My son is 13 and, like me, he has #ADHD. One of the ways this manifests is extreme reluctance to engage with “new” things outside his current hyper focus. Fortunately, my brother is exactly the same, so I have some experience of working around it (though for decades we didn’t understand what we were working around). However, it can still be really hard when I want either of them to try something I know they’ll love. I have to time the recommendation perfectly, or perform some sort of inception, otherwise they bounce off the idea like a fly hitting a window.
Mostly this has been around playing video games. Despite the Venn diagram of our three VG interests almost being a circle, the chances of us aligning to enjoy a game together (for more than a single session) are virtually zero.
Recently, though, my struggle with my son has been with movies. For example, with Rob’s death, I desperately want to recommend he watch Stand By Me. It’s the perfect coming-of-age story for boys coming-of-age. I don’t even want to watch it with him. I just want him to see it and feel it in his own way and time. But I’ll have to leave him to find his own way to it, which, I think, is as it should be.
Rest in peace, Rob Reiner, and thank you.
According to my #wrapstodon2025, I’m a “Butterfly”, I “frequently replied to other people’s posts, pollinating Mastodon with new discussions”. Well, if that’s the case, I hope I did more good than harm.
I do not strongly identify with this image
I’ve been watching Pluribus on Apple TV, which I’ve enjoyed, but the problem is the main character is called Carol and now I have a dreadful Neil Sedaka earworm
I’ve worked professionally with data for 20 years. Today I am working with literally the worst data set I have ever come across. It’s published every week by CQC. There are formatting errors or typos in either the filename or the headers every other week. Sometimes the order of the headers or the headers that are included change. It is virtually impossible to automate. For example: https://www.diffchecker.com/3Lhlr6SF/
I have a Christmas playlist playing on my tablet in the next room. So that when I leave my desk, and my focus headphones, I remember it’s Christmas 🎄#adhdhack
With Windows 10 going away, and my aged but honestly capable PC unable to run Windows 11, I thought I better give gaming on Linux a serious go in 2025.
Oddly, my original foray into Tux Tinkering ™ was inspired by boredom when I lived in Tanzania in 2001. I think it was Mandrake Linux? From 2003, I used Arch Linux and so system configuration became a past-time in itself. I did have a few attempts at gaming over the years. I played a few native games like Tux Racer, Frozen Bubble and Wesnoth but also managed to run stuff like Quake and Half-Life under Wine. (That’s actually the only time I have played, and finished, Half-Life.) But from 2005-ish, most of what I wanted to play was only available on Windows and, with the introduction of Steam (and the Humble Bundle!), it was just getting easier and easier. I was still tinkering with Linux for fun. I even got connections to our virtual desktops at work up-and-running via Citrix (which definitely WASN’T supported by IT).
But by the time our second child arrived in 2015, I had no time for tinkering and very little reason to even use a Linux desktop, with work being so Microsoft-centric. Fun time was extremely limited and stability was paramount and around then I started to look much harder at Workstation distros. I used Ubuntu for a bit but I think I decided to stick with Fedora from around 2019. I mostly used XFCE back in the day, but I did enjoy the “out of the box” experience of Gnome on Fedora. But throughout that time, desktop Linux was only used for the odd thing that was just too much hassle in Windows. Like anything to do with ffmpeg or any sort of bulk file management. I was still running Arch ARM on a Raspberry Pi, so I was still very much a Linux hobbyist, but gaming on Linux never crossed my mind.
Then, last year (I think), I heard from my (now teenage) son’s friend, that SteamOS is now based on Arch. And when my son got a Steam Deck for Christmas 2024, I started paying a lot more attention to how it works. I mean, I have to really. When your boy wants to run Marvel Rivals and he’s not using the right Proton build, you gotta dig into that! And I quickly saw that gaming on Linux as a main platform suddenly looks not only doable but almost straight-forward.
So, although I do have a year of updates on my W10 install, before it really goes away, I started looking at what I might do and I guess I’ll cover that in a new post.
My children are currently 10 and 13. In the not distant future, I fully expect to be asked to account for my repeated assertions that I believe in Father Christmas. I hope, when that time comes, my explanations will make sense to them.
I’ll talk a bit about card tricks and WWE; how some things shouldn’t be diminished by not being “the truth”. But, most importantly, I’ll talk about anthropomorphic personification and, therefore, the Christmas spirit, as a reminder of the importance of sharing and kindness, and being together.
And, since they’re rational and logical, I hope that having freed their minds of the mechanics of chimneys and sleigh velocities, they’ll think my version is actually a bit better.
