I need to sit down and have a serious thought about redundancy and what I want to keep long term. I want to leave little portable drives with an encrypted backup of my family photos with all my relatives so I can restore them in the case of a catastrophic failure that includes all local backups (like a huge fire, an earthquake, war, famine, see etc.). Essentially like sending duplicate or triplicate physical photos to relatives in the old days so they can send a copy back if needed. This is addition to a normal backup. Essentially in case the US falls apart.

Like you, I’ve also been collecting other media of interest to me. I would have plenty of space for Atari games, but I can’t imagine spending the drive space to archive every game in my Steam and GoG libraries or every GameCube game. If you have a generous 60 TB of space, that becomes 30TB really quick with redundancy. With a single offsite backup, that becomes 20TB and with 2 backups and redundancy that’s only 15TB or usable space. Granted I’m not factoring in compression, but at today’s prices buying 3 extra gigs for every usable gig practically requires a mortgage. If we could have $14-15/TB again I would probably buy another 2-6 drives right off the bat just to complete my build and be somewhat future proofed.

I’m also concerned about things that need updated. I need working images and copies of my systems and programs that I can restore to if the internet goes down or gets locked away.

Almost certainly some of them. I enjoyed hearing that insults and trash talk are still the norm for corporate passwords you have to remember! :D

At a job I hated, they made us change passwords often. It was quite irritating. I also think it was counterproductive because something like fuckcorporate!666 is likely more susceptible to a dictionary attack than a carefully chosen password rotated less frequently.

There’s a lot of people on the Mozilla hate train, and they do deserve a bit of ire for some of their more puzzling decisions. All I wanted from Firefox was a configurable browser with sane defaults, that lets me block ads and does all the normal browser things without being a total black box of corporate telemetry and profiling. To a large degree Firefox has been the best mainstream browser for people who can’t dance with the devil and use Chrome. In many aspects, it has made better decisions than Chrome.

With that said, I didn’t want Pocket, I didn’t want AI, and I’m mildly annoyed that this sort of thing is in the default build. It feels like a windows installer asking you to install 10 additional programs, but the ticked boxes are greyed out. I just want a browser, no crypto wallets, no ai assistants, no built-in mail client, no biometric scanning.

Firefox has been around long enough to have been both god tier and trash tier at different points. I don’t think the AI focus is going to go well for Mozilla. I’d like them to focus on browser stuff.

I’ve started to realize that early gen products are often less enshittified, even if they are frequently rough around the edges, and can often be hacked into a useful state unlike the newest hardware. By a few gens in, nearly everything is a giant plastic paperweight that only wants to phone home, download “updates” all the time, and probably needs multiple SSO sign ins and a subscription just to work. I’ll keep my old Kindle 4th gen with KOreader until it breaks.

Get your tentacles off me or I’ll weld them together! :D

We have similar tastes in mice. I have a bunch of variants of the MX Master mice, some from old jobs, some I purchased outright. The full sized clicker variant is my favorite. I can’t vibe with the soft-click buttons like I can with the clickies. They’re all decent mice though and work well under Linux and even Android. I have a very similar Logitech (but including wireless) and it’s great for gaming. I remapped the forward and backward keys to raise and lower DPI using a Linux tool (I forget what it was, probably Piper). Now it’s perfect. I don’t see myself buying a mouse for quite some time.

I haven’t been crazy about Razer stuff. Had a keyboard die and a mouse that was meh.

Tl:dr the user above me is right and knows their mice!

I heard of a similar situation. The person was being garnished but the rate of repayment was pretty slow because they were broke, not coincidentally. When you’re broke, you can’t pay your insurance but in most of the US and many other countries, you need a car to participate in daily life. It sounds perversely circular to me and it’s not getting the innocent party refunded in any reasonable amount of time either. Maybe drivers should have to be bonded like electricians or plumbers.

Sometimes we do, sometimes we don’t. I do watch in the bedroom sometimes, but I find that I don’t use the one in our living room at all and have considered reclaiming the space. For me, the reason for having it in the bedroom is that there is an extra heater in there in the winter and it’s extra cool in there during the summer because it’s not on the top floor and is shielded from the sun by landscaping so it heats up much slower. It does heat up a bit slower now that my gaming PC got moved to my office.

I live in the US where it is just a greeting, but grew up in a different culture where it is almost always taken literally and isn’t something you ask a stranger. I tend to answer honestly because I want to normalize not being fake polite and I almost always have some bullshit to call out. If you can find something to complain about that other people also hate, it’s a great way to bond around how shitty the world can be. :D

I knew someone who did this kind of work. They don’t wait until the weather improves. They climb poles in 70mph winds with sideways blowing hail and lightning if that’s what needs to happen. That’s crazy hardcore!

I remember watching a documentary about someone who was welding under the ocean, and simultaneously inside of a empty undersea pipeline that they had to swim a ways down to reach the problem area. That’s too damn extreme for me. I would sign up to be a doordash driver who only delivers to the worst Karens before I put on a single flipper. :D. Crazy hardcore.

Hell yeah, I’ve been wanting to sign up for a glass blowing class. I think it would be so cool to have some self-blown glass on display.

Cheese, I love cheese.

We need a “right of retrieval” where,once encoded, it must be free to decode and play back. If we’re going to allow proprietary media, all the prices should be clear and up front. No charging on the back end after everyone has already encoded their baby vids to avc; no changing prices after the fact.

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People will literally take any excuse not to pay attention while driving. All this iPad on wheels stuff has gone too far. I was driving a newer car recently, in a foreign country, on unfamiliar roads, and had to figure out how to use the defrost VIA THE FUCKING TOUCHSCREEN while driving. A moment longer an I would have been driving with my head out the window trying to find a space to pull over. Give me a spedo, tachometer, and some knobs for the air and I’ll be set. What beats the good old three knob (direction, fan speed, temp) combo? It’s practically perfect. All these distractions should be banned. If there is a radio, steering wheel controls should be mandatory and they should test them by putting average folks in the driver seat and asking them to perform basic functions. If it’s not intuitive, if it’s not distracting, it shouldn’t get manufactured.

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Yeah, Cities Skylines had traffic that was reactive to design. I’ve played some CS2, and while some things are improved (like lane connection), it feels like the traffic is just simulated sprites based on a traffic congestion variable for the area or something. Upgrading roads sometimes helps, but providing better routes doesn’t always help like you would expect. It feels very disconnected and rewards linear progression rather than skillful or smart gameplay. I still play CS1 and I check in on CS2 once or twice a year to see if it still sucks. I did enjoy the bike patch to some degree, but the gameplay in general just seems artificial and lame. CS1 may be old with mediocre graphics, but it’s still a 9/10 game in my opinion and you can buy in cheap nowadays to get caught up on DLCs and such. I have nearly everything except the radio packs. The menus are inconsistent and the way they organize things doesn’t always make intuitive sense. I think they would be better off recreating CS1 on a more modern engine than trying to reinvent a masterpiece. For me CS2 was the biggest disappointment of the gaming decade. With that said, lots of games sucked on release. Fallout 76 grew into it’s shoes, Stalker 2 was panned at release and is now much more highly regarded. I hope CS2 finds its way back into sync with the community, but I’ll be enjoying CS1 and other games until that happens. Thankfully MS hasn’t completely destroyed Minecraft. I practice city design on a much smaller scale on there (more “place making”, less traffic management, more roleplay, less mechanics).

I can’t see the pic in your comment, but I am gonna guess Broadway and Lincoln between 19th and 20th?

Interestingly enough, Denver has 3 main grids:

The range and township grid as the typical NS/EW grid, the Araria grid by DU which is largely built over, and the downtown grid, the last two of which are aligned to Cherry Creek and the Platte River, though I’m not certain which one to which waterway. If it wasn’t for one-ways, that area would be screwed up beyond belief. As it stands, it just looks a little odd and everyone needs to try to pick their lanes in advance. :D