televisions of the near future when you first turn them on: “Internet connection and account required to complete initial product set up.”

i remember “playing” typer shark a long time ago. i think it still exists somewhere today.

i suck with the number row, too, because i was ill and in the hospital during that part of the term i took a typing class during high school. text i can do at ~ 100wpm and i’m a monster on 10-key, standard or inverted. while i am getting better in the decades since, the number row and the symbols on it still slow me down.

i don’t need weed to do that.

if you overdo the grains (like cold cereal), you might experience an unintended side-effect later.

… which, in firefox, is either off by default or can be switched off.

i have my boss’s old one here that’s pretty much only used for testing mobile web and for its camera. i use a ‘dumb’ phone, and its camera doesn’t work (was crap-tier anyway when it did). i think it has 10 on it. it doesn’t leave the office, doesn’t get used that much, and has no google account linked to it anymore since it was totally reset when it was replaced earlier in the year… the inability to use google play to install a few apps reduces its usefulness. i got f-droid on it but not everything is available from it.

if that’s all you need it to do: browser, kitra, libreoffice and not much else… any mainstream distribution will work.

fedora’s ‘atomic’ distributions tick your boxes. minimal terminal exposure, hard to break, and infrequent demands of user password.

silverblue (gnome) or kinoite (kde). kde is a traditional desktop experience, but gnome would be excellent for your rather basic set-up.

take a look at endless os.

https://www.endlessglobal.com/foundation/access/operating-system

specifically, the ‘full’ install with all the goodies and content ‘preinstalled’.

notes from personal experience (i use endless at home): don’t be tempted by the ability to install alongside windows and dual boot. it’s not optimal by any stretch. that configuration uses windows as the boot manager (windows has to basically boot to get to that menu), and endless and its data is then stored in a loop device (slow, especially with old hdd). do a normal install (use the ‘advanced’ option in the windows installer to make an ‘endless usb stick’ then choose the ‘full’ image). you will need a 64gb flash drive for an english language ‘full’ installer of the current (6.0.8) version.

the form itself is easy, it’s the bot detection and spam prevention that’s hard. on my own sites, i’ve given-in and use the highest-level recaptcha, a hidden form field triggered by bots but not humans, and a server-side script for the mailing that also has some spam detection routines. they still get through, but far less often than a naked form would.

if you’re satisfied with your existing comments function, can you simply enable comments on your ‘contact’ page and hide them from public view?

if they have shown any interest at all in programming, regular expressions is another topic that would be worthwhile to start learning ‘early’.

One. Two. Three. Four. Five?

That’s amazing. I’ve got the same combination on my luggage.

i’ve got one user who has refused to update their win7 system for a full decade–literally the entire lifecycle of win10. offered to set up a dual boot for her and she seemed to be receptive of that–even bought a nice big ssd drive for it, but she never used it and never upgraded. husband says that ssd is still in the damn box sitting on a shelf. i expect to hear from her when that now tired old hdd in her (i think) wolfdale-era win7 finally craps out.

Literally no one is throwing away a working machine just because some deadline passes.

yes. yes they are. we’ve taken in a lot more ‘junk’ systems over the last six months than we ever have.

many of those who aren’t tossing their pc on the heap are paying for the updates or jumping through the link-and-sync bullshit for them.

microsoft’s scare tactics work, and work very well.

yup. i have a bunch of users that won’t be happy. they only still have fb for messenger, use the messenger app, and never go to fb itself anymore.

have to have PiHoles and other DNS sinkholes for a basic protection, which is hard for regular people

mullvad’s free dns. free for all, not just their subscribers. encrypted doh or dot only. a basic ad and malware blocking dns sinkhole is a fairly simple configuration away if your os supports it (win11 and android do… those are what i’ve set it up on for others so far).

https://mullvad.net/en/help/dns-over-https-and-dns-over-tls

not a whole lot of takers here either, and not a single one yet due to win10’s “retirement”.

everyone wants windows. but after that, most are pretty receptive of other foss options like libreoffice.

while a straight dvi-d to dvi-d cable is quite uncommon to need today, i have used a bunch of hdmi to dvi-d adapter cables the last couple months to hook up new desktops to older displays that had vga and dvi-d inputs.

just give 'em time. it’s still a bit early in the game for that play

iirc, they did do a limited regional test of subscription windows back sometime during win7.