Lots of good advice but one question - have you tried LED bulbs before and had flickering problems?

Just worth checking a standard LED from your local super market before you go down the route of expensive brands or online purchases.

The reason I say this is that there are a lot of shoddy cheap and counterfeit electronics sold on Amazon for example. A supermarket bought bulb meanwhile actually has some quality control and standards plus you have somewhere you can go back to should you need to return them.

All my LEDs are from my local supermarket, own brand (Tesco, I'm in the UK, but Philips are also available for me) and I've had no issues. I'd also buy from local retailers where you can get good returns policies (Argos here, or your big box retailers in the US)

Amazon meanwhile has a policy of mixing stock that it purchases with stock from small sellers that they place in their warehouses and sending any to a customer. So a "sold by amazon" item may actually be a counterfeit item supplied by a 3rd party. Basically do not buy anything of value or branded from Amazon. So don't buy Phillips or other brands from Amazon.

And definitely do not buy the cheap Chinese unknown brands on amaxpn or elsewhere. The supermarkets will of course be buying Chinese made bulbs for their own labels but they will be buying them in bulk from specific factories and under contracts with some quality expectations, unlike the shitty free for all small seller type sourcing that your get from Amazon. Small sellers are going to be buying cheap ass unbranded bulbs and the factories are going to sell their cheapest bulbs plus ones that's do not meet bulk orders quality control thresholds via this route (cheaper to dump the bulbs by selling cheaply instead of having taking the financial hit and binning them). A large supermarket has leverage over the factories to maintain quality (or lose the contract) while small sellers have none.

Personally the only time I had a flickering LED bulb was a dimmer-switch lamp; it was designed for LEDs but didn't work with the bulb I bought but turned out I'd accidentally bought a non dimmable bulb. Otherwise I've not had a single bulb flicker in my house including all ceiling lights and numerous lamps. All my bulbs are supermarket own brand.

In terms of your connection, LAN and WAN isn't really going to be the way to go except for some very specific scenarios.

The Steam Deck and almost all multiplayer games connect via Internet servers and your steam accounts. Some games you can host and your friend connects directly via the Internet - games are designed to support that so you often don't need to resort to local LAN/WiFi play.

It doesn't matter that you're next door to each other - you might as well be miles away from each other for all it matters - you both just need good stable internet connections to the remote servers, with decent speed and your Internet routers not too restrictive on your connections (firewalls not blocking access, relevant ports open).

So basically ensure you have a good WiFi connection. Even better you can also get USB c ethernet dongles or a dock for your steam deck with ethernet to connect to your router directly and avoid WiFi.

I play with my steam deck docked under the TV, ethernet connection to my router, hdmi to my TV and an xbox controller and Bluetooth headphones. I play on the couch with all the benefits of the steam deck.

Both of you docking your steam decks with ethernet connections to your Internet routers may give you a better experience.

Edit: In terms of games to try:

• Phasmophobia - you can cooperatively try and hunt ghosts, horror game but can be a lot of fun

• Keep talking and nobody explodes - coop game where you diffuse a bomb, hectic but not needing fps reactions

• Divinity: Original Sin 1 & 2 - RPG games which can be played in Co op mode, with tactical combat

• Baldurs Gate 3 - similar to above, same makers but hugely popular and highly regarded game

• Valheim - coop survival game - explore and build a base, defeats bosses etc

• Stardew Valley - super cosy farming sim, with simple combat. It's a very chill multiplayer experience - can just chat away (or not) while building up your joint farm

There are loads of co-op type games that work well on the Steam Deck.

Food prices aren't high; the value of money has fallen - it's called inflation.

The real problem is wages have not increased so the purchasing power of consumers remains low. So food becomes relatively expensive - consumers have had pay cuts.

KDE doesn't control what packages are released on a distro? That's Aurora that chooses not to have point releaes version, and instead seems to have a rolling release from your description.

Bluefin GTS is based on Fedora 40 while Bluefin is based on Fedora 41. Fedora doesn't do rolling release outside it's Rawhide rolling dev branch. It does point releases and bug fixes.

There are plenty of KDE based distros that are also point release and not rolling release if that's your preference. I'd also recommend feeding back to Aurora if you think they should alter there KDE release schedule; they chose when to feed KDE releases into their distro.

Are hood mirrors a substitute for side mirrors? Like do they have the full field of view so you can see the same things as you see on a side mirror? I'm doubting it myself.

It's also kind of irrelevant. It sucks that the window was broken but the driver should have gone to one place only and that was the shop to get the truck repaired (without duct tape on the window). Even then it's arguable if even that should have been attempted as it was probably unsafe to drive either with duct tape or without duct tape in the Canadian winter and actually the truck probably needed towing or working on at the site of the accident.

If they went off working then I'm really not surprised they got into legal trouble. They'd be facing manslaughter charges if they accidentally killed a cyclist because they couldn't see them while delivering amazon packages or whatever his lorry/van does.

I get that it's the guys livelihood but these safety laws exist for a good reason, and he's probably put his commercial license in jeopardy by his actions.

You have so many options because your system has a lot of audio output options available. Presumably your mother board or your graphics card display outputs given the "Navi" label.

As others have said, from that section of the settings you should be able to click on the "proaudio" drop downs on the right and disable any you don't want to see.

The Navi outputs are the audio available via your hdmi and display ports - you may want to keep those on if you ever want audio from the screens directly but if you don't ever use audio from your displays you can disable the audio outputs. Most people don't use screens with integrated audio output but some may plug headsets into their screens via 3.5mm cables so may want it. But that's an usual use case - most would plug into the PC itself.

The starship/matisse HD audio is your audio jack on the front of the PC (often USB provided) - I'd keep that one available if you ever plug in your headphones. Personally I have my noise cancelling headphones plugged in via audio jack - you get perfect uninterrupted audio and longer between recharges as the headset doesn't have to use Bluetooth. However may not be desirable if you're using a mic on your gaming headset too.

You then have your Bluetooth device itself which is the gaming headset.

The other devices below that are your microphones. Again you will have multiple inputs which you can disable if you don't use them.

Just remember in the future if you ever want to plug in something that you've disabled these devices here.

"Time to switch to uBlock Lite or another ad blocker"

No. Time to switch to Firefox or derivative such as Librewolf.

After being forced to standardise to usb c and be responsible for some of the e-waste it produces, apple has finally relented.

They fought tooth and nail against the EU regulations to force charging standards. I don't care if they up sell cables to some people; most people will reuse what they have and thats the whole point of the regulations.

Regulation works.

This is a fluff piece written by someone in a rich bubble.

The 2 year old and 4 year old have no concept of money, the 4 year old did not "do most of the work" in a lemonade stand, and they do not have "their own money" to spend. Picking up after yourself and putting dishes in the sink are not chores, and kids this age aren't taking out the trash - of course they enjoy it when mummy does it and makes a big deal of how grown up the kids are for helping, and probably rewards then for it.

None of the ideas are innovative or relevant to most parents, and particularly not with a kids that age. This is just one rich bored parent with young kids sharing their "experiences". Pretty out of touch with reality.

Zuckerberg thinks Facebook should self regulate and that means in this case be free to allow posts of anti-vax propaganda and covid conspiracy theories that literally cost lives.

This is just a great example of why social media needs external regulation.

This is badly written and ignorant article. Fat32 supports up to 16Tb partition size (depending on cluster size - 2Tb -16Tb).

Its microsoft's windows tools that arbitrarily only allow users to create 32Gb partitions, and it is this that is being changed. This is not a change to Fat32, this is a change to windows. 3rd party tools on Windows and other systems like Linux have long offered more options for partition size.

That its taken to 2024 for Microsoft to fix the command line tool (and still not fix the GUI tools) is ridiculous.

Manifest V2 phase out is a big deal, as Google is pushing towards Manifest 3 only. Google's version of Manifest 3 is hobbled by removing WebRequest blocking which breaks privacy and ad blocking tools - an obvious benefit to Google as an Ad and data harvesting company.

Firefox is implementing Manifest 3 with WebRequest blocking, as well as supporting Google's hobbled version declarativeNetRequest to allow compatibility with chrome extensions.