Back during the late 90s era of internet, I got into a MASSIVE amount of troyble over a finger slip in a high school computer lab.

We were all assigned an African country to write an essay about. We had to only use internet cited sources.

I was assigned a country with the Namba people. Somehow I fat-fingered an “L” in there in the worst places. (Between the ‘b’ and the ‘a’ - don’t google it)

It triggered my school’s search filter. Altavista got involved. It was a nightmare.

The police got in contact with my parents, thinking I was being groomed and in danger of kidnapping.

It sucked.

I prefer it to real spam. Way less greasy with more flavors

In those situations, that is the best class sizes for electricity tomfoolery, sprinkled heavily with bravely, and a side of youth assumed immortality.

It is also a good class size to swiftly move bodies, of things get too bad.

I had a similar sized class when I apprenticed as an electrical worker via “future farmers if America” funding.

I learned so many good ways to fix things correctly, and three times that number in “bad” ways to fix things.

Guerrilla learning method with pratical daily needed subjects is SORELY missed now-a-days.

I made one of these when I was young, poor, homeless, and imminently dying due to being swiftly being frozen to death (with bone tumors coming in second place in the death race). I was able to get an abandoned metal shead with a small heater working quickly in a sudden ice storm using on hand parts and a pirated “outside” power line.

Outside of a significant situation like that… it’s not a good idea

This seems to be a “PEBCAK” situation.

A super bright flashlight is also a top pick for a bugout bag. It punches WAY above its weight, space wise.

Some of them can even be used to start fires.

It’s easier and, most importantly, safer than ever now.

My forming years during the age of Napster, LimeWire, and Morpheus made me learn how to format a hard drive and reinstall an operating system expertly. I had hundreds of CDs with backups of (mostly) clean songs, videos, and crackz.

There was a 90:10 chance of getting a clean piece of media or electrogonorrhea, no matter how safe one was. However, it brought people together trading and downloading, akin to the Pokémon Go craze.

Everyone should be using the Facebook addon “Facebook Purity” if they are still using the platform. I’ve been using it for over a decade and I can’t stand using Facebook without it…

They are always a few steps ahead of Facebook and work well with other blockers.

Not only that, you can block specific parts of Facebook, not just the adverts. You can block the shorts, people you know, groups, keywords, and even whole topics.

You can change settings, like how you see your feed and it will stay changed.

Changing the font size, type, spacing in addition a bunch of color and night mode options are just icing on the cake.

In my professional opinion, it’s the only way of working with that platform is not harmful to one’s sanity.

The only thing that’s stopping me from swapping fully to Firefox is finding a good password manager that will keep the passwords up-to-date between several machines.

Double points if it will let me import the passes from chrome.

That has to be a record in inappropriateness.

It’s like saying that concentration camps are great for losing weight and reducing urban over population in the ghetto.

Those are the only times when it’s appropriate to insert a 3 1/2 inch floppy.

I’d never go back to Reddit again if the several game projects I beta test for in my spare time would migrate over to lemmy.

Jordan, the YouTuber, is a really great follow.

https://www.youtube.com/@jordan_the_stallion8

He’s the president of the “fast food secrets club” and has taught the world a lot about everything secret in fast food recipes.

His non food content is great too.

I’d be very interested in your theory.

I thought it had something to do with the distance to the server or ping timeout, but that is more of a guess.

I’ve not experienced that problem again despite working as a network engineer for 20 years

I have been using WUB, and some other extremely helpful tools that this company makes, for a few years at this point.

The part that I LOVE about WUB is how complete and exhaustive the shut-off is for the ease of use.

There’s no editing files, no editing anything, just download and press a button to turn on update blocking (while protecting the services that could mess up by blocking). Press another button to unblock everything as good as a fresh install.

It’s as if it was never blocked when updates are toggled on, and it’s as if Windows update is completely removed with the blocking is toggled on.

My alts are always on my same name. It helps me not have to remember, but it helps me to compartmentalize.

I have one over on lemmy.world that I made when RiF went down and it pointed to that instance. ‘Reddit is Fun’ was my trusted app of choice for so long that I figured that I’d go with their recommendation.

That mindset was apparently shared with a lot of people, and lemmy.world became overcrowded and unusable every other day for a while due to traffic. That’s when I read that one should get registered at a closer and/or smaller instance in order to have better service.

That’s when I moved over to SDF’s shockingly fast lemmy instance.

I’d love to see smaller game devs have a federated presence with their content.

Right now, I only use Reddit to keep up with game devs who only post game content and updates on their own subreddit.

Microsoft PowerToys is a fantastic program if you like to tweak your experience with Windows.

It lets you do things like set up individual zones within your monitor that act like picture in picture or another monitor. It has a robust color picker, which helps greatly when it comes to photoshop and template creation. I also use the text extractor very often to extract text from pictures, which it copies to the clipboard.

The best, and technically the worst, is it lets you change settings that you can’t normally do in Windows.

While it could get someone YOLO adminning in trouble, thankfully it has a lot of warnings before you mess things up too badly.

Those are the features I use, but there are too many useful features to name in one go.

Here’s the link to get it in the Microsoft Store

WUB or Windows Update Blocker.

It’s one of the first things I put on a new after the initial Windows update.

It safely turns and completely turns off Windows updating and the services involved with updates.

It’s practically a necessity if you use a metered or paid internet connection, or connect your laptop to a cell phone for an internet connection via a hotspot.

Windows doesn’t listen to its own settings about metered connections and if it deems something worthy of killing your data plan for the month, it’ll do so without your knowledge.

The best part is that when you’re ready to download critical updates or something from the Windows store (Whatsapp, Minecraft, Power Tools, etc.) then it’s as simple as a button press to reactivate updates without restart.

The longform video format is highly underrated.

Some days I want to watch a 20 hour retrospective on Skyrim.

Other days I want to enjoy 20 hours of an AI voice recapping a Korean manhwa about the world’s most powerful necromancer from another world that’s like a video game…

YouTube shorts also have their place for micro hits of dopamine.

So long as it makes us happy, it can’t be that bad?