When I built my computer, I had no problems at all. I mean, sure I was confused or puzzled by a few steps, and I was certainly challenged by the process, but I was never frustrated. All in all, it was a very empowering experience. I learned a lot and I was really successful.

And then I decided to upgrade. When I bought my graphics card, I made the mistake of not researching the computability of graphics card drivers with Ubuntu. It caused a whole weekend of headaches and troubleshooting and frustration before I got it working again.

So did I learn my lesson about doing research before making major changes to my computer? Apparently not.

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So I finally got around to beating Never Alone!! It was a good game overall, but as I was thinking how to review it, I had a hard time deciding whether to review it as a Native American, as a Linguist, or as a Gamer. So why not all three? (Warning: Spoilers in the “gamer” section) More »

So, you bought and installed a shiny new graphics card on your Linux machine. Congratulations! Now to make use of it by playing some video games! Unfortunately, there’s not a lot of games out there for Linux. Fortunately, there’s a thing called WINE, which is sort of like a Windows emulator, but not really. It’s basically a layer of code that makes (most) .exe (Windows-only) programs work (kinda) on Linux.

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I bought one of the best GPUs I could get for under $100. I determined this by using the benchmarks per dollar chart here and by watching Black Friday sales closely. I did not determine which GPU I should buy based on anything other than the above, and the games I wanted to play, and whether it fit my motherboard. Okay, so I did my research, I just didn’t take into account I’m running Linux and not Windows.

Big mistake.

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Thanks to PCPartPicker, NewEgg’s tutorials, and the BuildAPC reddit, I learned a lot about computers in the last month, which culminated in me building a little Linux machine, so I can learn Linux!! Yay! Click through for pics! :)

Building a computer is something I’d wanted to do since I was a kid, and learning Linux is something I’ve been interested in doing for the past few months. So this was an awesome experience and a lot of fun! I’m already wanting to build another one, but I guess I’ll have to wait. More »

A few months ago, I created a bot on Twitter. @AllTheLanguages tweets a new language from the Ethnologue database once every hour or so, and will do so for about a year. Give or take. Sometimes the bot goes down and I have to reboot it. And there are some other bugs too. But more on that in another post…

When I tell people that I made a twitter bot, the first thing they ask (after “why?”) is “how?” Well, today, I’m going to answer that! Why? Because it was fun! How? Well, it’s complicated… More »