I also use my guest network for the (notoriously insecure) IoT stuff. Oftentimes I’ll take it a step further and use my PiHole to block whatever servers they’re phoning home to.

A good example is my smart TVs. My TVs are the single most blocked devices on my network, by far. Like on a day of heavy use, my phone or PC may generate ~2000 blocked requests. On an average day, my TVs generate 7000+ blocked requests. That’s ~5 attempts to send telemetry data back to the mothership per minute, even when they’re not in use.

My neighbors had the FBI Surveillance Van SSID, so naturally I set mine up as “Definitely Not Russian Hackers”

Pretty sure everyone in the late 90’s and early 2000’s knew some poor kid who was dragged out of class for “hacking” the school network with net send. Send “you got a virus lol” to every computer in the computer lab in 6th grade, and suddenly you have your school computer privileges revoked for “hacking all the computers” until you graduate 6 years later.

If you already have a NAS, (since SMB was mentioned, I’m assuming there’s some sort of NAS setup going) then you may even be able to host Plex directly on the NAS. It likely won’t be powerful enough for things like video transcoding, but just audio should be fine.

Yup, we tell people they’re adults at 18, but the reality is that you do a lot of growing and maturing in your 20’s. I likely wouldn’t want to date any of my high school girlfriends if we met up again today, simply because we’re radically different people than we were in high school. And the same goes for college years as well; I likely wouldn’t want to date any of the people I dated in my early 20’s.

Yup, I didn’t find my wife until we were both in our 30’s, but we’re both happier than ever. Finding the right person takes time and probably a lot of rejection.

Out of all the high school sweethearts who got married young, I only know one couple who is still together and doesn’t hate each other.

The DLC launches next month, so it has seen a surge of renewed interest. And once the DLC lands, it’ll likely get a surge of new players from being on the store page again.

Which is a very easily recognized pattern, color, and size. The entire point of a dollar is that every single one looks identical.

Imagine if every single dollar bill was a different color, shape, size, printing pattern, etc… Now imagine trying to block that. Now consider that as soon as you figure out how to block all of the current versions, anyone in the world can just design a new version in 5 minutes.

If you mean changing which app natively gets used for texting, that’s not something you can do on iOS. You can choose to open a different app, but if I tell Siri to text someone it will always 100% without a doubt no way to circumvent it use the standard Messages app. iOS doesn’t let you change your default for texts.

Hell, they only allow you to change your default web browser because they were dragged into court kicking and screaming. And even then, all third-party browsers are forced to use Safari’s engine for the backend, and aren’t allowed to use their own engines. Even Chrome, Firefox, and Brave are just reskins of Safari on iOS. And even then, any apps that open an in-app browser will still use Safari even when your default browser is different. For instance, I’m browsing lemmy on Voyager, and it opens all links in a built in Safari browser, (even though my default browser is set to Firefox.)

Yeah, captchas have gotten worse recently. I had one asking me to choose “the largest animal” and it had an example picture of what was meant to be a lion. There was a rhino in one of the other pics.

It wanted me to click on lions, but then gave me something larger than a lion.

Edit: I just got this… Clicking on the flowers fails. Clicking on Skip fails. It wouldn’t let me try a third time to try clicking the cows, giraffe, or moose. But it clearly believes at least one of the three is smaller than a cat.

There are (on average) around two mass shootings per day, but only (ugh) about one school shooting per week when you actually average it across the whole year. For instance, 2022 had 51 school shootings, but had 647 mass shootings total.

The high number of mass shootings is because anything over 2 victims is considered a mass shooting. So when an abusive dad drunkenly shoots his wife and kids before committing suicide, it’s considered a mass shooting. Drive by gang shootings are frequently considered mass shootings if more than two people are hit. It’s not just an active shooter firing into a crowd, (though those definitely qualify.)

I have had major issues with exFAT across a variety of platforms. But I also work with a bunch of niche gear. But my point is simply that being widely compatible isn’t the same as being fully compatible. And OP was asking for the best way to reach the widest compatibility. That calls for FAT32, even if it has issues with things like file size.

This was my immediate thought as well. Portable launchers for the various OS’es on a tiny (just large enough to store the launchers) FAT32 partition, then a large FAT32 partition (the majority of the drive) encrypted by VeraCrypt. As long as it can read FAT32 and run VeraCrypt, it’ll be compatible. And that covers Windows, Linux, Raspberry Pi, and Mac ecosystems. It’s not as simple as just plugging it in and getting a password prompt, but it’s going to be the most compatible while still allowing for (nearly) the entire drive to be encrypted.

Let me help with that…

Spotify
YouTube

That’s because the firefighters actually live at the station for several days at a time. And since they need to be available at the station in case of a call, they will cook at the station instead of eating out at restaurants.

So yeah, firefighters buy groceries, but cops eat out in their cruisers.

Even worse, many of those scammy companies use the Do Not Call list as a list of known active numbers. Since the DNC is an opt-in thing, the call centers know that people have proactively added their numbers to the list.

Yeah, voice notes are the “your solution to your problem is somewhere in the middle of this 20 minute long YouTube video that could have been a short forum post with some screenshots instead” of the communication world.

The Bible Game. It’s a game that was originally released on the GBC or GBA; I honestly can’t even remember which… I downloaded a ROM pack for my retropie and discovered it hidden inside. My buddy and I got drunk one evening, and decided to boot it up for shiggles.

It has you running around trying to answer bible verse questions to get keys from demons. It’s the single most boring and unintuitive game I’ve played. It also blatantly got several of the Bible verses wrong. We looked it up online, and there’s also a version that was on the Xbox, but it apparently had wildly different gameplay and was more like a game show, where the players answered trivia questions.

That would actually be the safer scenario, as a failure in the PD handshake simply defaults to 5v which every USB device can accept. It would be more dangerous to only have the PD negotiation be on one of the three ports, because then you could potentially burn out devices on the other two by sending them too much voltage.

I guess the best case scenario would be to have the PD signal run on all three, then default to low voltage if any of them fail. But that’s likely not what they’re doing, because then things would only fast charge if all three ports are plugged into fast charge devices. Because an unplugged tail would likely register as a failed PD handshake.

Not gonna lie, I was worried your second paragraph was going to turn into Mankind throwing Undertaker off of Hell in a Cell