My solution is perhaps more convoluted than most. But I got tired of trying to cherry pick the best printer from the limited selection and built a Windows 11 VM in Virt-Manager and passed through the USB port my printer is plugged into. Now I can buy whatever printer I want/need without worry of compatibility.

Advertising being allowed to become the dominant monetization method for the internet was a mistake.

I’ve never seen anything that makes most of its money from advertising that doesn’t get worse and worse for it over time as a result. Once you let the advertisers in they will ruin whatever it is they are being allowed to leech off of. Might take 1 year, might take 20, but once they get that foot hold they will run it into the ground because like a billionaire and money, it is never enough.

But not his job right? He alone is far too valuable to be replaced by an IDE. /s

Gross. It looks like an open air mall food court.

I use whatever the latest Ubuntu LTS is on my desktops and usually laptops (besides my Macbook) at the time, and whatever the latest stable Debian release is at the time on my home lab servers.

I am very much a utilitarian and function over form kind of person so I choose what I do because it is the best fit for the problem I was trying to solve, usually with little thought to looks or UI design. I find I don’t really care so much how something is done on a given platform, just that there is a way. As a result stuff like theme options, dynamic wallpapers, etc are not something I really care about. I have been using the same black image as my wallpaper on every computer I have used for at least a decade now for example. I arrange the UI in whatever way I feel is the most functional for me within the constraints of what the platform supports out of the box. Meaning I couldn’t care less for stuff like the old school Window blinds program and what not.

Ubuntu over Windows because I wanted to get away from the ever increasing ads and general slop that Microsoft was putting into Windows while still retaining some support for gaming(thanks to Valve and Proton) and building my own systems.

Debian on servers over Ubuntu or something RPM based because Debian stable is rock solid and will run whatever you put on it without issue in my experience.

I don’t understand how someone makes the logical leaps they do in these kinds of cases. Even from a purely selfish stand point, the risk of exactly what happened and the fallout are just not worth it to make that appointment right then and there or just have the kids sit in the lobby.

I must be losing my grip on reality, trying to reason why someone that thinks this way does the things they do.

No matter if you end up getting him a pair or not. Be sure he understands that such things as bullying people for having the “wrong” shoes is shallow clique nonsense and he should be better than that.

content being watched) on my device(s) and share that information with Plex’s advertising partners

That is a honey pot rights holders will be falling over themselves to pay Plex for access to once they hear about it.

Been telling anyone that would listen that they need to get out of Plex since they implemented that first iteration of trying to require you to sign into your own self hosted server with a Plex.tv account. They were telegraphing what direction they were going in with that kind of user hostile move.

Lots of responses about how it was easy to get around so no big deal (or worse that they liked it for some coping mechanism reason) and that nothing else was as easy and feature rich as Plex so it was worth it.

Well now a few years down the road from that they are now going to use that beach head on everyone’s Plex server they can to collect what is being watched and sell it to the highest bidder.

Nothing teaches you what the documentation says like plowing ahead without reading it, fucking something up badly, having to crawl back to the documentation hat in hand and actually read it.

I find that Apple supports their software and services on platforms they don’t own cradle to grave while holding their nose, seemingly just so they can say they are available on other platforms. And catch a few bucks from people that don’t have their hardware but really want to watch Ted Lasso and the like legally on their Android/Roku/Fire TV device.

Sure, it technically works, but like you have seen it is clearly a very distant afterthought.

Open a Grindr account using his profile picture.

It is all running in a Proxmox cluster. 2 nodes have 62GB and one has 32GB. So while it is a good chunk. Not enough to bottleneck available RAM for other things in the cluster.

It is allotted 16GB out of the 62GB total that the host has. Which is the amount their docs call for in a 20 RPS or 1000 user scenario. Since I am the only one doing any commits or pulls, it does fine.

Does take its sweet time to reboot though. 😆

1. Gitlab (version control)
2. Bookstack (wiki)
3. Joplin (not a webapp, but sync server)
4. Semaphore (does all of my infra updating via Ansible)
5. Uptime-Kuma (monitoring/alerting)

Been thinking about adding NextCloud mostly for the Google Docs/MS Office replacement at some point.

But honestly most of my stuff is just for me, my family prefers to to use whatever commercial thing is out there. So I tend to limit things to infrastructure type things that are of personal interest to me alone.

Guess I am going to be taking my “pro-sumer” dollars elsewhere.

The privacy conscious choice is to not use Plex at this point. It is only a matter of time before they start directly screwing with private library’s.

I use Joplin. They have a sync server you can host for yourself.

I use 2 matching Synology NAS systems. 1 backs up to the other daily. Then one of them backs up to Synology C2 weekly.

As with most things in the modern world that have gone to shit. It is not the monetization scheme in of itself that is the issue. It is the never ending desire for more profit this quarter than last forever.

If it was acceptable to stop trying to make even more once the cost to operate is covered and some healthy profit is made predictably then a lot less people would have issues. And enshitification would slow down.

Phones are becoming less and less interesting by the day.

Once they get to the point were all of the options that don’t require incredibly inconvenient sacrifices in functionality to maintain the interesting stuff like a video game console then that will kill interest in the market for me.

If I can’t do anything besides basic smart phone crap I might as well just buy whatever has a good camera once every half decade or so and be done with it. So whatever top end thing Samsung or Apple are putting out.

I’m not sure Google has fully thought through what it means to just be a worse version of what Apple puts out, but with more ads.