Old guy in the USA. My first car was a sport motorcycle so six speed with clutch and shifter. I have a sedan with an auto trans, but also a 4WD truck with manual. When I learned to drive in my teens automatic transmissions were not as nice as they are now, just three speeds and not very smooth. Now they’re typically six speed and much nicer. I really dislike a manual trans in heavy traffic, quite a chore.

I do 76F in the summer for AC and 68F in the winter for heating. Try to use minimal heating and air and still maintain a comfortable range. Can get expensive if working the system too hard. If it wasn’t a matter of cost I’d leave it on 72F all the time.

Evaporative coolers are great if you live where you can use one, much cheaper to run and they can work pretty good as long as humidity isn’t too high. I had one in a house I lived in before along with a regular AC system. It was a good to have and saved a lot on the electric bill. If it was dry enough out the AC unit was not needed.

Haven’t used a heat pump before and don’t know much about them. If they work as well and cost less to operate that would be a good option, but I wouldn’t use one if it’s a downgrade in performance. Rather pay for the comfort.

Stardew Valley: I really enjoy the game and play it on PC. It saves the game only at end of turn which is a game day. If I’m not able to finish my turn I have to put the computer to sleep instead of shut it down. Also if I make a mistake which is easy to do I have to start from the last save which can lose a good amount of progress and sometimes random pickups. Though it’s my only peeve with the game so it’s still doing better than most.

I never thought Reddit was addictive. I actually spend more time on Lemmy in a day than I did on Reddit. My browsing habits changed though. Reddit is so big I only looked at a few niche subreddits. Lemmy being much smaller I view a much wider range of topics. It’s a different and better experience for me.

Haha, most of my opinions are unpopular. Some posted in this in thread I agree with.

I think sci-fi has it right with that, I mean you’d only get up out of your chair or whatever receptacle to perform bodily functions. Most people think everyone would turn into fat blobs, but I think that’s not the case. There’s this one sci-fi where I think they got it right, most people became emaciated due to a failure to eat and get any exercise.

Oh and I’ll take the blue pill, VR all the way, reality blows. Though some might say reality is already virtual. It’s an interesting hypothesis, sure would explain a lot.

uBlock Origin forever and always.

Haha, most important program on my computer. My browser is a uBO support system.

I’ve ripped a good number of blu-rays to network storage. If you’re looking for older, less popular stuff it’s the best option. And older releases are usually just a few bucks. The new stuff I torrent because I can usually find a decent rip, but for stuff I want to put in my library a rip from optical disk is the best, but not free of course. You can even do it for free, public libraries often have a good collection of older releases on optical disk.

I rarely use any kind of chat, but I used IRC sometimes back in the day. I was recently working on a thing where I needed to use Discord for some programming advice. I got the info I needed, but yeah that Discord is a convoluted mess. Newer hardly ever means better.

Great software, used it a lot. Also Handbrake.

What an everlasting tool history will remember you as, elon.

Biggest tool in the history of tools.

Only clearer by the day that this was all an exercise to intentionally kill Twitter to the benefit of billionaires, fascists and other extremists.

When I initially heard about Elon paying what he did for Twitter my first thought was he’s buying it to kill it, then I thought nobody in their right mind would spend that kind of money to carry out a personal vendetta. Now I think that’s absolutely what’s going on.

I believe he’s killing Twitter purely for personal reasons (he hates it because people gave him shit there). I don’t think there’s some kind of grand social agenda. It would require an assumption he cares about someone other than himself. Unlikely as the guy’s ego extends past Planet 9.

I like them when they are actually amusing. Problem is that’s maybe one in ten so it’s not worth browsing them. If someone posts one and it’s actually good, no problem.

Actually after thinking about it, the stuff he’s doing to the company is just batshit insane. It has to be intentional. He’s on a campaign to kill the company for the tax write-off and because he has some kind of personal beef with it. If he were to just fire everyone and shut down the servers he wouldn’t be able to take the write-off. The company has to die a slow death for it to look legit.

In imperial units I get this for a single stack of 44B in $100 bills;

.0043 inches * 44B / (12 inches in a foot * 5280 feet in a mile) = 2986 miles

That would be approximately the distance from Los Angeles to New York. That’s a long stack of bills.

For sure, either he’s destroying it on purpose of he’s that stupid, either one is just way out there.

For the longest time I used my hand lathering with the bar first, then realized using a washcloth works much better.

How does it impact Chromium?

Chromium is the open source part of Chrome. I’ve actually run Chromium before, but it’s kind of hard to find a binary release. Chromium lacks some Google additions like an mpeg player and PDF reader. It’s also free of some annoying add-on stuff like that app tracker that runs a background process full time. Who knows what that process does really. Of course I have it disabled on my system, but you have to go out of your way to kill it.

Otherwise Google has the Chromium project under their thumb so they’re not going to do anything Google does not approve of or refuse to do anything Google wants them to.

Speaking of Google influence, it bothers me that Google is a big contributor to Mozilla. I think it’s mainly to stay out of hot water with the FTC. They know all too well what happened to Microsoft and Internet Explorer in 2001. They need to keep the competition alive. Still it makes me cringe knowing they could exercise their will on them as a big contributor. I mean everyone has a price, and in Silicon Valley it’s not very high.

and am stunned when I see the web without an adblocker.

True, True, it’s damn near unusable. You take it for granted what a job your blocker is doing for you.

I know my uBO has saved me from some hostile shit. So yeah it’s a part of my browser security. I have it configured to a stricter blocking mode so it’s not just blocking ads for me, it gets other stuff that can be a problem.

Anyway I’m aware of the Manifest V3 business and being on Chrome I’m just waiting for the hammer to fall before going to Firefox. If they start adding DRM as well, I’m out of there quick.

Yeah, yeah, I know, just go to Firefox now, but I don’t really want to deal with a new browser and all my custom stuff until I have to. I’m old and that shit is super hard to motivate on for me. Not to say I’m inept, I mean I’ve spent my whole career in tech, but old dogs and all.

I spend more time on Lemmy. More interesting content, more commenting on my part.