It ain’t even local news. What we have now, is anybody’s guess.

Anybody else here play Oregon Trail on a teletype terminal? The school had 2 terminals in a small basement room that a few of us nerds could get access to for and hour or two a week, We would try to learn Basic, (with no one to teach us), and play Oregon Trail and get yelled at for going through some much thermal paper…

Me too. As a toolmaker and engineer, space mice were a thing. But they were stupidly expensive and still are. I was unwilling to spend the money for one. So I use a ball mouse and I still do for when I need to do serious CAD work these days-- designing my next model steam engine.

In many places , yes you can be ticketed. Maybe even have your bike impounded like a car.

At the rate many pedestrians are locked into looking down at their phones, eye level obstructions are maybe more dangerous.

They were using it for pig feed.

Order a Slate pickup. Buy what you want and only what you want. And add things later as you want or buy that tablet from amazon and a bluetooth speaker and install it yourself.

I think the issues is that you can’t pick and choose exactly what you want in your new vehicle. You can’t say, get just a simple AM/FM radio and get bluetooth. You buy a package of accessories.

So if you want just that simple radio, not only don’t you get the bluetooth, but you have to give up the power seats and windows too. It’s an all or nothing choice.

There was a time you would order your new car with individual accessories and then a couple of months to get it. I’m pulling for Slate to be successful and bring that freedom of choice back.

The school I taught in was rural and poor. Part of my budget was for calculators, so I had enough TR99’s and the school issued chromebooks for each student to use. My students would moan and groan about not getting to use a calculator, but they quickly understood why and when we would use them or not.

I wasn’t a tyrant about using them. Sometimes, those magic devices made complex tasks far more approachable and teachable. But you need a good basic foundation to get the best out of them.

OK, I’ve heard conflicting reports if it was moribund or active. Always an issue with one man shows.

Yep, and we thank you for the word soccer too.

No, but many needed to protect those passengers from bandits and other assorted outlaws.

Despite being from a time before the internet, pocket calculators and smart phones, (my first “calculator” was a slide rule), I’m as quick to adopt and master tech as I find a need for it. I like shiny new tech.

But as someone who also spent a few years teaching math in a my local and very rural school, I was not very generous with the use of that super computer in your pocket in my classroom. The reason being I wanted you to get your fingers dirty and greasy playing and manipulating those numbers yourself. I wanted to you develop a personal relationship with them and have at least a basic idea of the how and why they work.

Modern tech is great if you already have an understanding of how things work and can simply view it as a tool. But modern tech pretty much prevents people from developing the basic understanding of the how and why things work. And we are all dumber for it.

Best I can say is if medical care is an important need for you, then you will need to look at the Minneapolis/St Paul metro area. Rural areas lack much of the health care you might need. As a retired medic that worked in rural areas, I’m not lying when I say if I were to have a heart attack at home, I’m probably very dead before help can arrive.

While Minnesota shows as a mostly blue state, that is because we have one large metropolitan area that dominates the rest of the state. And outside of that metro region, the rural 80% of the state skews from purple to red.

Otherwise, plan on long cold winters that can grind some people mentally and what to us is warm and very humid summers. We are an outdoors people that enjoy the 3 months of summer and spend as much of our time outdoors as possible. Preferably on a lake in a boat, we own a LOT of boats. Even in winter we find snowmobiling, skiing, and ice fishing as popular hobbies. We are all about the outdoors for sure.

As far as the denizens of the state go, we are Minnesota Nice^tm to everyone, but as individuals we are mostly stoic and often wary of outsiders. And the farther you get from the cites, the more that becomes apparent. So it can be difficult to build friendships. You can live in a town for 20 years years and still be considered the “new people”. Or you can be accepted and welcomed immediately. YMMV for sure.

If you decide to move here, I wish you luck. As a whole, we are a good and helpful place to live. But there can be bumps on the road of life here also.

Nor will we create a better society if we let tyrants rule either. For most people, the choice is about how you choose to die-- kneeling in front of the pit you just dug or on your feet and fighting for something that might not be much better.

But no matter which you choose, you will probably die.

Another answer to question that no one asked…

Is there any new work being done on SuperSlicer? Or is it orphaned yet.

It’s a subscription based software. And it appears that it doesn’t much care for my old Nitro 5 laptop and Fedora 42. With 16Gigs of memory and the old 1650 nVidia chipset in it. It really slammed the brakes on.

I’m using Fedora KDE 42 and I found that to run Orca well I had to switch to the flatpak of the nightly builds. It still crashes sometimes, but not very often.

Bambu Studio was stable, but I have ditched it for Orca. I also use Prusa Slicer to run my Klipperized Mk3s. Prusa Slicer has always been rock solid for me no matter the distro or OS.

Have you tried starting Orca from the command line? It should show the error of a lib you are probably missing.