Dark Reader is essential!

This will be the comment that starts the war between Britain and Australasia. During the first wave we’ll just drop millions of plugs pin upwards on your streets, there will be severe foot damage on a scale you cannot fathom

Agreed, and they help family life so much - “announcing” when meals are ready, using “drop in” as an intercom rather than shouting around the home, not to mention the stuff you’ve already mentioned.

The one that seems acceptable to them is to list one cheap part for the listing, along with variations of the full device. That way it looks like the lowest price in search results, but when you click it, the selected variation is the cheap part.

This practice is so widespread on Ali that finding the best price/seller that is likely to get the item to you balance is ridiculously time consuming, a lot of the time the cheap item is something barely related to the item you’re searching for. It also seems to be creeping into Amazon at the moment!

It’s really not a problem anymore. Look at a distro like Mint, compare the lightweight xfce version versus the full fat Gnome cinnamon. They both look the same on the surface using the same theme, all apps work, look and behave fine over all versions, yet you’ve got the option between “small and snappy” or “pretty and high end” which works much better than turning off the animations in Windows.

I’ve been an on/off Linux desktop user for years and now is just a comfy time to be a Linux user. All websites work, most of my Steam/Epic and GOG library just works with no messing, the various software stacks we use day to day are there, mature and “just work”.

It takes a woman nine months to make a baby, nine women cannot make a baby in a month.

Classic (and likely mangled by myself) computer science quote which I always enjoy encountering in the wild!

Second this. I bought some after watching Dankpods rate them as a cheap way to get into IEMs. I liked them so much that I bought the Bluetooth dongle attachments (AZ15) which were more expensive than the monitors themselves(!) to turn them into wireless earbuds and they’re great. The IEMs themselves provide a lot of natural sound isolation and aren’t overly bassy so you can enjoy all of the music while being able to hear the lyrics/lighter instruments.

The only thing I don’t like is that they look fairly ridiculous to wear out and about. I have a conventional pair of Redmi Bud 3 for going places which are a lot more discreet, but don’t sound half as good!

A human can not eat for several days and still stay active.

I’m looking at my bulging waist and feeling incredibly guilty right now!

I say this as someone who considers themselves a leftist…

The lack of civility shown by left leaning people online is almost certainly pushing moderates into more extreme communities and the unhinged takes are perfect meme fodder for those with a bad agenda. Instead of channeling your anger at the person you’re corresponding with through your keyboard, channel it at a lack of empathy and understanding in society as a whole and respond with kindness and disengage when the conversation is not honest.

Repeat above for the use of “nazi”. The use of the word has become devalued because people like to fling it at folks with milquetoast centrist opinions, save it for people who are legitimately evil.

Buy a nice home, upgrade it to my liking (CAT6 to all parts of it, solar panels/energy storage/network cabinet/make it watertight and safe for the next 50 years), buy a shitty looking van with a petrol powered pressure washer and indemnity insurance and spend my spare time going around cleaning paths and monuments etc. in my local area.

Their points about it not having monetization make zero sense - there’s a bunch of shit on the internet available for free, the fediverse didn’t invent that.

It has to be paid for, though. Servers, traffic and disk space aren’t free, the volunteers who run instances will need to be compensated once their instances start to become their day jobs and there are legal hoops that some servers will need to jump through when it comes to nsfw content, removing copyrighted content etc. We’re in the early days of the fediverse atm, so it’s interesting to see how this will all pan out!

it’s not a problem there

It is, because my wife is an avid Tok user and complains about it, and reports it, frequently. She also says there are many animal videos that are “unsettling” but not outright abuse.

I have two Huawei AX3 Pro Wifi6 routers (Chinese versions, since they have a much larger range due to extra amplifiers on one of the bands) which are connected together via a devolo homeplug system. I consider it pretty cheap and janky, but practically it works really well. Range is excellent and roaming between both routers is seamless. My only complaint is that you only get 3 free ethernet ports as one is needed for WAN/uplink, also you need to use Google translate to configure it as there is no English language option!

I don’t use Tiktok but I gather that this is a big problem over there as well, so it sounds like Twitter is working just as well as the site it’s riffing off.

Keeping my computers, phone and the firmware of any devices up to date. Doesn’t matter what it is, I like the latest and greatest.

Consider my SIP VoIP gateway, I maybe make one call a month through it and get a couple of scam calls a week, it’s stable as hell. Yet the second I get a notification saying there is a new firmware version I’m downloading it!

BBC News. They do a fairly good job of being impartial since both main party voters here in the UK hate it and accuse it of being biased to the opposition!

2744548! I still log in once every few years to see all my contacts who are offline!

So many!

MS Comic Chat and their weird VR Chat, the former was always very lively and a great introduction to the world of IRC, the latter was just experimental and trippy.

Usenet and finding lively discussion, flamewars and so much porn and spam under one roof.

Instant Messengers like ICQ and AIM being the lifeblood of the social world.

I think the thing I miss the most is that there was so much to discover and discovering it was very much a word of mouth thing, you had to find links from friends, follow webrings and pointers from sites that made it onto Altavista and Yahoo (or astalavista for the less legit stuff), now everything is consolidated onto a handful of platforms, it feels less open than ever.

I loved this one. Before broadband internet was common a number of us would download our Linux ISOs from questionable websites in our university computer lab and then take our files home on floppy or zip disk. I remember once my friend got trapped in a number of popups which claimed to have pictures of “Britney Spears Nude!!!” and I loudly asked him “what does ‘Britney Spears Nude’ mean?” in the full lab and then watching him panic close down everything.

Golden days!

I cut my teeth on Usenet so web forums always seemed so backwards and limiting compared to that. My earliest experience of being an actual user of them was probably the eurogamer forums and a few proboards “free” forums hosted by a few websites in the early-mid 00’s and still it just felt so clunky!