At this point I think it’s most telling that even Azure runs on Linux. Microsoft’s twin flagship products somehow still only work well when Linux does the heavy lifting and works as the glue between

My wife and go on kicks of playing a bunch of Minecraft together which is amazing

As others have said loss of interest can happen and the interest can of course come back with a vengeance. I’d recommend picking up another hobby until gaming suddenly grasps your interest again.

Two types of hobbies that have lasting positive impacts on people are creative hobbies and physical hobbies. Your brain is wired to invent and create and your body is wired to move, so being able to do each for fun is brilliant for your mental and physical health. Hop on a bicycle, go for a walk and enjoy the crisp fall air, stop off at that gym you forgot to cancel your membership for, and start doing it regularly.

For creative hobbies you can get a pack of printer paper for a couple of bucks and a pack of Crayola crayons or colored pencils and just start doodling. If you suck at drawing make wierd geometric shapes to rebuild the fine motor skills that computers have killed. Or if you want something more in-depth model making is always great because it has elements of fantasy while having entry points at any skill level. Personally I’ve been getting back into model railroading which if that seems boring to watch a train go around in circles, consider it has its own table top roleplay scene in the form of operations

At least as far as US law is concerned, a federally hosted and administrated social media platform gets interesting with America’s unusually strong free speech laws, since there’s content which is legal but unethical which they likely would not be allowed to block or moderate, such as bullying, hate speech, misinformation, etc. but also illegal content would be immediately moderated away, which might include content that falls into legal grey areas or ethical but technically illegal content, like someone copy/pasting the contents of a paywalled article, or discussing any kind of DRM or digital security bypass

Honestly I think there’s good reason for governments to host a Mastodon instance for their representatives to use for communications, but inviting the public to use it might get weird for sure

Too big of a map ultimately becomes a deal breaker for me because it will inevitably have too much empty space and get too boring and time consuming to play through.

Smaller more refined maps are better than larger maps where the team can’t sufficiently justify every single corner and make sure every inch truly is fully designed and makes sense.

The upscaling technologies they’ve been building into modern graphics stacks also have benefits for much older games where the performance isn’t necessarily needed. There’s an old game I like to play, Railroad Tycoon 2, which doesn’t run at resolutions higher than 1024x768 and modern upscaling can make that game look absolutely gorgeous despite being 4+ pixels per original pixel. I’m sure it provides similar benefits to emulators and the like too!

Thunderbird still supports RSS, however I’ve found many news sources don’t provide proper RSS feeds anymore

Somewhere in the In-between by Streetlight Manifesto

I’ve been slowly digging into their discography recently and holy crap Ska is so funny because it’ll be a bopping tune but then you catch the lyrics and find it’s a song about war, death, collapse, etc.

This music video definitely embodies that same disconnect. Cute animal animation with bopping music except wait what are those people doing? What are those animals doing? Oh my is that how this ends?!

Personally, I’m terrible about actually spending money on myself. Mostly because right now money is pretty tight as a single income household. A giftcard forces me to spend money in a more careless manner than I otherwise would. A giftcard encourages me to splurge and order a thing on Amazon or buy a super sugary treat or something else that can bring me joy. If I’m given cash I just use that to smooth over the daily grind, so giftcards absolutely hit different

The nice thing about these thrift stores is they’re actual charities and if you are in a hard place they’ll often help you get the stuff you need for free rather than charging the $0.25 an item they might otherwise

I loved the wildlife zoo there when I visited Rochester on a whim a few years ago!

Every former windows phone user I have ever talked to has sworn up and down about how amazing of a platform it was. I honestly suspect Microsoft could have legitimately won a sizable slice of the mobile market if they simply chose a different name than “windows phone”

But then, this is the same company which held a mock funeral for the iPhone upon the launch of the Windows phone so…uh…yeah that actually happened…

I mean, the person who did it did technically manage it by running an emulator of a different similarly ancient architecture

Ars has a decent summary of the blog post if you don’t feel like reading the full blog post

No joke I read an article a while ago about a computer cafe in like Nepal I think it was? where users had to pedal a small DC generator to power the computers because power is so scarce up on the mountain

It’s more than just a TPM requirement. They have actual processor requirements cutting off all 7th gen and older Intel processors and all 2nd gen? Ryzen and older AMD processors so that they can modernize instruction sets. Many perfectly capable if a bit old machines that have years of life left in them that will be going to the recycler who will attempt to extract something of value from these machines.

I’m all for modernizing instruction sets and cutting off literal ewaste machines that nobody should still be using like the Core 2 Duo for example, but this is just going to produce mountains of ewaste, which is about the last thing we need with the looming climate apocalypse and dire need significantly reduce emissions rapidly

Only time I’ve had fraudulent charges was when I was 18 or so and hadn’t yet got my first line of credit. They disputed the charges normally and froze the account. It did suck not having much money but I also was living at home still so I just avoided spending money for a few days until it all finished processing

My oldest is about ready for her first computer, so I have an ewaste laptop earmarked for Christmas that I’ll have to tweak the configuration a bit more on before then.

She’s been getting better at better playing Minecraft and learning how to ask us how to spell the names of things so she can search for them in Minecraft, and getting pretty good with the mouse and keyboard too

When I went back to college with a new baby, a 2 year old and at times being the sole income for my family, I attended the free yoga courses offered at the school and found that was incredible for managing the stress I knew I had and the stress I didn’t realize I was carrying with me. Plus you can approach yoga as “improving your flexibility” in addition to stress management

PayPal is nice since it gives virtually zero trust to the seller to secure customer info. But as you alluded to, PayPal has lots of problems mostly stemming from it trying to get all of the benefits of being a bank while accepting none of the responsibility of being a bank, and therefore customers receive none of the benefits of a bank while still getting all of the drawbacks of another entity handling their money

Literally just yesterday my wife learned of Minetest’s existence and said it was a terrible name