spikej

Those one-offs can always be in a separate VM (in Hyper-V or something)

This is one usecase where I'm thankful for AI: to help generate a bunch of documents in a well structured manner (giving it audience, having it scan through my comments on why I did xyz, etc)

I had less "custom" work to do with IE 6/7 if I got it working well in Opera first was my experience...

Opera was my secret weapon back in the day: if it worked in Opera, it would be guaranteed to work in Chrome, IE and Firefox. It significantly reduced the browser quirks stuff I'd have to dig into.

Dragonfly was top notch also: one of the best bits was ability to outline all the elements on the page. There were other features too that weren't (still aren't) in the other browser dev tools

I'd be super happy if they left Windows alone and did just this for years to come. Use the other products to make money, and just maintain this Win 2000/7/10 type OS without new features, and stop trying to hide everything behind fancy UI. I still revert back to old control panels to do the necessary tweaks.

I hope there's more to it than something solvable with AutoHotkey... So far I just experience a buggier version of Windows 10 with features I don't want.

Bang on! This is definitely coming and very few talk about it.

Cannot even reliably permanently disable real time scanning...

Even without the AI, it's replacing native apps with web based ones. Case in point: Notepad. It's slower than WordPad on Win 10... and crashes!

"CUSTOMERS demanded bigger screens" That's a bold statement...

What about your local public library as a source? (that's worked for me)

Big assumption there... chances are they would rather keep the money or spend it elsewhere, instead of "unnecessarily" upgrading when things still work

This may or may not help, but have a look at ZorinOS. The latest release and it's announcement is targeted towards those wanting to jump ship from Windows -> Linux. They've tried to account for the adjustment with built-in tips/prompts and the UI looks closer to Windows also.

You're right, Office is where you will struggle.

https://blog.zorin.com/2025/10/14/zorin-os-18-has-arrived/

I use BazQux (https://bazqux.com/) as it was the closest to the old Google Reader I could find.

The developer also set up their own instance of FiveFilters Full Text Rss (https://www.fivefilters.org/full-text-rss/) for use with that reader to do fetch the content. I typically use this as proxy for any feeds I'm going to add where the author didn't provide the full text.

Other than that: * The BazQux web interface has a button to fetch the full text content of the article. * As you noted, FeedMe on Android can also switch to web mode to fetch full content.

I prefer the Five Filters way because then I can go through my feeds offline while in transit

if I REALLY care, then I end up making an agent in my Huginn instance (and hope there's no Cloudflare, etc verification in front that blocks scraping

https://github.com/huginn/huginn

Most non-technical people I know that have VPNs simply have it for streaming media from platforms that geo-restrict. It's a cat and mouse game as the provider bans servers/providers.

I had a similar problem with having to deal with an ISP provided modem, and solved it in the stupidest way possible: xmas light timer to reboot it in the middle of the night. It's set to go off for 30 min then come back on. Sadly, I've had this up and running for years...

I have been running Huginn on an Ubuntu VM since Yahoo Pipes shut down almost 10 years ago.

I've tried out NodeRed and n8n over the years but they've been a huge let down in ease of manipulating multiple RSS feeds and web scraping -- my primary use case for Huginn. I tried Zapier and IFTTT as well, but the free tier didn't allow for what I wanted to do. Since I could do it just as well with Huginn, I decided to stick the more complex flows there also.

Once you figure out the workflow (setting up agents, and which agents suit which task), then it's fairly straightforward.

I'd never heard of it until I just Googled it... Is it a better experience compared to DuckDuckGo with bang operators?

The safer option is to build your own install media using an unattend file. Here's an unattend file generator https://schneegans.de/windows/unattend-generator/

I didn't realize I would have to say the answers over the phone when choosing the answers (and thought it would only ever be me filling them in online)

CSR: "What is your mother's maiden name?"

Me: "do you really want me to say it?"

CSR: chuckling. "Yes, I need you to say it"

Me: "Diarrhea"

Do you have any links for ones they'd recommend?

That's nuts!

For what it's worth, I bought this for my old chamberlain. https://gotailwind.com

I was looking into replacing the old unit with a new one with myq but then read about all the problems and decided to give this a shot. 3 years in and it's been a good decision.

Which company, and which product did you see this with?

Unless you're getting them for older hardware that only plays mp3 like my car stereo...

This is a real problem that doesn't get talked about much...

I did similar -- not to the level of Youtube videos -- but have that list for spouse in case something happens to me.

Someone gave me an added tip to include a tape measure in the shots so you can more easily line up where things are after the wall's closed.

My solution is same as your plan A. Except that local backup is a NAS that also stores all backups from computers as well as photos from phones. Then everything goes to back blaze and photos go to Google photos for convenience of sharing.

This is spot on. I was having this exact discussion last week about how best to "strangle" an older application and deploy the new replacement for an upcoming project.