There would be no more internet access for anyone anymore if that were allowed.

Soooo many insecure networks out there ripe for the picking if you know what you’re doing and have the tools available. And the tools are often free, not costing any money. From there, those networks are the places people will go to commit their “piracy”.

And what exactly is piracy? If I purchase an album on iTunes but choose to download it on ThePirateBay, is that really piracy? Because I have done that when the music THAT I FUCKING PAID FOR is no longer available for me to download off of iTunes and Apple won’t give me a refund for said music purchase. People do it for games that include shitty DRM and don’t allow them to easily install on another device like Linux too.

It seems easier to find things for users. Probably part of dumbing things down.

My mom went through this last week with Libre Office. She said she couldn’t find anything because the ribbons from Word weren’t there. I found the option and enabled it and she said that was much better.

Whereas, I use Word 365 on a daily basis but I still know where things are from the classic menus.

But users want big pictures and less words, less menus.

So UI designers have done that.

You see that in the change between Windows 7 and Windows 8 in heavy ways. More buttons and less menus.

I fucking hate the dumbing down, especially on servers.

I was looking something up and of course Reddit came up but kept telling me “YOU BROKE REDDIT”.

What a shitty way to express an issue that your site is causing for users. Just go ahead and blame the users. That’s great for noobs who don’t know anything and will legitimately think they did something wrong on their end.

As far as the administration side goes, I think whitelisting is a pretty awesome feature on most routers. This gives you an extra layer of security on top of your password for your WiFi. Someone may get your code from someone else or you may have let a neighbor use it for a moment, but then what? Change the password and then have to update all your other devices?

Nah, just whitelist and you can remove devices as you wish any time you want.

It’s not foolproof as MAC spoofing is a thing, but it’s a cool layer to have.

You can also more safely create a QR code for getting on the WiFi with whitelisting enabled. So if someone happens to see it, they don’t necessarily get access just by scanning it. That’s just the first step. But this makes QR codes a little safer to have for joining the WiFi easily.

I think creating your own DNS server at home with a Raspberry Pi through PiHole is also another cool thing to do. Gives you the ability to block ads as well as many other things like known malware websites and even restricting adult sites easily if you have kids or just wanting to do it for yourself.

Combine that with a VPN server on that same Raspberry Pi so you can remote into your network from anywhere and also have the adblocking from the PiHole server at home. I did this for a while but disabled it because I wanted to ensure my home network was a little more secure before opening that up again. But it was a cool thing to have and use.

All that advertising makes me immediately avoid those kinds of products.

Is this for your home’s water heater? I was initially under the impression this was going to be for your car.

If this is your home’s water heater, it is possible that by turning it off it did turn out. Some water heaters have a pilot light that needs to be lit and by turning it off, you extinguish that flame and it needs to be relit. It depends on each water heater in the manner how you will relight it, but most will have you either turn the knob to a certain point and hold a button while you light it using a match or they will provide another button you press which creates a spark which will hopefully light the pilot light. You need to be watching the pilot flame as you do this to see if the flame sticks. If it does, then you can move the dial to an on position to have the flame fully light up, almost like how a gas flame lights up on your gas stovetop.

All this is general but these directions in between are more direct depending on your specific make and model. The best thing you can do is to either watch a YouTube video on your specific make and model to see how it’s done or look up the manual online. Also, in most cases from the many I’ve seen, they should have these written as directions on the side of the tank. They can often be a bit hard to read and follow for the first time, so be patient and don’t be afraid to re-read sections again a few times to be sure they’re saying what you understood.

There’s no much risk involved here for the most part if you’re safe, but the taking time part is mostly because I’ve had issues pointing the dial to the correct position and it creates confusion and frustration for me. But taking time to re-read it before acting helps reduce those occurrences.

I guess the next step in piracy is to change the apk enough that it doesn’t get recognized correctly, if that’s possible? Though then everyone will have to worry about malware-ridden apps.

I think this is horrible, aside from piracy, because you may want or need to stay on an older version of an app. I have had to for devices at work that require a specific version or just an easy way to manage the device and ensure devices only got updates we approved through our MDM.

Went to Iceland a few years ago and the biggest thing I noticed was how clean everything was. In the US, at least where I am, trash is literally part of the street. Little black “gum” streaks, random paper flying about…

I don’t remember ever seeing any litter of any kind anywhere we went on the island.

I do remember seeing a random piece of raw meat on a meadow but that was it and I’m not sure I’d call that litter.

It’s backed by the likes of Samsung, Square Enix, Circle & Mysten Labs and is taking aim at both SteamOS from Valve and Windows from Microsoft to give a simple interface to get gaming on handheld PCs and more.

This is going to be interesting. I think Valve will welcome the competition while Microsoft is not going to like this if they notice an impact.

It’ll be interesting to see what new features they can bring to the table that Valve can implement or improve SteamOS on.

But loving to see more Linux options and less reliance on Windows!

Oh no this was years before Covid that this was happening. I remember this because it was prior to a close family member of mine passing and that had something to do with my personal experience with this sub, in particular.

They said it was due to “brigading”, but a lot of the users being banned had never heard of the obscure subs that were doing this.

The wannabe tyrants of subs like OffMyChest who banned people for simply posting in another sub, regardless of context, and the fact that Reddit didn’t shit about it despite it being against their own ToS.

Super lazy form of “moderating” to not just wait for someone to actually be a dick in your sub. Most people receiving the ban never heard of your dopey little sub until they got auto-banned for the crime of participating in an unrelated sub.

Not to mention every OG single player game now becoming heavily multiplayer focused.

Halo, Call of Duty, Battlefield, Rainbow Six, Grand Theft Auto…

Can’t just make a new IP. No…we need to ruin the old game you love playing and focus only on players who want an online exclusive experience.

I quit following Halo Infinite updates because it only ever was something new for multiplayer.

Rockstar canceled all DLC plans for GTA V and waited 10 years to unveil its successor. I’m not even interested in GTA VI because it’s inevitably going to be multiplayer focused and forget about the offline single player experience.

Rainbow Six Patriots got canceled so we could get Rainbow Six Siege which has pretty much become a CounterStrike knock off.

All these companies forgot what made their games great and who the original fanbase consisted of in favor of the flavor of the month players.

This is why I don’t buy toys and other items that require a specific app.

The last one I remember buying was that little robot and the company that made it went under and a new company bought them and resurrected the robot but now required a monthly subscription.

Great example of why this kind of crap needs to stop already. I don’t need a damn app for everything I do and it doesn’t have to be specialized.

The other side of it is those things I have, like an older RC helicopter, that still has the app available on the App Store but not for modern devices because the specifications changed and the app no longer is compatible for modern devices.

Fun stuff…

Been thinking about this for a while and I gotta say food. If it looks spoiled, I just throw it out. I’m not going to risk getting sick over cheap food that’s probably gone bad anymore.

Think the best analogy I can give you is this:

If you write a check and give it to someone, the money has not yet been taken out of your account until they turn that check into cash or deposit it into their bank account.

Until that time, it is something you are keeping a record of to say “I wrote a check for $700 so I am down $700 in my checking account.” Even though the total balance today says $1700, you know that it really is supposed to be $1000 that is available to be used for other expenses.

If you wanted to recover that $700, all you need to do is shred the check before it gets to the bank or check cashing place or contact your bank to tell them to not process this check. Thereby, you have essentially “recovered” the $700 you intended to give to someone else.

This is similar to how your hard drive works. When you tell your computer to delete a file, your computer’s operating system basically tells you that it’s been deleted and no longer lets you access it by normal methods, but that data still exists in a form awaiting an actual deletion. Once you create a new file, your operating system remembers that it had deleted 100MB earlier in the day, so it can now use 25MB of that 100MB it reserved to overwrite some of that file that was deleted, in a sense. However, this whole time, your operating system told you that you had an extra 100MB immediately after you deleted that file, even though it was really being reserved to eventually be replaced.

Your operating system speaks in binary language of 1’s and 0’s and this file existed as a bunch of 1’s and 0’s. When something else got overwritten, it took some of these 1’s and 0’s from the old file to be turned into space for the new file that is to be created.

So as long as it’s recent, no new data has been written to the drive, and the computer hasn’t been restarted, the file is still effectively there in the binary language, just not in plain text to you. However, as time goes on, new data is written, or the computer is restarted, then it becomes much more difficult to restore the file. This is mainly because data is always being written to the drive due to the computer doing other things in the background in addition to the things you do on the computer.

But there isn’t any way to exploit this as this is all due to how much data is available. You have a 1TB drive in your computer and your computer will only ever report 1TB of available storage. It will never report to you that you have more storage unless you’ve done some trickery and even then, it’s just playing with the numbers that you see. Fake USB drives do this where someone sells you what they tell you is 2TB but is actually 16GB and the file has been written to trick the operating system into thinking it has 2TB. If you try to copy more than the actual 16GB of available space, you get an error.

Great, another PvP game.

I tried peanut butter biscuits for dogs once. Needless to say, dogs are getting ripped off. Tastes nothing like peanut butter.

As a kid, think toddler, my parents said I used to eat the dry dog food with the dog. Not like a lot, but a bite sometimes. They said the dog would give me weird looks as I’d take a bite.

I love Voyager. It’s the closest we’ve come to Apollo for me and the features are great!

My number one reason for leaving Reddit was no longer having access to Apollo, so finding Voyager meant a lot to me.

A second USB port wouldn’t hurt either.

If you haven’t already, you should watch Mystery Team specifically for the character of Duncan “Boy Genius” who absolutely fits this characterization to a T.