This seems to be a “PEBCAK” situation.

A super bright flashlight is also a top pick for a bugout bag. It punches WAY above its weight, space wise.

Some of them can even be used to start fires.

It’s easier and, most importantly, safer than ever now.

My forming years during the age of Napster, LimeWire, and Morpheus made me learn how to format a hard drive and reinstall an operating system expertly. I had hundreds of CDs with backups of (mostly) clean songs, videos, and crackz.

There was a 90:10 chance of getting a clean piece of media or electrogonorrhea, no matter how safe one was. However, it brought people together trading and downloading, akin to the Pokémon Go craze.

Everyone should be using the Facebook addon “Facebook Purity” if they are still using the platform. I’ve been using it for over a decade and I can’t stand using Facebook without it…

They are always a few steps ahead of Facebook and work well with other blockers.

Not only that, you can block specific parts of Facebook, not just the adverts. You can block the shorts, people you know, groups, keywords, and even whole topics.

You can change settings, like how you see your feed and it will stay changed.

Changing the font size, type, spacing in addition a bunch of color and night mode options are just icing on the cake.

In my professional opinion, it’s the only way of working with that platform is not harmful to one’s sanity.

The only thing that’s stopping me from swapping fully to Firefox is finding a good password manager that will keep the passwords up-to-date between several machines.

Double points if it will let me import the passes from chrome.

That has to be a record in inappropriateness.

It’s like saying that concentration camps are great for losing weight and reducing urban over population in the ghetto.

Those are the only times when it’s appropriate to insert a 3 1/2 inch floppy.

I’d never go back to Reddit again if the several game projects I beta test for in my spare time would migrate over to lemmy.

Jordan, the YouTuber, is a really great follow.

https://www.youtube.com/@jordan_the_stallion8

He’s the president of the “fast food secrets club” and has taught the world a lot about everything secret in fast food recipes.

His non food content is great too.

I’d be very interested in your theory.

I thought it had something to do with the distance to the server or ping timeout, but that is more of a guess.

I’ve not experienced that problem again despite working as a network engineer for 20 years

I have been using WUB, and some other extremely helpful tools that this company makes, for a few years at this point.

The part that I LOVE about WUB is how complete and exhaustive the shut-off is for the ease of use.

There’s no editing files, no editing anything, just download and press a button to turn on update blocking (while protecting the services that could mess up by blocking). Press another button to unblock everything as good as a fresh install.

It’s as if it was never blocked when updates are toggled on, and it’s as if Windows update is completely removed with the blocking is toggled on.

My alts are always on my same name. It helps me not have to remember, but it helps me to compartmentalize.

I have one over on lemmy.world that I made when RiF went down and it pointed to that instance. ‘Reddit is Fun’ was my trusted app of choice for so long that I figured that I’d go with their recommendation.

That mindset was apparently shared with a lot of people, and lemmy.world became overcrowded and unusable every other day for a while due to traffic. That’s when I read that one should get registered at a closer and/or smaller instance in order to have better service.

That’s when I moved over to SDF’s shockingly fast lemmy instance.

I’d love to see smaller game devs have a federated presence with their content.

Right now, I only use Reddit to keep up with game devs who only post game content and updates on their own subreddit.

Microsoft PowerToys is a fantastic program if you like to tweak your experience with Windows.

It lets you do things like set up individual zones within your monitor that act like picture in picture or another monitor. It has a robust color picker, which helps greatly when it comes to photoshop and template creation. I also use the text extractor very often to extract text from pictures, which it copies to the clipboard.

The best, and technically the worst, is it lets you change settings that you can’t normally do in Windows.

While it could get someone YOLO adminning in trouble, thankfully it has a lot of warnings before you mess things up too badly.

Those are the features I use, but there are too many useful features to name in one go.

Here’s the link to get it in the Microsoft Store

WUB or Windows Update Blocker.

It’s one of the first things I put on a new after the initial Windows update.

It safely turns and completely turns off Windows updating and the services involved with updates.

It’s practically a necessity if you use a metered or paid internet connection, or connect your laptop to a cell phone for an internet connection via a hotspot.

Windows doesn’t listen to its own settings about metered connections and if it deems something worthy of killing your data plan for the month, it’ll do so without your knowledge.

The best part is that when you’re ready to download critical updates or something from the Windows store (Whatsapp, Minecraft, Power Tools, etc.) then it’s as simple as a button press to reactivate updates without restart.

The longform video format is highly underrated.

Some days I want to watch a 20 hour retrospective on Skyrim.

Other days I want to enjoy 20 hours of an AI voice recapping a Korean manhwa about the world’s most powerful necromancer from another world that’s like a video game…

YouTube shorts also have their place for micro hits of dopamine.

So long as it makes us happy, it can’t be that bad?

Random computer quirks always fascinate me. The strangest one I had involved a computer that shouldn’t have existed.

One time in the early aughts I had a patchwork computer that I put together from the junk pile of a local computer store that a buddy of mine ran.

It was barely holding together in a rusty frame, with zip ties and wood glue.

Its modem was temperamental as hell. It would only stay online so long as it was pinging a website via command prompt. It was only some websites, too. Like I could ping Geocities, but not livejournel.

I remember many weekends doing Mephisto runs in Diablo II, praying that my command prompt doesn’t bug out anytime I’d get anything worthwhile.

‘Hypnotically Caucasian’ sounds like a phrase that a hyper nationalist Ásatrú would use unironically.

This is the truth. I was being abused by a boss of mine, with him demanding to know the whole of my medical history. He also demanded doctor excuses go directly to him, and not HR as I was told,

Needless to say, HR shared that I was bitching about him and he messed up my desk, breaking an ornament and a knickknack that was precious to me at the time (I got it on honeymoon). I took photos, and HR even saw him near my desk at the time of all of that happened

It took a major civil suit to get the video, but after the judge saw it ‘my case was won’ according to the judge. It was so obvious of evidence of him breaking stuff, spitting on my chair, snapping my laptop.

I even got special consideration because my boss then gave me a laptop that was so old that I couldn’t load the required VPN software.

I’m glad I got out of a corporate run tech field. It’ll eat your soul without you noticing until it’s too late…

I didn’t realize until my mid 20s that having a house without pictures and wall hanging is weird. It was also when I learned that if you don’t have enough lighting it makes a home feel like a mausoleum.

The answer as to what a person should put on their walls depends on how based a person is or how much they don’t care about what others think.

If you want to get non-traditional with it, hang up movie posters, collages, video game posters, etc. Whatever you like and like to look at.

If you go traditional and normal, then art is a fantastic idea. Go to your local thrift store and find old art that they have. Local estate sales are also good.

Personally, I love to commission a painting or two from the artist themselves. Etsy and fiverr painters love to make custom art of whatever you want if you have the money. You’re looking at spending anywhere from $10 to a few hundred depending on the size you want.

It’s always fun having a painting of your pet remade in the style of Edvard Munch