There’s 2 kinds of people in Trek fandom:
I haven’t gotten all the way through it yet, but I have very occasionally come back to it as a hobby project over the past year because I have been trying to collect a dataset of Majel’s lines in order to train a text to speech voice.
Usually, I’d find that a bit unethical, but in this case, they literally tried to collect a dataset before she died, which I think is as close to consent to such a reproduction as most passed actors could give. Also, it’s mostly for fun for something like HomeAssistant on Raspberry Pi.
While DS9 quality is an issue, I think Keevan is just a PS1 character- a beautiful one.
I find Pegasus a decent episode. I think that while utopian aspiration is a fundamental tenet of Star Trek, I think it’s a bit reducto e to call it completely a show about perfect humans.
Heck, from the get go we had Garry Mitchell doing pyscho god stuff and Charlie X groping people, and a captain who sacrificed his crew to the weird space Romans so he would survive.
I think in truth, Star Trek is both about the best humanity can be and how the best in humanity can overcome the worst in humanity - you can’t exactly do that without episodes where the protagonists or the Federation makes mistakes, sometimes small and sometimes on the magnitude of Pegasus.
In many ways, DS9, darker as it is, feels the most Trek - a team of very different people with different beliefs overcoming/respecting their differences and forming a beautiful community despite the folly and evil around and within them.
To be fair, not everything is played for laughs - I’d say pretty much every season finale gets moderately serious. I also think the Orion world building was top notch.
I enjoyed the crossover before I watched Lower Decks and still enjoy it, but I also feel like the way the characters were written at times reduced them to their basic archetype without the character development they would have had at that point in Lower Decks. I mean, it somewhat makes sense - probably a good idea to assume not everyone had watched Lower Decks and give an idea of who these people are - but I wonder if it could have been executed a bit better on that front.
Suffice it to say, I think late Lower Decks itself actually contains better examples of their “toned-down” real selves.
The whole Gumato!
Mostly - I find a lot of these quite funny, but I think LD is the least accurate one. TOS also is one of the less spot-on ones, but I think late TOS and especially the TOS films, it becomes very applicable.
I think the LD one really only applies to the early show, and mostly just Mariner and Boimler. Later on, it's often less they lack brain cells but often use them at the wrong time, but then their brain cells are good enough they actually make it out of the situation. I'd say none of the main characters are actually particularly mediocre except Boimler (not to hate on Bradward), as we slowly find out. Maybe some of the bridge crew stay within the box of mediocrity, but we still learn to love them as characters. I might put something for Lower Decks like "Pick one from each, and make it more dysfunctional".
Considering both the description of LD and there being no SNW, this was clearly written some time 2020 or 2021.
To be fair, the Romulans only showed up because this was an alternate timeline version of a TOS episode.
SNW is decent. S2 E2 is an especially strong episode.
That's nuts. I was just up in LA a couple of days ago to see They Might Be Giants. Stopped by the TOS cast signatures in the concrete in the walk of fame.
I'll have to see if I can get that in next time, although it's a bigger detour than simply jealously checking out the Micro Center in Tustin, which we have had nothing like back where I live since Fry's Electronics shuttered (and frankly, Fry's staff never seemed so nice).
It’s always a pleasure when Trek shark jumps and plops in a historical figure in an implausible way.
That’s half of what made the Amelia Earhart episode of VOY so fun. It’ll be really funny if we ever find out what actually happened to her.
A severe temporal anomaly during a transporter accident lead to this abomination, Kai Winkomaskix, child of Mogh.
The transport officer on duty almost phasered them on site. During the manhunt, Gul Dukat got the closest he ever did to getting a statue on Bajor.
Luckily, temporal investigations got everything sorted out.
Kai Winkomaskix, child of Mogh was a spiritual successor to Needole. https://startrek.website/post/12514221
Edit: I added a GIF version as the thumbnail. Here's the apng version below.
If it’s not moving, wait 30-ish seconds and see if it loads.
In LD 1x08 Veritas, Rutherford is rotating some "EPS Capacitors" (These seem to have little mention outside this episode) to prevent them from overheating.
Before I ask my questions, I first want to establish what makes sense to me here. Although not previously mentioned, like electrical capacitors, EPS Capacitors probably help to "smooth out" plasma flow. As these are high-power systems, I am sure there is risk of overheating in these capacitors that is not as present in current electrical capacitors, which usually don't have a rotating mechanism.
Now, for the questions:
For the first: My first theory is these are variable capacitors. Assuming the mechanics work similarly to electrical capacitors, Rutherford could be changing the capacitance of each capacitor to rotate the load. This doesn't feel completely right, though (for instance, how to keep the array within specification).
A better theory is that although its function is analogous to an electrical capacitor, the physical mechanics used behind it are different, and somehow wear in the internal materials is uneven unless rotated, somewhat like tires.
For the second: We practically mastered rotating crap with electricity in THE 20TH CENTURY and have only gotten better since. I don't understand why Starfleet couldn't just give each capacitor a servo motor running off an EPS tap that does the randomization automatically, or at the very least mount them all on a belt. Heck, if heat is the problem, why not a liquid cooling loop? The worst that can happen is an ensign has to go get a mop.
It could be possible that maybe it was kept there as a task to bully ensigns/make officers feel useful, but I feel that kind of thinking wouldn't necessarily exist at the Cali class drawing board. It could be possible that somehow the magnets in the motor interfere with the EPS containment field, but I feel like that would mean a lot more crap would have to be banned on board if the EPS conduits were that vulnerable.
Ultimately, I really can't make full sense of this second point, and would love insights on this and my first question.
Let me know if I missed any!
Edit: Updated Linux with Resistance, Year of Hell, and Borg Janeway
Weird. It seems like the images failed to save. So here’s the who’s who.
Risa’s Dental ”You’re on a pleasure planet, so why shouldn’t your teeth be a pleasure as well?”
Although I imagine dentists don’t exist in the 24th century like they do know; I imagine instead of braces or fillings, a general doctor just replicates chompers like they did for Ransom that one time, albeit hopefully the right size.
Another update: https://startrek.website/post/13283869 I found a fix for my issue. I'm annoyed that I had it in the first place, but I overall still like my laptop.
Important update in this post: https://startrek.website/post/14075369 I still consider this a good laptop, but this is an important fix if you're using this on Debian 12. When 13 comes out next year, the out-of-box support of this laptop should be basically perfect.
Anyhow, back to the original post: I recently got a brand new laptop, a Thinkpad 21JT001PUS, to consolidate/replace my array of various on-the-go-Linux devices, and I have to say, I'm impressed. I know Thinkpad and Linux aren't news, but for such a recent device, I am surprised how well it works. The price wasn't bad (which makes up for the fact that it's a Zen 3 chip with DDR4, in my opinion), it has good upgradability (I'll touch a bit on my experience later), and hardware support was really good.
I initially tested hardware support with Debian Testing Trixie XFCE (as that was the Live USB I happened to have on hand, since I often test devices and also keep it around as a backup for my desktop, which runs Testing). At first I couldn't get it to boot, but then I found the BIOS setting to enable non-Microsoft certificates. After that, I booted in and found everything worked out of the box (except the fingerprint sensor, of course, but that's extremely rare for any laptop anyway). However, after experience with my previous portable devices, I learned I prefer stable distributions on those, as during some parts of the year, I can go months without opening the laptop.
Thus, I retested with Bookworm. Almost everything worked still, except for the Wi-Fi (which seems to have been introduced in later kernel versions). Luckily, this thing has an ethernet port (From which it is HECK to remove cables - I've found I had to twist the end up a bit to get it out), so I was able to do an install and then add the Backports kernel to get Wi-Fi working.
One minor issue I had (a software fault rather than a hardware/kernel one) was Bluetooth headphones, but as it turned out, it was just that PulseAudio was installed instead of Pipewire, so after switching, it worked flawlessly with Blueman).
As for battery life, so far it seems okay (as I write this, it says 3:29 left at 51%), but I haven't rigorously tested it yet (though I threw on the usual tlp and stuff like that for good measure).
For performance, I once again haven't tested it too rigorously, but I did play some Civ VI, which it was keeping up with just fine.
The upgrabability of this laptop does have one caveat, though. The bottom is a bother to remove, and most Youtube crap conveniently glosses over them. For one, some of the screws would get loose but not come out all the way. I eventually found the trick was to throw some pry tool under the screw head to hold it up so I could get it the rest of the way out. After they were all out, the bottom cover STILL wouldn't budge. This too ended up being a matter of jamming a pick in one corner of the case and running another one to slowly pry up the bottom case on all sides. I lost a plastic tab or two in the process, but that doesn't show up on the outside, and I think 24 GB of RAM (and 2 TB of NVME 2280 storage + 256 GB, the Windows drive that I left in the 2242 bay) will be plenty for a long time.
Overall, I would say this is a great laptop for those who don't want to go the route of purchasing a used laptop for Linux. I'll say an 8.5 out of 10 due to the hard-to-remove bottom cover and weird ethernet port (Update: 8 out of 10 now due to the nasty Wi-Fi bug I had to fix with a few module options, see posts linked in top of page).
Here's the Linux Hardware probe: https://linux-hardware.org/?probe=1e50fb1862
Based off Doctor Who 8x01 Deep Breath
A sequel to https://startrek.website/post/12349474
I do declare, it's the best of both sides of the Mississippi! Needole's as dependable as a well-bred mule with the looks of country-fried chicken, while lacking the more unsavory qualities of our otherwise trusty Talaxian companion.
Oops.