ObsoleteNerd

McMeatless.

My start was ~91-92 in NL too, playing with a DTMF generator on payphones on the walk to/from school. We had more luck with the phones in hotel/museum foyers as they were usually not updated as often. I remember hanging out at the skate ramp near the Rijksmuseum and taking it in turns running over to the payphone near the entrance to try the latest tricks someone had passed on. Then a friend's dad got an internet connection and it changed our lives forever.

Yeah I've had a MFC-L2740DW for something like 7 years now, and it's an absolute beast. It was like AUD$250 or something on sale, does printing/scanning/copying/etc, has wifi, and works on all our devices flawlessly (windows, mac, linux, phones, tablets). I've bought toner I think once in that entire time.

It’s still being updated on their website, just not on GitHub: https://youtube-dl.org/

I get this when I visit the OP link:

> Your browser doesn't support SharedArrayBuffer, thus ffmpeg.wasm cannot execute. Please use latest version of Chromium or any other browser supports SharedArrayBuffer.

Having done basically this same project before (but just adding amber LED indicators, no MCU) I’m a bit confused over the use of the sensors vs a relay on the existing indicator wiring. Was it to save from splicing into the factory wiring? If so, as an alternate method, on mine I got some of the same connectors used on the factory indicator wiring to add an in-line split off to a relay that triggered my new indicators which were then powered directly off the battery. This made the entire system very simple and reversible.

I wanted to do mine animated like my car but I wasn’t sure how well MCUs hold up to the pretty extreme vibrations bike electronics get submitted to. Plus I’m lazy.

As someone who is seriously immune-compromised and also gets social anxiety, masks are the best thing to happen to me in a long time. I get none of the claustrophobia or breathing restrictions some people talk about and find masks perfectly comfortable, and it actually lets me go to the shops or walk through town without freaking out.

More importantly though it sets a precedent for the future. We now know how easy it is for an airborne virus to decimate us, so even when this virus is over it'll be acceptable for people with immune issues to keep wearing masks "just in case" (similar to Japan/etc, although I know some of that is about stopping other people from getting sick).

I feel like it’s just that those of us who had our formative years in the 1980-2000 range are finally old enough and have enough disposable income to collect the things we could never afford back then and/or the things we loved and wish we hadn’t gotten rid of.

Across all my hobbies, from cars to retro tech to various small toy/comic/whatever collections, everything from that generation is sky rocketing in prices now.

I live in a rural city in Australia and get 95% of my Amazon deliveries within 2 days of buying it (whereas most other online stores take a week or so), and have also found their range to be pretty extensive. Sure it’s not as big as the US but we’re a fraction of the market so it’s to be expected. If anything I’m constantly dumbfounded by just how much random shit I find on Amazon here (and I exclusively shop with “From Australia Only” ticked).

I’ll always buy local if I can get it at a similar price, and I’ll even pay slightly more for local, but I’m not going to spend 25%+ more for an identical product and Amazon’s prices usually really are that much cheaper.

That's ridiculously cool.

As a physically disabled person who can’t leave the house much, I beg to differ. VR has already improved my outlook on life immeasurably.

I wasn't quite as invested as you but pretty similar (KS backer, DK1 + DK2, banned from FB for refusing to send a copy of my drivers license, and now despise them with every inch of my soul)... but if anything this has motivated me to support anything VR that's unrelated to FB.

VR is incredible, I'm all-in on this being the right time for it (after many failed attempts in the last few decades), and I think it could really blow up now, but we really need to help alternate brands come up before FB fully owns VR in the way Google owns the web.

I absolutely love my Synology NAS. The photos function and the Video one especially. Being able to access all the videos on my NAS from any computer/phone/tablet in the house and have them transcode in real-time to suit the device, and/or cast them to our TVs. It’s great.

Yeah I’ve stuck with MP3s since the days when you could only download 1 per night. I’ve been made fun of uncountable times by friends and strangers alike, but I’ve never had my music-listening not work, no matter what device/OS.

It might sound naive, but as a user of these services for the last couple years, I only just recently learned this. Eg that they take a cut of each food item on top of their delivery fee. I always assumed the delivery fee was their cut. It was only when my wife mentioned she chatted to a local store who we ordered regularly from, that they mentioned they make crap all money on Uber/Deliveroo/etc orders.

We’ve deleted their apps and now just call ahead for pickup and go grab it ourselves. I feel shit for not looking into it sooner.

This is pretty freaky, but after the OP link mentioned having a running BBS I was wondering how I’d go about finding other current BBSes, and on my third “Surprise Me” click on Wilby it gave me this:

http://www.synchro.net/sbbslist.html

There goes the next few nights.

Spot on. I’ve tried to merge the two ideas for my kids, I’ve got a NAS filled with shows, movies and music, and playlists that shuffle each so they can get some randomness and not just watch/listen to the same few repeatedly. We work pretty hard to try incorporate a big mix of content for them, and it seems to be working quite well so far. Also stops them being inundated with ads and recommendation sidebars designed to manipulate them.

Same. Made my first website in ~95 or so. I remember getting so excited when we could finally change the colours of links, and distinctly remember even back then people saying “this is the beginning of the end for usability on the web, how will users even know it’s a link?!”.

Now look at the mess we’ve created.

Yeah that’s a particularly brilliant line.

I’m (slowly) working on an old-school manually-curated index of websites that I think have that “soul” of the old web. Many aren’t old, and lots are even using the latest in web technologies, but the common theme is “someone put time and effort into hand crafting this website for no other reason than because they were passionate about it”.

I really do think there’s a gap in the modern web for discovering stuff like this. Google only wants to show you what social networks and major entities have for your query, and SEO spam buries everything else.

It uses the Archive.org API for the actual cached websites, but I love all the other stuff added to the site, and the overall experience on the front page.

The creator’s page has a great little rant too which I agree with intensely:

http://theoldnet.com/~rich/

Bring back the old web.

> One of the issues we have in the US is that telecoms charge the recipient for these calls, not the originator. In some (many? most?) other countries that's reversed and such activities are much less prevalent.

Here in Australia the caller pays, and I still get daily spam calls. Nearly always from Indian call centres using VOIP services (can tell by the unique/different audio quality), or showing what I assume are spoofed CIDs (Zimbabwe, etc).

We have a “Do Not Call” register[0] run by the Government that’s (supposed to) give major fines if the company ignores it, but it doesn’t seem to bother these guys, I guess because they’re overseas anyway.

[0] https://www.donotcall.gov.au/

Nope, I used to when I was an active reddit user but I stopped using RES when I nuked my reddit accounts.

Seems to still work for now, but they’ve also removed the ability to sort comments in the old version, and stripped other features. While they say they won’t “remove” old.reddit.com they’re doing their damnedest to make it annoying/useless.

Using the normal reddit website now as a guest though is all but completely useless. When you click the comment section you don’t see any comments, just the story and then a list of “recommended” other links and a banner to sign in over a small link to continue to read the comments. On expanding that, you only see the top level comment and clicking to expand it tells you to sign in and you can’t continue.

I guess they’re going the Instagram route and moving towards app-only.

The sheer depth/breadth of Youtube's maker scene is awe inspiring. There's orders of magnitude more people creating/restoring stuff on Youtube than there are people destroying stuff.

The number of channels dedicated to restoring cars, building dioramas, making knives/tools, restoring old electronics, inventing new electronics, cooking, painting, etc etc... it's truly awesome (in both meanings of the word) and I personally love that Youtube has brought all this to the world.

I don't even watch TV/movies anymore, I just have 200+ subscriptions to talented makers of all varieties, even stuff I personally have no intention of ever trying, just because it's so great to watch.

After all that, I don't really fault people enjoying some things being crushed, same reason lots of people like seeing big crashes in motorsports or big explosions. It's a part of human nature.

Yeah I never went to college/uni and got my first job in IT due to doing web/graphic design projects on the side of my non-IT job.

Then after getting sick of front-end/design I started coding back-end side projects and taught myself enough to ultimately get hired doing CMS development. Then same again to get into Sysadmin, after running game/file servers as side projects. Etc etc...

Five distinct career changes/upgrades over ~20 years inside IT, all thanks to building stuff I wanted to build for fun and that impressing the right people to get me hired. The only IT job I've ever gotten through working my way up in a company was the last one, into Project Management, and that was only due to the breadth of skills I taught myself throughout the years... on all those side projects.

If I didn't do side projects, and didn't always strive for more, I'd still be running/packing cables for concerts and working 20 hour shifts for barely enough money to survive.

Flirc, Argon Neo, then all the generic billet Aluminium passive cases, all of which are in the ~$20-25 AUD range (whereas this one is almost $50 AUD).

This stinks of blogspam to try sell their new overpriced case.

Not to mention, like you said, with the recent updates that have made incredible progress in dropping the temps, any generic cheap passive case is fine even for quite heavy use. I have multiple Pi's (3s and 4s) running 24/7 and a few doing quite heavy loads (transcoding, etc) all with cheap Aluminium passive cases and have had zero issues since the firmware updates.

But there’s still a core group of people willing to put up with that and use F-Droid, and having the app used by that group of enthusiasts is better than it not being used at all.

Considering this app is used a lot on older secondary phones, it’s actually very likely people who want to use it would go to the little bit of extra effort required to use it via F-Droid.

The minimal-meat thing for me personally is about environmental sustainability and ethics, so not really something I’m willing to sway from. If anything I’m constantly moving more towards less and less meat, even if the opposite could help my tinnitus.

I’ve tried lots and lots of different diets (in the balance-of-foods type) over the years though and nothing really helped or harmed the tinnitus in any noticeable way.

I've had pretty severe tinnitus since my 20s (early 40s now), during my early 30s I got very serious about diet/health due to unrelated health issues. I only drink water or coffee, I eat a clean diet with almost no processed sugars and minimal meat, etc etc.

My tinnitus is still absolutely horrible, almost always there in some fashion, strong nearly every night, and drives me to near-insanity half a dozen times a month.

Just for another perspective.