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Triikan posted:Where are the hackers fighting against all this stuff? William Gibson promised I'd be able to find a guy in a sewer pipe that could fix my poo poo. They all got jobs with cyber security firms
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Aug 29, 2023 18:42
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I have a Phillips smart TV that I like, but I don't use any of the smart features other than to turn it on and off with my voice. Everything else is through my ps5 or Kodi box, since I don't watch broadcast TV (because gently caress paying for Tory propaganda). But the Netflix/prime apps on PlayStation are getting shittier, and the Disney app was always poo poo. Remember how stuff like iTunes/apple music and Spotify pretty much eliminated music piracy because they gave us usable interfaces* and great content selection at reasonable prices? I feel like the film industry looked at that model and then decided to make it as loving horrible as possible. You have to have at least half a dozen services to get even half of what you want to see, and they're all determined to make the experience as annoying as possible, making piracy once again far quicker - and often in better quality - with no loving ads or dumbass algorithms trying to push garbage that I'm not interested in. *Okay they also have increasingly poo poo UIs too. It's like they WANT us to pirate poo poo.
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Aug 29, 2023 19:59
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Tenkaris posted:It's never too early to start mainlining Prager U Iirc Oklahoma actually has Prager U in the elementary school curriculum now
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Sep 6, 2023 14:56
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They also changed Slack so you can't have a thread open in the right hand pane unless you're viewing the channel that the thread is in on your main pane. Why?! The whole loving point was so I could have a side conversation in one pane but still do whatever else I needed to do in the central one. It's objectively worse in every way.
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Sep 9, 2023 17:38
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Professor Shark posted:I have a Pinterest account for my work email because I like/ liked getting ideas for lessons, but after they started emailing me about EVERY possible category I showed interest in, resulting in 5+ emails a day, I went in and disabled notifications. I once worked for a company where the marketing director refused to believe that around half of the customers in our database had opted out of marketing information. He demanded that I 'accidentally' opt everyone in and if there was any backlash then to blame it on a computer glitch. I refused, because not only is that illegal in the UK but I was the registered data protection officer for the company, meaning I personally would be on the hook. I quit a few months later, then found out they made my replacement do it. They received absolutely fuckloads of complaints, primarily because their customer base is entirely retirees, and it turns out people get very upset when they receive marketing addressed to their dead spouse when they specifically asked you to stop.
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Oct 10, 2023 13:24
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Cerekk posted:It's absolutely blowing my mind that fully half of the people receiving marketing emails continue to receive them when they have the option to stop. This was almost entirely postal marketing! This was just over a decade ago, and most of the customers were 70+ and had no desire to use email or the internet in general. 95% of sales were from them receiving marketing then calling in. Some were probably lonely so having a salesperson on the phone was nice for them. Which is really loving sad 
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Oct 10, 2023 15:39
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There is a brewery near me that makes maybe 20 different beers, except they are all IPAs and they all taste exactly the same. The ABV varies a bit, and one of them has a tiny bit of raspberry juice in, but barely enough to notice. I swear it's like the bit in Simpsons in the Duff brewery where everything comes from the same pipe, except they sometimes add a little bit of ethanol to some batches and sell it as a different product. But everyone in this town says they're great. I mean it's fine, but there are much better local beers.
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Oct 11, 2023 16:00
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Since the last update to Chrome on my phone, it now submits the form when using autofill for my credit card. But it can't autofill the cvc number (by design, which is sensible), so the payment fails. This is also the fault of websites that don't validate the presence of a value for the field before submission, which is also very stupid.
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Nov 11, 2023 14:17
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Alright I have known for years that AdBlock isn't the best ad blocker browser extension, but it has always done the job well enough just running silently in the background and I guess I've been too lazy to try out any others since it never did anything to piss me off. The latest update has three new 'features': 1) It allows 'appropriate' ads, from some sort of whitelist that I guess the extension makers curate? 2) Now introducing AdBlock VPN! Sign up Today! We're going to remind you about this every now and then. 3) It displays ads for itself loving constantly with a bigass popup going "AdBlock has blocked x amount of adverts today! Why not give us money?" gently caress you.
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Nov 30, 2023 23:38
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I ranted about this in another thread the other day but movie streaming is absolute dogshit now. The quality of the stream is getting worse while the price goes up, and I have to subscribe to myriad different services to get even a fraction of what I want to watch. Every studio has its own streaming service or 'channel' through Prime video now. The '4k' streams look worse than a regular blu ray, especially in films where there are any scenes that are lit with less than total daylight. Which is every film except most of Midsommar. Remember how iTunes started offering music at a reasonable price (albeit with the shittiest interface I'd ever used at the time) and music piracy started to die really quickly? Then music streaming services came along and pirating music barely existed (at least compared to ~2000). Movie studios seem to be doing everything they can to make us pirate all of their poo poo because you have to loving research which combination of services you need in order to watch certain films. And then when you do get to watch them, the video and audio quality is significantly worse than a pirated copy that I could download in less than 5 minutes. And with the lovely 'FreeVee' thing on Prime now, there's a good chance you'll have to sit through ads while watching the film that you already loving paid for, which also disables the neat Watch Party feature. This poo poo is actually making me nostalgic for the time I used to live next door to a Blockbuster Video store. I would go there multiple times a week, and it cost less than lovely streaming now.
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Nov 30, 2023 23:56
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deep dish peat moss posted:This is true of most adblockers, the reason ublock origin is the preferred/good one is because it's open source. Nearly every other ad blocker is owned by an ad agency whose purpose is to sell advertising space to ad-blocking users. Here's a page from the company that owns Adblock bragging to advertisers about their ability to serve ads to ad-filtering users: Funnily enough I just installed ublock origin just before I posted that, because I remembered it being highly recommended. Like I said, AdBlock had never once seemed intrusive or failed to block ads until a recent update, and now it might as well not exist because its own ads are more intrusive than ads in general.
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Nov 30, 2023 23:58
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skooma512 posted:I said so a couple weeks ago and lol it's still the case, but the Paramount app straight up just doesn't work anymore and even clearing the cache doesn't fix it. Amazing. they already solved the piracy problem! they made it possible to get content at an affordable price that made consumers happy and everyone started paying that price instead of pirating! Then the movie studios went "haha no gently caress you pay us 4x as much for worse quality" and they can't figure out why subscriptions are dropping, while Elon Musk blames it on "woke".
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Dec 1, 2023 00:35
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Duck and Cover posted:Hmmm should I go with the cheaper, more flexible, more convenient option or go with streaming? Golly I just don't know. I swear you were arguing with me the other day for buying blu rays, which remains the only way of legally watching films at home in not-poo poo quality.
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Dec 1, 2023 01:24
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Cerekk posted:it turns out that it's really cheap to supply content when you don't have to pay the writers or actors any residuals I want the writers and actors to get paid, that's why I don't want to pirate films, but they're making it very difficult to do that. I was watching Mr Robot when it suddenly got removed from Prime. The cover image still has "Amazon Prime Original" on it but it's no longer included. It is not on any streaming service available to me. Can I just send some cash in the post to Esmail and Ramek to watch the rest of it?
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Dec 1, 2023 01:30
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Atopian posted:Why can't you stop it updating? Things are all app controlled now. You're not allowed to just press a button on an appliance to make it go. It loving sucks.
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Dec 7, 2023 00:28
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deep dish peat moss posted:I used to get my groceries delivered and it kind of owned because it would be a $10ish delivery fee and the items weren't marked up. $10 to save whatever time it takes to go to the store and shop was worth it and I didn't have a car so it saved me a ton of headache and hassle. I can get groceries delivered for £2-5 same or next day delivery, but I also have four large supermarkets, five small ones and like a dozen little convenience stores within a 20 minute walk (I don't drive). Deliveries are great if I am buying heavy stuff (like cat litter), frozen food or things with a long shelf life in bulk, but they tend to give you fresh meat, fruit and veg with a short shelf life so it's not as good if you're trying to plan a whole week or more worth of food in one purchase.
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Dec 13, 2023 18:36
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The Slack Lagoon posted:On the train, playing a downloaded Spotify playlist. Keep losing service and the (downloaded) songs stop playing. I had to set Spotify to offline mode to keep it playing. I had this once and it turned out the album had been removed from spotify so even though they were downloaded I couldn't play it, so I went to offline mode and still couldn't play them because even though the data was still on my phone the drm or whatever had been updated to say I couldn't play it.
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Dec 14, 2023 00:10
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Philthy posted:the only AI I want is AI generated celeb porn Is this not good enough for you? 
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Dec 14, 2023 00:25
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Marenghi posted:I remember the days before streaming or even chromecasts when an original xbox with kodi was the best method to watch pirated media on tv's of the time. I still have a kodi box. Never been without one since my first modded og Xbox with xbmc back in 2005. Somehow still the best interface of any media player.
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Dec 16, 2023 00:17
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I keep seeing ads for pizza hut and dominos lately. Like almost all ads on youtube are for those two things in the last week or so. Not gonna lie, it was making me hungry for pizza. I ordered pizza from somewhere else. I don't particularly have anything against those two chains (UK, don't know how it compares) but there's a local place that does doner meat, fresh crushed garlic and actually spicy chillis as toppings, so I ordered from there. Which leads me to the other thing that got shittier: no premade/fast food that says 'hot' or 'spicy' on it is hot or spicy anymore. A bit like sour candy. Did we all collectively just get too desensitised to spice/sour stuff and that's why it sucks now, or is it actually worse? Thankfully there are still decent hot sauces that aren't the gimmicky "rear end blaster 5000" kind of bullshit that actually taste of something as well as having a bit of heat, but it sucks I can't just take something off the supermarket shelf, heat it up and have something that has a bit of a kick to it.
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Dec 20, 2023 00:31
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Beastie posted:You're getting old, friend. I am nearly 40 so yeah, maybe. I've loved spicy food my entire life, despite being the whitest British guy. My mum was never a big fan of spicy food but she tells me that she started getting a massive craving for it while she was pregnant. I was born two weeks early, on a day when the hospital was offering patients chilli con carne as a special (I arrived 10 minutes before lunch was due to be served, according to my mum. She did not have the chilli). Having had covid 3 times has probably not helped my tastebuds. Pennywise the Frown posted:It is very very much the exact opposite. At least in the US. We sometimes get a limited run of spicy crisps (chips) that are pretty spicy, but they always go off the market after about a month. I did see a British guy do that one-chip challenge thing and the dude was in tears. Cost him like £30 for a single tortilla chip to be imported, which is just loving silly - and I don't want something gimmickly hot, just enough to get a bit of a sweat and some endorphins going. I have some capsaicin extract that I use if I'm cooking a big batch of food because you literally only want one or two drops across several meals. I put two drops into a single serving of soup once and I did not have a good time. Quote-Unquote fucked around with this message at 01:09 on Dec 20, 2023 |
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Dec 20, 2023 01:05
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Internet Old One posted:Do you have Mexican products there? Just find any Mexican hot sauce with habaneros and you can’t go wrong. In terms of hot sauces, yeah, that's no problem. I'm talking more about pre-packaged food, or stuff from fast food restaurants. So many things say that they're spicy but it's like... well, I guess this might have been in the same room as some paprika once.
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Dec 20, 2023 01:08
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Beastie posted:This is a really heartwarming story. Almost out of a children's book. Unfortunately I was born with pyloric stenosis, which meant that food could not leave my stomach to the rest of my digestive tract until they could operate to fix it. So despite my probable desire to eat chilli, I vomited huge amounts after every meal. This is a thing that has not gotten shittier, because it's now a really trivial keyhole surgery to solve, whereas I have a large indented scar in my abdomen. Medical science in general is loving amazing nowadays. Shame the UK healthcare system is being destroyed by our government
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Dec 20, 2023 01:45
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I don't think I've ever had a frozen microwave ready meal. But even chilled ones are definitely shittier now. Sainsbury's used to do some decent-for-a-ready-meal curries but they are now bland and cost way more.
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Dec 21, 2023 00:29
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bossy lady posted:Everything needs to have "lore" now. It's not sufficient to enjoy something without 3,000 wiki pages explaining the backstory or melvins picking apart every minute detail to find meaning. It definitely predates widespread internet access. It definitely happened with Twin Peaks and early X-Files, and even real-world events like Kurt Cobain killing himself or Brandon Lee getting shot while filming The Crow had people inventing stories to find meaning where there was none. The internet almost certainly made it worse, though, because now all these weirds started to congregate.
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Dec 31, 2023 02:42
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cat botherer posted:Don't use antiviruses. They're massive security problems in themselves. Antivirus is definitely something that got shittier. There were things in the 00s that were still usable but everything has been terrible since around the time Windows 7 came out. I'm glad I no longer work in IT, where you still kinda need it because so many users just can't stop clicking every link and downloading every attachment. Though I just did a lol about the time McAfee released an update that made it flag a critical Windows XP system file as a virus, which put about thirty of my company's machines out of order. Cool stuff! (Management wouldn't let me spend money on getting less terrible antivirus software until this incident) Quote-Unquote fucked around with this message at 20:48 on Jan 5, 2024 |
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Jan 5, 2024 20:46
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Canine Blues Arooo posted:I honestly cannot think of a time when Antivirus was ever good. Like, ever... And I started my computer life in Windows 3.1. It was just 'not as obnoxious'. It was never good, I guess, but it was bearable and sometimes useful, especially in the late 90s/early 2000s era of people downloading exe files from kazaa and limewire etc. the big brands were always absolutely horrible as far back as I remember in the early 90s when I got my first PC. I know I had something that stopped a virus from a pc gamer cover disc once in the mid-late 90s, can't remember the name though. AVG was okay for a while in the 00s but then became spyware itself and also opened up a massive exploit lol
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Jan 5, 2024 21:08
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Wherever possible, buy everything on credit cards, keep the balance on them under half of the maximum and pay off the balance in full every month. If you're buying something expensive and there's an interest free finance option then do that rather than buy it outright even if you can afford it. Credit is loving stupid, esoteric nonsense and unless you regularly have debt that you pay off, you'll be hosed trying to buy a house even if you have a decent deposit and easily earn enough to pay the mortgage every month. A friend of mine is in her mid 30s and is in this situation right now because she has never had any debt. We earn roughly the same amount but she gets much higher interest rates on mortgage offers than I do. Probably doesn't help that she is also an immigrant (albeit with full citizenship) and probably also because she is not white or male. gently caress banks, basically.
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Jan 10, 2024 02:06
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I made the mistake of connecting my TV to wifi when I got it because I wanted to watch netflix on it instead of using a proper device. Since the last update it now pops up with a huge box on the screen every 5 minutes saying that the wifi connection dropped (I have no idea why, no other devices have a problem). If I turn off wifi by telling it to forget the connection, I get a box popping up every 5 minutes telling me I need to connect it to wifi to receive important updates. It is two months out of warranty. Gonna try a factory reset and hopefully it'll revert to the original firmware, otherwise I guess I need to buy a new TV (and will do my usual trick of selling electronics that are perfectly functional for a few minutes before becoming unusable to CeX)
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Jan 11, 2024 22:33
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roffles posted:roku sticks are like $30 if you have a free HDMI port. Sorry, to clarify, I no longer use any of the absolutely atrocious apps on the TV but it still nags me with messages about how it needs to be connected to wifi/is having trouble connecting to wifi. I have like 8 free HDMI ports but that won't stop the nagging. Mulaney Power Move posted:My parents got SmartTVs and they're barely computer literate so they struggle with basics like switching inputs or sometimes just turning the thing on. I hate watching TV when I visit them because if I use it and then my dad can't figure out how to turn it on or something I get yelled at for breaking the TV because my dad is a huge immature baby. My dad knew just enough to stretch every single thing to fullscreen regardless of the intended aspect ratio. He passed away a couple of years ago, and one night when I stayed with my mum I was watching something and turned off the stretching. She hasn't noticed so far (she calls me about everything technical she doesn't understand, so I know she would've called me if she thought something was wrong with the TV). I loved my dad and miss him immensely, but it drove me nuts watching anything that wasn't 16:9. Dude didn't like the black bars, even though it made everything weirdly fat/thin depending on how it was being stretched. Thankfully I managed to turn off frame smoothing on their TV before he ever knew what it was. Quote-Unquote fucked around with this message at 23:08 on Jan 11, 2024 |
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Jan 11, 2024 23:01
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Professor Shark posted:Contact the company and say it’s been acting up for months but you’ve been dealing with other stuff and didn’t realize the warranty was up that soon. I’ve gotten around things this way. Good news! The factory reset seems to have worked. I skipped the 'connect to wifi' part of the setup and now it is usable again. Hooray! I did a bit of googling about warranties while I was doing this. Apparently in the EU there is a minimum 2 year policy of 'something goes wrong, manufacturer must fix or replace'. This no longer applies to the UK because the country decided to get shittier for no good reason, but we do have something on the books that says we have 6 months minimum, but also you can claim up to 6 years later if you can prove that it was faulty within the first six months. I have no idea how you would do this, so it seems like an extremely stupid law. I guess you could film something not working properly and then wait 5 years to send it back, but why?
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Jan 11, 2024 23:47
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CitizenKain posted:My dad somehow managed to set the TV to zoom, while at one point managing to set the cable box to stretch the content. One of the times I came up to visit, he was basically cutting off most of the picture. He couldn't see scores or anything. I can't understand why these zoom/stretch features even exist. They've been around for decades, sure, but why? They have no purpose other than making the image look weird or cutting part of it off. It's like how I grew up with a 4:3 pan and scan copy of Ghostbusters so it wasn't until I bought the DVD that I actually saw a good chunk of the visual gags in the film (the elevator scene, Egon giving Venkman hand signals etc.) Frame smoothing I can kinda understand. It can actually look pretty good for sports and even some nature documentaries. But it's horrible for literally everything else but it is on by default on almost every TV made in the last 15 years.
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Jan 12, 2024 00:23
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Canine Blues Arooo posted:I've reverted pretty much back to majority piracy at this point for media. I still have an Amazon Prime sub (for now...) and a Netflix sub, but I'm so close to just not even looking for shows on these services any more. Stuff is so fragmented because everyone wants a piece of that Netflix pie. Since the start of the covid pandemic, my next-door neighbour and I started watching TV shows together. It started as a thing because we had nothing better to do during lockdowns, but now it's just a fun thing we do once a week. We were watching Mr Robot when it suddenly got removed from Prime. In the UK, Mr Robot wasn't on TV, it was a Prime exclusive. It's still marked as a Prime exclusive. Except you can't watch it unless you pay a whole lot of money to buy it. The blu ray is cheaper than the lovely digital version, even. Piracy is back, baby! Arrrrrrrrrr! holefoods posted:At this point I just want them to add a squish button so I can get improperly stretched content back to 4:3, if they just do that then I can stomach all the other ones. I think Disney+ actually added this because of their awful 'HD' Simpsons treatment, which looked dreadful and cut a whole bunch of visual gags out.
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Jan 12, 2024 00:28
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skooma512 posted:Putting "push to break" buttons is hilarious though. What else are you going to do with the 50 buttons on the TV's remote? to be fair, when I was 8 I found it fascinating how hosed up the display got on our 640*480 monitor when I tried to set this one weird application to run in 1024*768. It was some spreadsheet application that came on a disc with a magazine. Absolutely nobody outside of very wealthy business people had a monitor that could do a resolution like that in 1992. Things that have gotten way less lovely: Monitors. Education started to shift to using computers more and more when I was doing my A-Levels, and I started to get seriously painful headaches on a regular basis. I had been used to using computers with CRT monitors since 1988 so I didn't think about it, but it turned out the flicker from crappy CRTs at my college running at (I think) 50hz was loving with my eyes.
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Jan 12, 2024 00:44
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TotalLossBrain posted:Visit shodan.io and marvel at the many thousands of industrial automation devices connected to the worldwide Web lol this reminds me of a thread on here many years ago (I wanna say mid-2000s) where there was some brand of security camera that was connected to the internet and had literally no authentication to access it by default. If I remember right, people found shitloads of these cameras via port scanning. You could just pop the IP into your browser and gain full control of the camera, including swivel, tilt and zoom. It was a matter of just trying different ones until you found an unsecured one. A whole bunch of office workers got terrorised by the security cameras going berzerk.
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Jan 12, 2024 23:31
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I haven't worked in retail for nearly 20 years but when I did so much shrinkage was caused by people further up the chain cutting costs. We had so many deliveries of things that were broken or soiled to the point that they either had to be sold at a deep discount or could not possibly be sold, and this was considered to be the fault of the store staff and not the middle-manager somewhere that had decided to save a tiny amount of money hiring completely incompetent or downright negligent delivery services, including one time when I received an entire delivery of frozen food in an unrefrigerated truck. This was marked as shrinkage against my store because I refused to sell it knowing that it could loving kill someone.
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Jan 18, 2024 01:29
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I used Discord exactly once to play Divinity: Original Sin 2 online with some friends that only have PCs because one guy insisted we use it for voice chat. I still don't understand the point. Fuckin MSN messenger handled voice chat equally well decades ago. Though I sometimes lol about the time some chud on twitter told me that he is more successful than me because, and I quote: "I am a member of several very exclusive discord communities".
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Jan 19, 2024 22:40
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Canine Blues Arooo posted:The vast, vast majority of people designing phone apps and webpages loving suck And the developers get the blame
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Jan 23, 2024 23:20
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Trains in the UK (at least in my area) now require you to download an app to get your tickets unless you want to queue up to get them from the single ticket machine at the station. This machine is often out of order, which means you will not be allowed to get on the train for the journey that you paid for. Alternatively you can pay an extra £3 to have physical tickets printed and sent to you. They used to email a PDF with the ticket on it but this is no longer an option because reasons. Also it now costs £150 for a 3 hour train journey to visit my family. It is literally cheaper for me to get a flight to Spain and stay a couple of nights than it is to get a train for 150 miles.
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Feb 11, 2024 00:59
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Nettle Soup posted:I've never had an issue just buying the tickets on the train, but I also haven't tried in a while. How do you get on to the train without a ticket? Are there not barriers or the surly wannabe-police guys watching so you don't climb over the barriers?
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Feb 11, 2024 01:22
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