That is how I do it yes. As much as feasibly possible. I do really miss the local PC shops and electronics stores… sadly my options for that stuff now are Staples, Best Buy and Amazon…

Unfortunately rich and developed countries with an iron grip on the markets by a few billionaires that control them you see. They ensure our options are limited.

Canadians have very limited choices in terms of services. Even our grocery store shelves are bought out by major corps and local options struggle to get their products on the shelves.

As another example, our banks have no interpayment systems outside the interac system, and they have no standard apis for payment services. So things like apps for managing budgets involve downloading a csv after our billing date passes and a lot of manual work. Most banks offer their own budget apps and they only work with their services.

We have effectively have 3 phone and internet providers… or little guys that resell access to the big 3.

The monopoly man won the game in Canada.

Getting money to organizations outside Canada and the US, once you remove credit cards and paypal, is exclusive to wire transfer from within Canada. If i want to get my money to any entity outside of Canada those are my options. None of these alt payment providers exist in Canada, and we are barred from buying crypto from our accounts.

JCB seems like the Interac system here in Canada, which I doubt Steam would take payment from. Its essentially a bank transfer. Nope, apparently JCB is a Credit Card company like Visa et al.

Yeah, JCB is not available in the Americas

What country are you in? None of those options exist in Canada so I think you’re going to need to reframe your point.

Also I can state that giftcards do not exist where I live as I just went though 4 kids birthdays and check 20 different stores and winded up having to give up on Steam cards and buy prepaid Visas.

EDIT: To clarify, two years ago the cards existed. Last year they were scarce, and in 2025 they are no where to be found.

What are those other options you have anyway? I’ve never seen or heard of any of them.

How else are you supposed to buy something on Steam? You just listed every available option.

Yeah my wife has MS and I worry when shes late that she is having trouble. And I go hiking in the bush so its good if she has my approximate location

We switched to Fairphones running e/OS so we have pretty solid control of that. Im looking forward to postmarketOS being a bit more stable.

Home Assistant

Mostly unaffected save for some things. Emberstack kubernetes reflector opts to not make their own chart and their docs tell you to use Bitnami, so its the only chart I use that I’ll have to start maintaining myself unless Emberstack changes their stance.

I never thought I would have a healthy relationship with ASD+ADHD. I found someone who is my equal and we have an extremely fulfilling relationship that’s full of both amazing fun moments and frustrating ones, but we always understand each other. Which helps with our son as well, as he’s a carbon copy of us.

Try the Droidify app. I find it better than the main FDroid app.

…and yet people not only believe this crap but try to pass it off as science.

I respect your opinion, but I lived through 90s computing and think dongles died the death they deserve and these phone manufacturers can go to hell for bringing them back or thinking that bluetooth audio is good enough.

Additionally most of the droids I have bought that have a jack are the perfect thickness in my mind. Weighted enough to stay in my hand and take a couple dozen drops without accident. Plus the headphone jack is used as an antenna and provides radio capabilities so I can listen to local news instead of whatever the tech industry wants to feed me. Which is a nice option.

It is, but it requires GPlay to operate and maintain your sub.

I switched to Subtracks when I dumped Google.

I have to contend with 70-80 year olds doing 30km in an 80 while swerving across the midline because they saw a bird across the street.

Man I miss Webrings.

It really was a great thing. It happened naturally too. Started as just a site I posted my writing to, a personal site in 1997, and friends wanted to add their stuff. By 1999 it was renamed from Routhy’s Den to the Den of Amateur Poetry, and then the domain was purchased and the site renamed to The Den of Amateur Writing.

I still remember the pre-PHP days. People would email their works to me and I would manually build an HTML page and update the site within 24 hours.

Yep, I fought against it for years but eventually my new user intake was lower than the rate at which the typical user would fizzle out and move on. We had users that were there for 20 years and regulars, but without fresh ideas and posts things would get stale. So I had to yield and start adhering. Around 2018-2019 things really took a dive in traffic and I could not afford ads as it was all completely out of pocket, so I started a new codebase and rewrote it over 4 years in my spare time. The site before it shut down had a top grade from all of Googles site scanners and I had thought “Perfect… now folks will trickle in again at the right rate.”. And then the delisting.

This is why I shut The Den of Amateur Writing down after 25 years of running and developing it. I had written the entire codebase for Googles SEO, rolled out the update so my users would see a bit more traffic trickle in, and then watched them delist all my URLs 3 months later when this change rolled out. I just gave up. It was taking way too much of my life fighting googles bullshit to provide a free community.

Because I dont need to pay rent for my files and I don’t have to worry about AI and VCs trying invade my privacy.