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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 19th, 2023

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  • Our last LG set of washer+dryer lasted 14 years.

    We got a new set when we moved into our current place 6 years ago.

    Now granted I am not satisfied with the lack of control in our LG appliances, where certain settings seem to be locked to defaults. For example, I would love to see longer drying at lower temps, as the temps seem to be unmodifiable regardless of tumble profile. However, so far we are seeing sufficient performance and no flaws.

    Our next set will be Huebsch, which is the Canadian re-badge of Speed Queen (something we only discovered in 2026), but we honestly don’t see a purchase within the next decade or more.



  • If this is the biggest shenanigans that the site has gotten into over its entire existence, imma not gonna throw the baby out with the bath water just yet.

    Any site owner has a right to remain anonymous. I would also take serious issue if someone started unmasking a high-profile project that I have taken extreme pains to keep separate from my private/meatworld existence. I would likely not behave as badly, but I would certainly pull out as many stops to make their life as uncomfortable/inconvenient as possible.






  • You know, vintage printers offer much the same.

    I have an HP 4050DTN from a good quarter century ago that has no DRM of any kind, no tracking dots, no reporting home to the mothership, is eminently repairable, and can accept overstuffed toner cartridges that are advertised to do 20,000 sheets at 5% coverage.

    And the toner claim largely bears out. Two degrees later and I’m only on my third cartridge in the machine’s entire life. Last I ran a duty report the sheet count was getting close to 50k. Low 40s, at the very least. So it’s tracking decently close.

    Sure, it now needs some parts refreshed. Rollers, fuser, and so forth. After a quarter century of use I would be surprised if something wasn’t starting to go. But parts are still readily available and surprisingly cheap. I mean, I have the parts in, I just haven’t had the time yet to swap them in.

    The only downside of kit this old is that networking was an afterthought. Most units will come with USB, DIN-8, serial, and parallel ports, but finding a good JetDirect Ethernet network card - ideally 635n or newer - is difficult and expensive (the 615n bricked itself with distressing regularity, avoid at all costs).

    I also have an HP 5000DTN that is of the identical build quality and can do oversized sheets up to 11×17. Beautiful machine in its early-2000s brutalist beigeness.

    So if you want HP at their peak of printer glory, long before enshittification set in, hop on over to Wikipedia and consider any LaserJet model first released before 2006-2012.







  • Because I am not talking about WiFi at all. Wifi isn’t even in the picture. Wifi is 100% irrelevant to my original statement.

    I am talking about the frequencies handed out to phone ISPs by each country’s telecommunications agency that determines how cell phones connect to cell phone towers in the first place.

    Each country has a different mix of spectrums that they hand out, even if the same company operates on both sides of a shared border. So a phone with ISP X that works just fine in a person’s home country might be totally unable to find any kind of a signal to connect to on the other side of the border. No phone calls, no SMS, no mobile data, nothing.

    This is because phones are manufactured to connect to a limited number of known domestic frequencies - so-called “international” phones are extremely expensive for this requirement of having all chips for all possible frequencies - so the phone that can work perfectly fine on one side of the border may be totally unable to connect to the frequencies that ISP X uses on the other side of the border - there is no overlap with the phone’s supplied hardware.

    It pays to properly read the original comment.







  • You stopped a bit short on your delete spree I guess.

    No, that was just the first two steps. Just on the “rip shit out” category, I typically churn through at least three separate tools, usually in this order:

    • Win10Privacy
    • Win11Debloat
    • Winslop

    I mean, sure, Windows can take as little as a half hour to “install”. But on a personal rig (which also includes my own workflow software and personal data shoehorned back into place), I take another 24-48 hours to gleefully beat it into submission and install secondary programs that bypass the warts it has acquired over the years.

    And as a benchmark, XP needed only about 6-8hrs of extra work to reach the same threshold of data migration, workflow software, and improved usability (I was an NT fanboy, IMO the primary improvement of XP over 2000 was the start menu).

    If we add up the AI push, the spyware/telemetry explosion, the recent attempts to force the use of a Microsoft Account as the default login, and the massive bloating and instability of Windows in general, it’s slowly becoming time for even non-technical, everyday users to move to Linux.