$325k for a 3bdrm 2bath detached SFH in good condition?

Awww, that’s adorable. Even after taking the exchange rate into account, that would be like going back to 1998 in my corner of Canada. Right now, a house like that on a 0.21 Ac plot of land would be running you $1,300,000 CAD. In places like Vancouver? $4,800,000 CAD on average.

I have a tube-based distribution system from the second-floor window that I started using during COVID to keep my distance from those plague incubators that came calling, and just never stopped using it.

I live in a moderately cold climate, and Halloween evening nearly always drops to around -5℃ to 5℃. So it’s much nicer to just sit in a cushy armchair by the window with a warm blanket over my legs and drop candy through the tube. A surprising amount of adults, teens, and tweens are tickled pink by that system, although a lot of little kids need a surprising amount of direction to get their candy.

And yes, I always drop either two pieces or - for those in dark hoods and carrying scythes - full-sized snickers.

Removed by mod

Now that is a real superpower.

I also manage to annoy TF out of my wife at being able to go from fully asleep to bouncing out of the bed like a piece of toast in under 10 seconds.

About the only thing that can impact this is severe sleep deficit, which - years ago - mean less than 3-4hrs in a night, but these days (in my sixth decade) means anything less than 5hrs of sleep in a night or less than 7 after multiple days of a sleep deficit.

Well said. Then there is the entire ecosystem of programs and apps for which there is no real ability to install on Linux (and for which tools like Wine will either be buggy or even nonfunctional), and whose absence will just piss users off.

As much as I love Linux and BSD, it is really only for people who are either mentally geared to shift off of Windows or whose minimal needs won’t notice the difference; it is not a drop-in replacement for Windows.

For example, my octogenarian father has exactly such minimal needs except for one program: Quicken. Any bugs or issues running that as an installed desktop program on Linux would have him enraged and throwing the PC out the window. So he is still on Windows, and I am keeping my eyes open on how to properly neuter/excise Copilot once it drops.

So far tools like Win10Privacy have been exemplary in allowing me to rip all manner of spyware, adware, and annoyances out of Windows.

I’m sure that Copilot will meet the same fate with one external debloating utility of another. Even if I need to replace the Explorer-based shell with a third-party one.

For Photoshop alternatives, I’d start with GIMP for photo editing

I have always felt that GIMP was the ultimate software Camel. As in, designed by a committee to include everything and the kitchen sink without any coherent UI/UX.

It’s the software industry’s 1965 Lada masquerading as a 2024 model.

If it wasn’t for Paint.NET still missing vectorized/sprite-based text (it instantly rasterizes text the moment focus leaves it), I don’t think I could ever use GIMP.

Can certain remote connections be whitelisted?

I have a number of non-tech family members that I remote assist and remote administer. Clearly, I need to be able to log in remotely via RustDesk whenever needed, and since RustDesk has no auto-updater, I would need to whitelist the website (and their GitHub page) as well.

I would hardly consider that pricing insane. Consumer TVs are massively subsidized by the smart tech built into them, in some cases by up to 60%. Plus, they are often fragile with cheaper components because they are expected to be mounted in “safe” places away from unusual conditions or extreme temperatures.

Considering the more robust construction (for commercial use) and lack of subsidization, I would consider those prices to be spot-on and rather reasonable.

Plenty of companies make display TVs that only display commercial content. You see them all the time displaying menus in fast food restaurants.

These can also have all smart tech turned off because some companies also use them as digital whiteboards to display proprietary or confidential information.

That’s why I put that term in quotes, and was specific about default networking interfaces. I didn’t go into detail because that confuses a lot of people.

Source: working with wireless networks professionally for pretty much the last quarter century.

Sailors on the ship then began finding the STINKY network and asking questions about it.

Oh, c’mon. it is trivial to make an SSID “hidden” for any networking tech that you have administrative control over. That way, only those “in the know” will know the SSID name to type in, in order to access said wireless network. It would not be “discoverable” by standard wireless-connectivity gear such as the default wifi interface in mobile phones.

And you need a good one because there has been problems with some password managers in the past.

coughLastPasscough

“Problems”. What an delightfully understated term to use.

Especially since it takes more effort to limit it than leave it wide open for whatever length of password a user wants to use.

nvarchar(max) is perfect to store the hashed copy.

16 characters was the minimum length a password should be due to how easy it was to crack… something like a decade ago.

Now it’s something like 20 to 24 characters.

Seriously, if your company is defining maximum password length and demanding specific content, it is failing at the security game. Have the storage location accept a hashed UTF-8 string of at least 4096 bytes - or nvarchar(max) if it’s a database field - and do a bitwise complexity calculation on the raw password as your only “minimum value” requirement.

Look at how KeePass calculates password complexity, and replicate that for whatever interface you are using. Ensure that it is reasonable, such as 150-200bit complexity, and let users choose whatever they want to achieve that complexity.

Any brands protected by American law must be independently-owned, with full transfer of all branding, patents, trade secrets, intellectual assets and physical assets.

So, for example, for even a single bottle of Perrier to be sold in America, it needs to have been made by a company registered with the brand name of Perrier, with exclusive use of that name within the country, independently owned and under zero control by Nestle, being manufactured using the exact same process with the exact same ingredients, and having control of the exact same patents and American-side infrastructure.

America is such a large marketplace that it would be impossible to split a company like this. Patents alone would prevent this, forcing Nestle to divest themselves of each individual subsidiary.

Separate the search engine from anything that stinks of advertising so it can return to what it’s supposed to do: return the most relevant results.

Because even appending udm=14 only gets rid of promoted links and in-page advertising, it does f**k-all to correct manipulated search results.

And IMO Koçulu should have sued NPM for everything they had. What NPM did to Koçulu was in violation of everything they stood for. Koçulu was there first with the Kik name, he should have had 100% of the rights to keep it.

How 11 lines of JavaScript crashed the Internet.

I only ever used Authy as a single-item TOTP vault for BitWarden, but I moved off of it long before they ever mentioned the Windows app shutdown due to dissatisfaction with the UI. I just didn’t like their “card-like” interface, and they never offered a super-compact list-like interface. The card interface just wasted too much screen real estate, even on a desktop, and it just got immeasurably worse under mobile.