ThinkPad X1C 7th gen

It should apply the same to Ubuntu as it does for Linux Mint.