I miss watching the little moon spin with the shooting stars of Netscape Navigator. It’s weirdly the most nostalgic thing for me. Maybe because my first full memory ever is the library computers and learning how to use Netscape in first grade. It’s the first time I started really retaining information fully, aside from snippets of Oregon Trail for the Commodore 64 in my kindergarten class.

Krull is one that stays in all my libraries. It’s so obscure yet has names like Liam Neeson, Robbie Coltrane, and David Battley. It was my dad’s favorite movie.

Kind of bs, seeing as how I use my friend’s account (with permission) to access the free Udemy courses that his career provides him and I’ve never seen this. Figures they’d nail legitimate users and completely miss people who abuse the system. Typical Microsoft.

Hope an alternative comes someday; I’ve always disliked LinkedIn.

I thought about this a few times at my last job, but unfortunately the job was solo work and if no one showed up, the whole contract would have been rescinded. My boss certainly abused my sense of responsibility, though.

That was a fun watch, lol! I should find one to set for my girlfriend. I had it set to the Daria theme song a long time ago. It’s one of her favorite shows and she has a dry and jaded sense of humor to match it.

I had to in my case. I worked for a company that was contracted out and had an on site boss. So instead of something like management calling me from the work phone, it was always the boss that did it from her personal cell.

It didn’t affect me, due to using startallback. It replaces start menu, taskbar and explorer. So my start menu is Win7 and my task and explorer are Win10.

It used to have a 100 day all access free trial and was 5 bucks, but I haven’t checked lately. I gotta keep a Windows machine around for art. My Gaomon tablet was able to use wacom drivers on Linux with some terminal tinkering, but it couldn’t map the scroll wheel by design, which was a deal breaker.

My ex-fiancee and ex-girlfriend for 7 years was getting hit on by our boss. She used to brag to me about it. They started texting back and forth until suddenly she wanted to “just be friends” with me (which entitled “benefits”).

This was all about a month before our wedding. So naturally I declined being “friends” and slept with her bride’s maid. We decided the sex was good enough to try dating.

That was 12 years ago now.

Story time.

I learned Debian-based distros back in high school from a college tech class. After leaving school and getting my first job, I built my first computer (after two DOA boards and much gnashing of teeth). I sat happily in my Windows bubble for a long time.

Years later I had a catastrophic failure when trying to get clever and unlocking my system32 folder to do some tinkering. I’d had enough of Windows. Thought Pop! OS looked really nice.

But we sometimes have that one friend. Arch. Every time I talked about my OS or showed him my clean setup, Arch. If I had a problem with packages. Pacman. AUR. Arch.

I was going nuts. Did he care I was running Pop! OS with KDE Plasma using Kubuntu backports to jury rig a later version? No. Arch.

After a long and grueling battle, after slogging through mountains of unsolicited Arch memes in my DMs, after vehemently defending Debian, I will only say this:

I use Arch, btw.

That’s enough from you, gregorium.

You mean like feeling bad about stupid things you’ve done (that most likely weren’t that stupid or embarrassing) and then feeling bad because you always feel bad about those things when normal people probably don’t? Yuh.

I should look into Jellyfin myself. I really need to introduce myself to containers. It’s something I should familiarize myself with as a Linux user, but I just barely got done learning the basics of WINE prefixes.

There’s not much that combines these two apps together like this, but there are separate alternatives. Nova Player for hosted media (I use Plex on my Raspberry Pi), Antennapod is one of many many podcast forks (most open source podcast apps use the same layout).

For listening to android localized audio books, I absolutely love Voice. Voice does have chapters built in as long as your audio books have them. You can pick up Voice and Nova Player for free on F-Droid if you want to try them out. Plex and Pi are a little more involved.

IF you needed the storage and badly, then I remember Hiren’s BootCD used to come with a tool to scan for and quarantine bad sectors. However, this is just a bandaid on top of an infected wound.

The wound will keep spreading, eating up precious backup files. I’ve only ever used quarantining once on my mother in law’s laptop because she had to wait weeks to get a new drive, due to the Philippines flooding back then.

Also, this was an old copy of BootCD that ran through terminal prompt, not a built in Windows PE, and I believe the tool I used has been removed. However, it seems to be replaced with a few alternatives.

That’s hopefully the plan if that time does come. Two of my three sisters lived at home and single while raising their first kids, so I tried to help them out as much as I could. I wouldn’t be completely blind going in. I’d be fretting a lot at first, though. The world would seem much more dangerous with a kid to worry about.

Not for the lack of trying though. They’ve been trying to destroy alternative frontend apps for a while, but the devs just keep rolling out workarounds. You know when your app is buffering endlessly that is time to check for an update.

None taken, friend. I understand that, but I still think about these things a lot. I’m still young enough where I could have a happy accident, even if we’re not trying. My mind is always on how to be a good father if it did.

This is the way to go. I don’t have kids, but it’s how my sisters went about it. For the longest time if my nephew wanted to call and talk to me, the number would ring up as my sister’s number, because not only was it a spare phone, but it was dually connected with her number (not sure how tbh, she worked for a carrier for a long time).

It’s just hard to find that thin line between allowing them to have something or have them be behind all their friends who do have access to one.

My policy would probably be worse, tbh. I’d toss them an old Nokia and be like, “Legends say it’ll take the force of an 18 wheeler and a flood and still work.” For context, I had a friend who ran his over 3 times with his dad’s mack truck, reducing it to just a screen and PCB which he used as his phone at school. Then I watched him accidentally drop and fully submerge said screen and PCB into a half foot deep puddle while we ran down a mountain in a thunderstorm and that sucker still worked.

It was his experiment, to keep trying to destroy it to the point where he couldn’t use it but have to use it if it did. I think it died not too long after, though.

90’s kid with smoker parents. You made do with the migraines. It was the absolute worst in winter car rides on bright days. Blinding snow plus second hand smoke migraine and no rolling down the window more than a tiny crack. Pure hell.

Can confirm, I had a heck of a time figuring out Bluetooth and sound myself. The distro I was using came with Bluetooth hard disabled and PulseAudio by default. The wiki, these four packages, and setting my Bluetooth to autostart on login got everything working with minimal hassle.