Also you can’t just write “HACK THE PLANET!” in marker on a tiny USB drive or microSD card…So that’s points against, right there.

Okay for real though… storage size? Terrible I agree.

But I’ve been kinda obsessed lately with the form factor of diskettes. They’re:

• Not super easy to lose (looking at for you, nanoSD)
• They’re easily labeled.
• Unlike flash drives, aren’t vulnerable to snagging and getting ripped out of the machine or damaging the port when inserted.
• Easily stacked or filed away.
• Most importantly: Make a nice satisfying “ka-chunk” when inserting into a drive.
• Satisfyingly fly out of said drive when you push the eject button firmly.

Nowadays, if we made a diskette that basically replaced the magnetic disc with flash memory, and the shutter protected the connectors, you could hypothetically store like 1TB in that space, it could likely be read super fast, and would obviously be way more reliable than the old “Oh no a speck of dust ruined my 2MB file” of old floppies.

I’d even settle for an open standard akin to Sony’s chunky little Memory Sticks…I liked those.

Worked for a public library in the U.S.

It was eye-opening and soul crushing how many people were there just because the government/insurance/medical/legal/whatever was forcing them to fax pages.

What’s more hilarious is that faxes are only in black and white…and these jokers would demand faxed IDs and licenses…and then complain when all the pretty-pretty reflective anti-counterfeit layers resulted in a mostly black blob rectangle.

We had to use some scanner that basically “e-faxed” it anyway. It took a long time per page, charged $1/per, BTW, and after it connected to a kind of “courier server” it would attempt to establish the phone line connection.

This would routinely time out and require you to hit “retry” before it just closed and erased everything you just did.

Even then, it would regularly encounter some random connection error and…close and erase everything you just did.

…Sending so many stupid faxes was a huge motivator behind quitting that clown show, among a million other things lol.

“We may have been on the losing side, still not convinced it was the wrong one.” --Captain Malcolm Reynolds

I’ve seen videos of people doing this for fun to see what happens.

Sadly now it’s not even fun “for teh lulz” kinda compromise, either. Everything is just a million varieties of crypto miner or ransomware now.

Kinda reminds me of the same feeling I got when first opening the inventory UI in my preordered copy of Skyrim for the first time. 😬

I remember being enamored with VMUs.

I thought it was so neat plugging something into your controller that seemed somewhere between a miniature GameBoy, a pistol mag, and a N64 rumble pak.

No kidding. Or how we just got used to Morrowind’s erm…“unique” hit system and weapons actually collided in Oblivion, with real physics!

And I still remember that trailer shot of walking down the hallway with the traps and casting a fireball while still holding a sword. It was such a crazy feature update!

“Close shut the jaws…OF OBLIVION”

And…yeah…today’s game industry is more “How can we make Ai enhanced 24k textures so the game is a 1.5 TB install, but streamline it so entire armor sets are a single item and we remove half the skills from previous titles.”

I really liked Skyrim, but definitely disagreed with how “opinionated” the games got about how you were supposed to play them…

Hey there, a little late to the party maybe but I think you might wanna consider Nextcloud Memories!

https://apps.nextcloud.com/apps/memories

I’m not AS big on the rest of Nextcloud (but NC is really cool), but Memories alone makes it worth it. I haven’t messed with making albums a whole lot yet, but basically it works a lot like Immich, except I’m pretty sure it respects folders and uses the directory. It’s got object/face tagging and reverse-geocoding.

Also sorts everything by EXIF so you don’t end up with that awkward “All my memories happened yesterday” scenario.

Also has an app to auto-upload. I use Tailscale to connect my phone safely to my network, and it uploads when I plug it in to charge.

Jitsi is amazing. Even during 2020 it always has worked way better than Zoom for me, and I haven’t even tried hosting it myself.

One of my absolute favorite features of the game “Hacknet” was finding these logs in various filesystems you hack into. Such a nice touch.

I made it a personal mission to copy them to myself before exiting the target. I distinctly remember the one about “duck stand-up comedy” too lol.

Keep calm and wipe the logs. :)

I particularly seem to be into stuff that my community isn’t feverishly trying to rent. That helps haha. Traditional paper books too, I could keep renewing them for a stupid amount of time because they didn’t end up on hold. Found out the limit was 255 renewals until they suddenly dropped it to like 10 max. :(

But sadly all the good nerd stuff like R.A. Salvatore books or Discworld always has queues, yeah.