Some middle-aged guy on the Internet. Seen a lot of it, occasionally regurgitating it, trying to be amusing and informative.
Lurked Digg until v4. Commented on Reddit (same username) until it went full Musk.
Was on kbin.social (dying/dead) and kbin.run (mysteriously vanished). Now here on fedia.io.
Really hoping he hasn’t brought the jinx with him.
Other Adjectives: Neurodivergent; Nerd; Broken; British; Ally; Leftish
Was this you?:
Seems much of Lemmy is still married to Firefox despite all their slop and Alphabet funding
Your wording appeared to imply a solid dislike for Alphabet which I then took to be transferred onto their own browser - Chrome - and the browser who takes Alphabet’s dime - Firefox.
I can see that there might be other ways to interpret that sentence and get the true shade of meaning you intended, but I’m not sure which one it is if it isn’t the one I thought it was.
What browser do you use? If you hate Chrome and Firefox, that’s really going to limit your choices. Derivatives of both of those must be forbidden too because all of those would cease to exist if the base browsers vanished.
Something WebKit based? Or are you using something based on the Goanna fork of Gecko?
“Explored the world for spices but decided we didn’t like any of them.” is the usual one.
“A nation of Baldricks and Blackadders” might also work.
(Caveat: I’m currently on medication that helps with getting off to sleep, and might also be helping me with anxiety/depression, but it’s really hard to gauge that side of it. Anyway, sometimes I try these if the effects are wearing off in a morning and my mind starts spinning, and used to use them before being on the medication at night too.)
Breathing exercises sometimes work. The old deep breath, hold for a little too long and then let it go in a measured manner. Two or three cycles and then relaxing / applying some or all of the following might work.
Other times, telling myself that what I’m thinking about can wait until morning / later, basically trying to trigger “save and quit” in my brain. I got quite good at that before the change of medication.
Another weird trick is to convince myself that the room is the other way up and if I don’t relax and sink into the sheets and mattress that I’ll fall away from the bed onto the ceiling. I know this doesn’t make any kind of sense. File it under “so stupid it works (sometimes)”.
Practically speaking, try not to be too warm or too cold. A surefire way for me to not fall asleep is to have cold feet. I might not even realise that my feet are cold until I think about it. An electric (under-)blanket that warms both body and feet has proven invaluable, as did the hot water bottle that preceded it.
Finally, if none of these work, get up and do something to distract yourself for a while. Plan to get back in bed 10-15 minutes before a multiple of 90 minutes before the time you’ve set your alarm. Hopefully, you’ll be tired enough to sleep before 105 minutes (15+90) to go, because that’s basically the last chance for meaningful rest. Anything less is a short nap and you’ll probably be groggy when you wake up.
The next advice you need to seek is how to wake up when you’re tired and/or groggy.
The earliest message I have accessible in Thunderbird is from the 25th of May, 2001. It’s part of a conversation with old work colleagues who I had remained drinking buddies with when I started a new job nearby. (There are actually two messages with earlier dates, but one is an imported message from March of 2001 that wasn’t actually sent or originally received by me, and another that’s an old Usenet post, probably also imported, that doesn’t have a datestamp at all, registering as 1/1/1970.)
If I go digging around in my university backup, I have messages from 1998 in there. I would have earlier e-mails, but quota was limited on the University systems, so I expect I deleted everything at the start of every year.
Whenever it cost £35 for a 256MB stick. The Internet suggests 2003 or 2004 which tracks.
Let’s say Usenet.
When I gained access at university, search engines hadn’t really taken off yet so if you wanted to access something, you had to know the http address, and if you didn’t know any web addresses, you were stuck. (Maybe the actual, actual first thing I visited was the university website, because that was at least fairly easy to figure out the address of, even if visiting it was somewhat redundant.)
However, the university also provided Usenet access.
Usenet at least had a small, finite number of newsgroups and any decent Usenet server could list all the groups it had available. A hundred or more web.server.like things right there. And thousands of people who already knew several actual web addresses elsewhere in the world who also had access to those newsgroups.
Has to be at least 15 years. Probably 20 or more.
I still have a few floppies somewhere around here, but haven’t had a drive that can read them since I donated an ancient laptop to a friend of a relative.
I don’t feel like splashing out £12 for a USB floppy drive right now.
Other people mention 5¼" floppies for old 8-bit computers, and I suppose I do have my old computer and drive packed away somewhere, but I haven’t touched any of that in over 20 too. I’d be surprised if any of that still works and I’m kind of afraid to find out for sure.
Void the transaction. There’s no way I’d be able to pay it back and I do not need any of that and everything that goes with it.
Heck, I might not even be able to afford the interest that accrued on it in the short time I had it and I’d be looking for pro bono legal representation ASAP if the lender tried to stick me with it.
There’s no way I would have knowingly signed for it, so it ought to be an open and shut case.
No thank you. No way. Nuh-uh.
Now if this million was to be no strings attached and no repayment required, half’s getting invested properly after a chat with a financial advisor and the other half is going in the highest interest bank account(s) I can get for it. Then I’ll live off 60-80% of the interest, leaving the rest to stave off inflation.
I’d still have to live a frugal lifestyle, but I’d be more comfortable than I am on government handouts and I wouldn’t have to worry about a government stripping the help I currently get.
If you ask some police forces, driving with the radio on is also dangerous as it can also affect concentration.
Not as much as a screen, sure, but nonetheless.
Source: Know at least one driver who was given a warning using the above argument by a bored police officer looking for drunks. They were barking up the wrong tree, but the argument does have some merit.
Ciphers are easy to invent, and if you can’t read the cipher-maker’s mind, it’s going to be an order of magnitude harder to break simply because you don’t know the rule(s).
I don’t think we got one that tracked back to lunchtime specifically, and those tend to be slightly less well aligned or frequent anyway, but the one that was being caused by a freight elevator’s motor was a devil to track down before we knew what it was.
And we may not have found it if the engineer had used the stairs to come back from the basement where the router was. Lazy engineer plus angry motor = DSL died when engineer still present. “It died again! What did you do?” “What did I what now?”
Reminds me of when I did DSL customer service. Once every few months we’d get a customer (never the same one twice) calling up saying that their connection was terrible, and when we checked the logs, their connection would dropping at incredibly regular intervals aligned well with human units of time. On the hour (or a few minutes past) every hour, for example, or every 10 minutes.
We figured, and told them, that it had to be something on a timer causing an EMP or other interference at their end because there ought to be nothing outside their premises acting with such specific regularity.
The caller usually went away and we’d see the connection stabilise not long after, leaving us none the wiser, but hey, fixed!
“… as foodstock for the Hhftss Diregulum”
Their word for us translates roughly as “crunchy”.
I think most people are able. Knowing how to act on it and being willing to do so are the two real problems here.
It probably does. To my knowledge they’ve never deleted old accounts, though you might have an issue if you’ve forgotten your password and the e-mail address you used to sign up is no longer accessible to you.
the Russian alternative
You say that like it’s not simply swapping which one you have in your mouth.
Yeah, somehow I saw the transformation scene from American Werewolf… at a young age and it left a deep impression on me.
Given how long it took for films to make it to TV in those days, it’s conceivable that I saw it on its UK TV premiere, whenever that was, because I sure as heck wasn’t old enough to go to the cinema to see it. But what I still don’t understand is how I would have been up late enough to catch it, because it would surely have been on past my bedtime.
Anyway, there were probably other scary things that I can’t call to mind right now, but that stuck with me for a long time.
Chromium is still Chromium. Would I rather that Mozilla got off their AI kick and didn’t have to take Alphabet’s dime? Sure.
But at least I’m not using a Chromium.
My emergency browser is the MiniBrowser that comes with the WebKit packages on Linux.
As for speed, I don’t see any issue. Maybe I might if I switched between browser engines on a regular basis, so I don’t do that.