“Secret Links”, Like that one scene in that Sandra Bullock hacker movie, The Net.

https://triviahappy.com/articles/welcome-to-the-net-every-webpage-from-the-1995-movie-the-net

His family name was actually Drumpf. His immigrant grandfather Americanized it on or shortly after arriving in America.

I spent a little more to get the upgraded newest model of the android phone I’m currently typing this on, released in January 2021 and received by me in March. I had to replace my previous phone because the battery started to fail and it was failing behind in Android versions, meaning some newer apps could no longer be installed and some older apps could no longer be updated. Current phone still going strong, no signs of being any slower than it was originally. Mostly have used wireless charging and battery protection schemes in the OS, so USB port still works well and charges just fine either way. I feel like phones hit a performance plateau a few years ago and I see no reason for an “upgrade”. If my current phone needs to be replaced, I fully expect to be forced to pay more for less given the costs of memory these days. Previously I’d been basically forced to upgrade every 2 years because I always bought the contract special “free” phone and updates stopped or the battery pillowed.

Fun fact, North Dakota (home of the idiot cop and criminally evil prosecutor) has a fewer people than the city of San Francisco in about 150,000 times the acreage. Put another way, there are about 268,000 people per electoral vote in North Dakota compared with about 728,000 people per electoral vote in California and about 670,000 people per electoral vote in Tennessee (home of the grandmother).

Hey now. Hillbillies are a proud Appalachian cultural tradition. The grandmother, being from Tennessee, might have been a hillbilly. And it might not have been an insult for her to self apply that label. The idiot cop and asshole prosecutor were in North Dakota.

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Everyone should just report the error to Google over and over and over again. Remind them that the federal government doesn’t actually have unilateral authority to rename major international geographic features on the whim of a single deranged despot.

They were also inconveniently experiencing significant negative feedback to their business decision to sell warmed up day old food as a standard operating procedure just before new of the logo drama erupted. If you thought cracker barrel was extremely mid before, it’s apparently gone full Applebee’s microwave kitchen bad lately.

Don’t sleep on that toothache if it is due to an infection. Tooth infections can kind of fast track to the sinuses and then the brain and go real bad real quick. Also there’s the pain. I don’t know how you can survive with that pain AND a tiny human. Probably best not to die on them because of a dumb thing like a toothache.

Once upon a time I got a CueCat to catalogue my book collection on a (probably now defunct) Web2.0 service. This was before smartphones and apps, and before I had even a laptop. At the time it felt retro-cool and really did help me speed things up in that task. At the time, I had to box up most of my books and CDs for storage, but I wanted an easy way to know in which box each thing was. I think I even had plans to use it with my CD collection next, but building the backend for turning barcodes back into a reference to a playable directory of ripped files turned out to be too much trouble. Could still be doable if you could query a Jellyfin or Plex database based on UPC codes. Now we all just yell into the void and hope the nearest “AI” hears us.

It’s also an argument for not having your own domain for emails, because you may one day loose that domain too, and someone could poach the domain to impersonate you.

The Google Nest Mini is a smart speaker, not the smart thermostat with a similar name.

Why did the Thinkpad 701 become a cult legend in computer history?

It was the expanding butterfly keyboard that gave you an 11.5" wide keyboard from a 10" wide laptop. Super cool for its day, but not really a problem that needs solving anymore. Nobody seems to be clamoring for the nipple mouse anymore either.

Somehow I think the national lab test company’s lawyers have got them covered. This wasn’t exactly a fly by night, no name company. Having in known third party send you a medical bill months later is pretty fucking common place. This was just one anecdote of many, not an isolated incident.

The best part is the random bill.

• Go to the doctor. Get blood drawn.
• Doctor send the blood to a lab for the test. Doesn’t tell me who. I don’t care who. It’s their subcontractor, let them worry about it. *Go back to the doctor or get a call for results. Pay the doctor the standard co-pay. *Months later a random company sends me a bill. This is a company that I have never interacted with or entered into any contract with, for work that somebody else (presumably my doctor, but who the fuck knows for sure) asked them to do for them, sending the results to that other person and NOT to me.

The system is broken. If any other company subcontracted a part of their work to a third party, you as the client would reasonably expect that work to be paid through the original contract, not get a bill directly from the subcontractor. I didn’t hire them, the doctor hired them. As far as I’m concerned, that’s the doctor’s subcontractor and their debt, not mine. I paid the doctor already.

Or another variant.

• Go to the emergency room.
• Get separate bills FOR THE SAME SERVICE from the hospital, the doctor, and somehow the hospital again but this time it’s the emergency room (which is somehow separate with a different billing company).

The system is not just broken. It is designed to fleece us and train us to always accept whatever debt the institutions decide to levy on us without question.

Songs are cheap. Ever heard of buying something for a song?

It’s because that recording industry, the RIAA vs. the MPAA, has had a stranglehold on the industry and artists for much longer. They are much better at exploiting artists while paying them next to nothing.

Mpd + a frontend of your choosing, I prefer ncmpcpp, will run on just about anything and is remotely controlled through apps or ssh. Mpd is great when the server is physically connected to the audio output device. I use it to remotely control a speaker connected server that can also run Plex (because I prefer plexamp for streaming and syncing to my phone, other android devices, and smart speakers). They both look at the same directory of a collection near 30 years in the making with hundreds of thousands of files and a wide array of formats.

I bought SUSE Linux once upon a time. It was a physical CD and the packaging that I paid for. Maybe a little support was bundled, probably not. That was a time when the internet was slow for most and not an option for others, wifi wasn’t ubiquitous (and if it existed, good luck getting the proper drivers loaded without internet), live distributions weren’t really a thing yet, booting from usb was finicky and unreliable, and the install CDs would have the entire OS and basically all the software you could want to install bundled. These would have been the days before the fall of Napster and the rise in other “Linux ISO sharing tools”. Ubuntu would even mail you like a half dozen physical CDs and some stickers just for asking and promising to share them in your community.

There’s nothing wrong with buying the physical things or paying for support. That’s not what this meme is showing though.

Wow, what a dumb and toxic take.

Whoa there. Are you seriously gatekeeping sci-fi? Don’t be a jerk.

Just the MCU characters with an obvious sci-fi backstory: Tony Stark, Hulk (an actual scientist), everyone in Guardians of the Galaxy. Even Thor is actually an alien using Sci-Fi tech. Bucky Barnes is a cybernetic super soldier. There’s the Nazi scientist from Hydra that transferred his consciousness into a computer. Fucking Vision and his love story with Wanda. Black Panther may mix in some mystical drug, but his suit and all the other toys are all science fiction.

I’m not arguing that ANY of these are great science fiction stories, but they are still undeniably science fiction. Sci-fi stories are often also something else: horror, action, humanist, dramatic, comedy, or all of the above.

Not every science fiction story needs to use the obvious sci-fi tropes either. Ursula K Le Guin wrote a bunch of very influencial science fiction stories that you could be forgiven for classifying as fantasy and have very little shiny tech in them.