Other people have obviously pointed it out, but this is one of the many areas in Linux where the command line is so much easier than an interface that the people who write GUI tools just don’t bother. The tool you need for a command line approach is called dd (I imagine it stands for direct data because that is what it does). Using dd you can take data from one place and put it into another. This means you can put zeros all over a drive, wiping it in full, using

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/targetdevice

That will fill the whole drive with zeroes, but you could also do it with random noise first, using the below

dd if=/dev/random of=/dev/targetdevice

In the case of your ISO image there is someone who has included all the options including block size and so on, but the step you really need is to be sure you get the right device. Execuse the command below

ls /dev

Then insert your device, wait a few seconds, and run it again. You will have a list of all of the devices that were connected before and after plugging your drive in, so your drive will be the new one. It will probably show up as something like

/dev/sdc
/dev/sdc1

Notice that there are two. The first is the device, the second is the partition on the device. If you tried to put the content of an ISO image into an existing partition it would look like it had all worked but it would actually fail because the ISO is a full rip of a device, not a partition. Instead use the device itself, in this case sdc.

dd if=/path/to/image.iso of=/dev/sdc bs=4M; sync

The last bit will make your system write things to the disk and make it safe to eject it. Once that is all done it should work as a bootable USB.

It seems super complex but once you have done it a few times it becomes so easy you will regret the time spent getting a GUI installed.

If you still want a GUI you could try Gnome Disks, but I never enjoyed using it.

Yes and no. I had a heart issue a couple of years ago and stopped taking my meds during that process because they can interfere with heart function in theory. That said, I think I am living up on part of your anxiety. Are you afraid that if you get used to them, get used to functioning with them on board, and then they get taken away you will be unable to function but be expected to based on recent performance?

I have had some of that anxiety and it is reasonable. People do tend to see your “new normal” and “normal” after a fairly short time. Their expectations change and their tolerance for you struggling goes down in some ways because they start relying in your performance at that higher level.

It is really unfair but that is something that happens. I have however found some ways around this anxiety. I have built better systems while using my meds that work better for off my meds too. I have automated some things, make others easier to do, and honestly stopped doing a bunch of things I used to do at all. By doing this I have reduced the demand on me on the other days.

If you can use your meds to make life easier for when you are off the meds I think you will feel the anxiety lessen.

Also, depending on where you are and local laws, stockpiling a very small amount, maybe one month ahead or something, can be very helpful. I try to buy my next dose as soon as I can and have ended up with about one month of buffer. Now if my meds are unavailable at the pharmacy I can just not stress and use my backup. Because I rotate through they never get stale and I am never holding more than two months of meds, so I am not in a weird situation of having years of meds to explain away. Be careful of your local laws and so on, it is legal here but may not be there, so don’t get yourself in trouble.

Also, consider non medication supports. For me that is heavy work like weight lifting as well as eating far less sugar. Consider having a reasonable source of caffeine available and keeping your usage down so you don’t built a tolerance to it. If you are out of meds caffeine can help for some people such as myself, nowhere near as good as meds but much better than nothing.

Yes, but not immediately. I am seen as obviously odd, but friendly, like a very big dog. I frequently have people stop me in shops to get help getting something off a shelf or finding something in the store, though I don’t mind at all, I enjoy helping people. I also get asked for directions all the time in public, a couple of times a week on average, and according to other people I know that is far more than they have. I guess I just have that “open face” people talk about, and I also make more eye contact than NTs because of masking, so I think people take that as an invitation.

Also, once people talk to me for a while, and I mean like 15-20 minutes, they tend to clock that something is up. I know a lot of things in many areas thanks to the ADHD interest in just about anything, so I can speak from a relatively informed position on many more topics than people expect. They think I am just like them because I know a comparable amount about their favourite topics as they do, so obviously it must be equally important to me as it is to them. Given a fairly short time they will watch me interact with someone else and see the same thing happen and have that moment of confusion because I am interested in too many things.

After a little while of knowing me people refer to me as a wikipedia on wheels or google with a face. If I don’t know something I am always prompt to say so, but if you ask me again later that day I have likely gone and fixed that hole and have something useful to say about it, and sometimes people do exactly that. I feel like a very odd LLM in a body running on 40 watts and being surprisingly efficient.

ROMs are your best bet for more play with less storage required. Older games are insanely small by today’s standard, often coming in at under a single 600MB disc in size, but console games blow even that out of the water. N64 games are tens of megs, while earlier platforms are only a couple of megs a piece.

PlayStation games are all around that 6-700MB per disc and some games are multiple discs, but that is still way less than the size of modern games. Also a lot of them can play fairly well from a high compression format like 7z, so you can store then compressed.

Also, some games that are older have newer open source engines which can really breathe new life into them. My first example would be OpenMW for Morrowind, but DevilutionX is another great example. Trying to get Diablo running in modern hardware is entirely possible, but the resolution is very limited and it is super clunky. DevilutionX has more options and it is a much more enjoyable experience.

Also, Creeper World 3. I have put 50 full days of my life into that game and regret nothing.

A quick question, what accent do you have? As an Aussie I have real trouble speaking naturally with most speech to text software, open or closed source. I feel like the guys in that Scottish sketch show in the voice activated elevator. I sometimes use voice dictation for my notes for work and I spend almost as much time correcting as I do speaking.

That said, I have found a perfect solution. I can get well over the 95% correct mark by simply using an English or American accent. I can do both fairly well and the speech to text has no complaints. I imagine someone from Boston would have a tonne of trouble being understood, as would a Welsh person, but pretending to be a Californian or similar can help immensely.

I would love to find something that can be trained by my speech like Dragon Naturally Speaking used to be. I used that in the early 2000s and at first it was awful, but training it for a few hours really did offer a noticeable improvement, and ongoing use continued to improve further. My computer died and I lost all the trained data, so I never went back, but if I could I would definitely do that again.

Noooch?

Sad to see this play out again. Lots of people are deficient in B12 and various other essential nutrients. The worst part from my perspective is obviously the loss of life, but the second worst is how easy this is to fix. I am by no means a vegan, I definitely eat my fair share of meat and eggs, but B12 deficiency is easy enough to get, especially if you eat a lot of processed foods or have a mono diet, eating the same thing every day.

For B12 I would recommend nutritional yeast. It gives a cheesy sort of flavour and can be added to foods like beans, refried beans, ragu/bolognaise, various pasta dishes, the list goes on. A fairly small amount packs a lot of B vitamins and you can have quite a bit without any issue. It also keeps very well, just requiring an airtight container and maybe a dessicant packet for longer term storage.

If you take some tapioca starch and add it to water then slowly reduce it you can make a really nice cheese sauce substitute, very similar to Mac and cheese. Nutritional yeast adds the full flavour and colour, making it actually tasty.

I got a lot of fiddling with things when I was a kid so all my fidget toys that I found for myself got taken away in the places I needed them most like school etc. My solution was to use my own hands. I curl my fingers a little and then touch the crease between the first and second metacarpal on the index finger, then go down to middle and ring in the same spot, then diagonal up to the flat of the second metacarpal then the crease of the second and third metacarpal, then I reverse course. I can do the same with the straight from the second to third metacarpal crease on index, middle, then ring, then diagonal up to the first to second crease on the index. It is a nice pattern and except for times where I have broken or flayed my hands respectively it is always available. I can go slow or fast, do variations of the patterns, and I can do it subtly so people don’t notice. Very… Handy. Ha.

Something to consider is differences in absorption and context. One angle is coabsorbtion, where two molecules can be absorbed better together than apart. Another is binding, such as with lectins which can bind to some micro nutrients and prevent absorption. So if you add lots of something which is not bound like it naturally would be with foods that contain it then absorption may be disregulated and you may have wildly different levels absorbed than the nutritional label would suggest.

Adding lots of vitamin C to foods because of a cosmetic or preservative function may not be the best idea given how active it is in the body. Maybe it has a similar effect in the gut to what it does in the food in the packet, killing a bunch of microbes, and therefore could impact our gut microbiome. We don’t have the data yet on the mechanisms, so we should withhold judgement for now.

Ah, good to know. I have found that the state I was used to calling tired was actually really exhausted, absolutely out of energy. Using Ritalin made the cost of things much lower so I felt like I could go for hours after my dose ran out. It was actually that I had gotten used to being absolutely ruined by the day and expected to feel like crap that drove my response, and now I go to bed with the capacity for a fair bit more than I used to.

I go to bed less fatigued and tired and sleep more than I did before Ritalin, but I do sometimes have trouble sleeping. I have found that heavy work, like a weight lifting routine or playing with kids, helps a lot with getting the physical agitation under control. I need to be active to be OK and when I am not able to be active I end up with depressive symptoms and sleep disturbance.

I would recommend trying a calisthenics or weights routine at some point, maybe a few months down the line, to see if it helps after your initial adjustment. It also helps with getting mood regulation working a bit better and can make sitting still much easier. I have worked various jobs and lifting heavy things helped a lot with the physical symptoms, though the boredom set in and made the job intolerable fairly quickly. I now work in personal disability care and the varied needs of my clients helps to make the job sustainable over a longer time.

Do you mean you didn’t sleep the night after you had a dose in the morning? Normally the dose wears off after 3-4 hours for standard release Ritalin and 6-7 hours for extended release. That would mean if you took it at 10am it should be completely worn off around 2pm for standard Ritalin and by 5pm for extended release. Did you take a second dose?

It is important to remember that how it is today is unlikely to be how it is in a few months. Your body has to get used to processing Ritalin and also the different level of demand you will place on it given your improved capacity. You may overextend yourself and maybe even hurt yourself in this process. It is normal to have some trouble adjusting and small issues like one missed night of sleep but it should level out within a fairly short time, maybe a week or two. If you have ongoing disruption make sure to talk to your prescribing doctor and make sure it isn’t a side effect.

Good luck, have fun!

My personal recommendation is to get started asap with what you have. That would mean using any old thing you have laying around. Do you have an old laptop? They are ideal for beginner self hosting as you can physically access the machine and it includes a battery backup right in the machine. Usually they are also fairly lower efficient, so that is nice too.

Buying dedicated hardware acts as a barrier to actually doing things, so getting past that is key. If you find you don’t actually want to do self hosting you can just stop using your old laptop, but if you bought a full server machine it will be a bit of a trap and make you feel like you failed in some way. Also, the cost right now is fairly prohibitive, but using existing hardware can make that much more manageable.

As for what to run, I would recommend trying a fresh install of a distro based on Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, and Arch. Yes, four. They are different and have a different feel to them, but also have different communities. By going through the process of installing each one you will get a feel for the system and the community around it and have a better idea what works for you. I spent a few years having around the Debian end of things but eventually moved over to Arch stuff and am currently using EndeavourOS. Your experience will likely be different to mine but trying a few different options will help you figure it out.

Then moving on to services. Try to see what you actually use your machine to do now and then find services for that. For example, if you use something like Google Drive to synchronise data from your phone to your desktop then try using Syncthing to replace that. If you use Netflix to watch stuff try using Jellyfin. If you do play things like Minecraft get a local server running.

These will all be for learning, so their performance doesn’t need to be better than what a professional can provide, they just need to work and be yours to learn with. If you find you love doing this and enjoy the process but the hardware is holding you back this is a good time to upgrade to a dedicated machine.

For this I would recommend getting an office computer like an Optiplex or similar, just a basic office computer with an i5 or similar. You will want a fairly good amount of RAM in it, probably 16GB minimum and really 32GB is where things start getting good. A dedicated graphics card is not likely to be useful this early as the iGPU in most modern processors is actually fairly robust and should handle transcoding video for most use cases at a small scale. Storage could be one SSD for the OS and multiple spinning disk drives in a RAID or similar configuration for storage. The SSD will make the actual OS faster, decrease boot times, and make it faster to install and update things making updates less disruptive. The spinning media is way cheaper and you can backup all of your OS drive onto the spinning disks as a cron job in low usage times.

That’s my two cents on it, start with what you have, expand as you need but not aggressively before you need it, and try things now before you are too afraid to mess something up because you rely on it. Remember to have fun and experiment, nothing teaches better than experience. Enjoy yourself, don’t take it too seriously, and don’t lock yourself in to one specific thing, be flexible and willing to experiment.

My experience may be different to yours, but I found that I could actually sleep better with Ritalin on board than without. I can actually have a nap if I decide to and will actually fall asleep while having an active dose, whereas if I don’t I am too agitated and can’t relax enough for a nap.

As for eating, OMAD (One Meal A Day) is good for me, I can not worry about it and just eat in the evening and cover my full day intake in one go. It makes organisation much easier simplifies my schedule. It is also better for blood sugar regulation and insulin resistance, so if you are prediabetic it can help reverse that damage.

That said, if you take it every day you will probably find your hunger signal changes to be more obvious while on the meds. I have found that I can get my three meals a day while on Ritalin after a couple of years of taking it, but skipping is also fine and doesn’t upset me like it does without meds. This is also true of pain, I can tolerate pain much better with my meds than without. The pain isn’t gone, it just doesn’t intrude and disrupt as much so I can keep doing other things.

I will also say that the sense of holding two tasks and switching between them, not forgetting the other, is something that I find works better off the meds than it did before the meds. I assume it is because I can actually train the skill with the meds on board and get better at it, then when I am off the meds the pathways are stronger and easier to use. I can’t say that for sure, but it certainly seems more possible to ignore distractions off the meds than it was before the meds, so I think skill is a part of it, though the other side is probably some degree of burnout and a lack of resources before the meds compared to after having them for a while.

Anyway, good luck, I hope it goes well for you.

This looks like a job for fidget toys!

Honestly, such a great tool, you can use your hands while they talk and it is much easier. Also other things like gardening, walking, and so on can fill the same niche. Just have something your body can do while you are listening and it will be easier.

Also, consider having some music in the background, or be playing a game together like a card game or similar to break up the talking.

Maybe also tea and biscuits? Just something to have your hands and mouth occupied and make not talking easier.

I definitely feel similarly about bad instructions. I have found a few recent products that actually had good instructions which made me really understand the issue.

Good instructions give a single possible interpretation. Bad instructions could be interpreted to mean mutually exclusive things.

Does the washer go on the bolt before the bolt enters the hole? Or on the other side? If you get it wrong you may not tighten it correctly and may compromise the strength of the furniture.

I recently bought and built a few items and they had clear, unambiguous instructions. Only one possible interpretation, clear logical steps, and well labeled parts. One was from GiantX and the other was Fantastic Furniturea chain here in Australia. The difference between those and other flat pack items was insane.

Yep, when you have life with a major block and then experience a significant reduction in it you will definitely feel the pull to have even less. There is a sweet spot for meds and it can be different than you initially think.

I find that having my morning dose of 40mg Ritalin LA and my afternoon dose of 20mg Ritalin standard release works really well, but if I am just doing stuff like dinner and hanging out I may actually split that 20mg dose into two sequential 10mg doses a couple of hours apart. That gives me relief from some of the sensory issues for much more time but doesn’t give me as much help with the motivation and activity level stuff.

So for you it may be worth considering an adjunct of lower dose Ritalin for after the big dose wears off, obviously depending on how it worka for you. I would recommend speaking to your prescribing doctor about trying a few different dose schedules for their recommendations, and really to use the language of testing so they understand you mean to experiment within safe bounds to understand how it works best. That means the same overall dose but tweaking the delivery timing and measuring the outcome.

Some psychiatrists will be uncomfortable with this. Some may be reluctant to have you try things and experiment. Some may think you are heading towards abuse. For that reason I would also recommend saying you want to optimise the dose you currently have, not increase, and also be open to other things like modafinil or similar non-stimulant meds.

Also, consider non-medication interventions. A great one is hard, heavy exercise, for example powerlifting. You burn a bunch of calories in a short time and release some of the body tension that builds over time and eventually causes issues. I find that lifting heavy things helps settle me and makes the next 3-5 days way better. Cardio never does the same for me, but maybe it would work for you.

Physorg is a great resource for someone who is not currently fully educated in the field but has a strong interest. They do really good summaries of each topic and provide just enough context to go and find out more. They also do have good RSS feeds available, so you can easily use whatever client you like to get their content.

As for FOSS clients, just have a look in F-Droid and you will find a bunch. I use Feedflow at the moment but I have tried a few from F-Droid and they are all similar. On desktop I would recommend looking at a different one depending on your desktop environment. On EndeavourOS with KDE I have used a few but be one included with the Kontact suite is fairly good.