You’d be surprised.

I’m sure there are plenty of people out there who use their Instagram or Facebook as basically the history of their social lives, where all their memories are, the local copies long gone.

It’s a terrible idea, but I’m certain people are doing it.

YouTube videos degrade in quality over time too, as they reencode from one codec du jour to the next.

Heck, even Google drive pulled that stunt where they stopped storing photos in original resolution.

Point being, none of these companies exist primarily to archive your content - they exist to monetise it.

If you want to safeguard your content in original quality, then you need to either put it on a cloud storage that you are PAYING for, or keep it on your own hardware (and with backups)

Japan is like this too, and I loved to see that when I was living there.

The bus drivers often wear nice uniforms and white gloves, and clearly take a lot of care in their appearance and work. And people give them respect.

I wish it was like that everywhere, because being able to have pride in what you do and be respected for it is such an important thing that everyone deserves to have - regardless of what your job is.

I feel trypophobia quite strongly with some triggers, even things like budding plants pushing through the ground can make my akin crawl. But for some reason crumpets are okay.

I guess my brain just sees the crumpet texture as being like a macro bread texture, which is okay because it’s kinda bready.

There are some ways in which the newer shows like Discovery are realistic, but there are also ways in which they are stupid.

For example, two federation officers in a life or death situation where they have two minutes to solve an urgent crisis, and they decide to spend 60 seconds of that having an emotional heart-to-heart.

If that was in TNG, they’d have got the job done like professionals, and then had the friends chat later in ten forward. Because that’s how people with jobs get their jobs done.

TNG era was quite cheesy in some ways, but it kept characters real in that they always acted appropriately for their role and position, not just like a bunch of emotional oddballs who get to be in charge of a spaceship for some reason.

Hell on earth, perfect

One thing that works is finding ways to make achieving small tasks part of your routine. I have a to-do list and in my lunch break at work I often pick off one or two things and decide okay, that’s what I’ll do when I get home. And so that way the selecting of the tasks and the doing of the tasks are things that have their own specific times and the decision is already made.

What also works is to create some external motivation.

I might not feel like cleaning the house, for example, but if I have friends coming over then I’ll enthusiastically clean everything because I want it to be nice for them.

And so sometimes I intentionally weaponise that by inviting a friend over just to give myself that extrinsic motivation.

Not what you had in mind when you said ‘fake’, but how about an AI-generated mushroom identification book that landed people in hospital for eating poisonous stuff the book said was safe

This is it for me too. I’m not going to allow companies to monetise me or my data any more than the absolute minimum I have to.

One thing I try hard at is making sure that I never have to see a single advert in my own home. I don’t have TV, I don’t watch any streaming services if they have ads, and I adblock everything. I don’t care how good a product is, how cheap or free, if it has advertisements I’m out.

To me it’s about having sufficient self-respect to not let companies live in my head rent-free.

Because then your browser would itself have to be a torrent client.

The way torrents download is fundamentally different from how a standard http download works, which is why they have a specialist implementation. Browsers dont want to bother bringing a whole load of new code and associated bugs into the browser to do a job which isn’t really connected with the browser’s main responsibility, which is browsing the web.

Just because torrents come from the web shouldn’t make it the browser’s responsibility to deal with them.

I had so many good times on forums back in the day.

The personal nature of them was great for being social and making friends, but it was also good for the quality of the content for and user behaviour too.

When everyone recognises you and remembers your past behaviour, people put effort into creating a good reputation for themselves and making quality posts. It’s like living in a small village versus living in a city.

The thought of being banned back then genuinely filled people with dread, because even if you could evade it (which many people couldn’t as VPNs were barely a thing) you’d lose your whole post history and personal connection with people, and users did cherish those things.

Yeah but there’s clunky in the way where its big but still a single unit as designed and intended, and clunky when its got some extra growth hanging off the back of it like some technological parasite.

Of course, my advice is only that, and you should choose the approach that works best for you. But advice is why you came here right :)

I have a portable monitor that I’m pretty pleased with.

It has a magnetic cover that goes over the screen to keep it safe, and that same cover folds and goes on the back to act as a stand when it’s in use. Power and video are via the same USB-C cable.

Nice and slim and stays in my bag most of the time but when I want a second screen I can whip it out in two secs.

A screen that attaches to the laptop sounds convenient initially, but I feel like in practice it would be a hindrance and make your laptop clunky and bulky.

If a tree falls in the woods…

Yay!

This may be a nonsense suggestion but is the game trying to activate the headphone mic?

If so this could be switching it to a different mode and cutting your headset audio quality in half.

EDIT: two other people suggested the same thing at the same time, never mind :)

The blogpost was made four years ago, though.

Quite a fascinating read, nonetheless :)

The teaser trailer looks like a high energy superhero romp that’s closer to Guardians of the Galaxy, than it is anything Star Trek.

And I just don’t like the idea that section 31 is made up of a bunch of oddballs and misfits with no discipline. Makes the movie more ‘exciting’ I guess, but really? Section 31 should move quietly in the shadows, not all brash and ballsy.

I’m sure they are hoping this style will boost revenue by appealing to a younger demographic, but it’s just totally the opposite of what I want from Star Trek.

The number one thing I noticed after installing Linux on my old macbook was that the battery life was immediately halved.

I totally expected that to happen, though, because my previous experience had always been that power management on Linux was kinda terrible.

Time to try this out and see!

Oh yeah, of course. The rich have done a very good job of deflecting blame and convincing people the blame lies elsewhere. Excellent marketing and diversionary tactics.

Just wish people would see through that.