A lot of the “automation” we can buy is a joke: it should be unobtrusive and provide actual quality of life improvement and it’s not. Turning on a light shouldn’t require us to interact with an app on our phones.

HA with some good hardware choices does that if you don’t mind putting in the work up front. Most of my automations require no interaction to work: they passively check conditions and trigger automatically – if I’m home, leaving, need to wake up for work, etc.

I work every 3rd day, so for an odd schedule it’s nice. I set up Home Assistant to look at my calendar.

Don’t ask an old timer what they call the transmission.

^creating a script to periodically change it to a random number between 25 and 120.

We have to fuck with the jackasses using it for fingerprinting too.

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Wordpad? I’ll stick to Word Perfect 5.1, thank you very much.

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Maybe it was just me, but Kubuntu was also the least stable distro I’ve tried on my gaming laptop. Constant crashes and random reboots.

I’ve had zero issues with Mint.

How about instead of banning kids from social media we ban the degenerates actively grooming into joining unnatural subcultures from social media.

You know … like Turning Point USA, PragerU, and the various “alpha male” / incel influencers.

It gets worse:

Luckily the company behind them went bankrupt, but it’s only a matter of time before someone else is more successful with the idea.

Refuse to buy their product if their ad is obnoxious.

Not the person you’re replying to, but Nord sponsors a lot of “entertainment” youtubers. If you watch those kinds of videos you’re inundated with their ads.

Mullvad is a solid choice.

It’s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head.

Subverting ads doesn’t even need to be high art. E.g.

Luckily that’s still uncommon here, so there’s only a couple gas stations that do it. I won’t give them a cent.

Real men build their own toolchains.

You’re allowing PC gaming to become locked like Android/iOS for very little in return.

They paid a lot of money to make what is currently the best compatibility layer for modern games on Linux and released it as FOSS software. And someone already forked it into a non steam stand alone launcher if you don’t want to use Steam.

That’s like … the complete opposite of “allowing PC gaming to become locked”.

We use Windows 11 at work. One of the desktops has an error where you can log in but windows displays a notification to the effect of “You’re not logged in, your settings and app preference aren’t available.”

Other than Edge most of the built in programs don’t work. No errors, no notifications – clicking the icon to open them does nothing. Notepad, file explorer, etc.

I wonder how many people don’t realize thermal throttling is likely contributor to their old laptop slowing down.

The occasionally blast of compressed air and replacing the 6 year old dried out thermal paste does wonders.

There the added difficulty of “real whistle blower, but changed the details so they don’t out themselves”.

I was convinced I wanted to go into a science or engineering from childhood through my early 20s.

Mid 20s was a complete turnaround for me, and I’m a firefighter/medic now. There’s a lot about the job that sucks: but the pay and benefits are decent enough and I’m (mostly) actually helping people without making some sociopath billionaire even richer.