Where I live temperatures can reach -30C in winter and 30C in summer, so storing anything “sensible” in a shed is a very bad idea. Everything has to be stored in a controlled environment or it will quickly get moldy and rusty.

However, I kept my old 5.25" diskettes in a box where they were a bit squeezed together and they obviously didn’t like that. It could also just be time. Anyways, a few years ago I decided to copy everything on hard drives and some diskettes were now unreadable.

I waited too long to backup them and now it’s too late for some of them.

And even stored “properly”, I also have burned CDs from the early 2000 that are also unreadable. It’s unfortunate but there’s nothing I can do now, except to learn and remember the lesson.

I’m always baffled by people that find old computers stored in barns and still working. Where I am I don’t think they would last more than two winters with this kind of temperature and humidity variation.

The hunt for the cofounders of torrent site The Pirate Bay was a lengthy game of cat-and-mouse, spanning several continents. In the end, Fredrik Neij, Peter Sunde and Gottfrid Svartholm all ended up in prison.

How often do you switch email address and provider?

Mine still takes several seconds to boot android TV just so it can display the HDMI input, even if not connected to internet. It has to be always plugged on the power because if there is a power cut, it needs to boot android TV again.

My old dumb TV did that in a second without booting an entire OS. Next time I need a big screen, it will be a computer monitor.

That’s excellent for their clients. I’m guessing it set a precedent and the industry stopped trying anything else.

I didn’t follow the most recent developments here in Canada but AFAIK, a decade ago the industry tried to sue individuals that were “pirating”, and lost because they couldn’t proof that an IP could be associated with a single person, or something like that. Then the industry pretty much stopped trying to sue individuals from that point. They still send the threatening letters, but they don’t do anything else because past experiences with our courts didn’t go well for them.

Of course, there is a very very slim chance that the industry will try to sue a few individuals to scare others and create a new precedent, but it’s going to be a civil suit because it’s not even criminal here.

Meh. I don’t know about OP but where I live ISPs are forced to relay the legal notice, but nothing more happens. There is no prosecution and nobody will knock on my door.

I have been torrenting on and off since the protocol exists and never once hid my IP. My ISP relays me the threats from the industry, I ignore them, and continue what I was doing before. Same for everyone in my country. Those that end up paying for a VPN and hiding their IP are just intimidated onto doing so, because of the threats. But again, aside from getting that threatening email, nobody will knock on your door for torrenting here.

Are you a native English speaker in an English speaking country looking for English pages?

Because as a French speaker, when I tried DDG a few years ago, it was pretty hard to have some useful results. Like, I was looking for some local results and they were nowhere to be found.

I know it got better, that it’s possible to tweak this, and that I should try it again. But because the first impression wasn’t good for me, it made me dubious about giving it another try.

I’m using Android but I can give you a few personal examples on why I still prefer mobile websites to apps.

1. The place where I take weather has a shitty app full of ads and always sending notifications. They don’t have PWA offered on their site but just going through a browser instead of the app is significantly better.

2. YouTube’s app is also full of ads. So I use the mobile website in Firefox with uBlock Origin.

3. Again with awful apps full of ads. Twitter is also much more tolerable through the mobile website. There’s no autoplay on FF and again, ads blocked.

4. I still use IRC and my client is web based, so that I can see pictures and videos in my chats. The web based IRC client (The Lounge) offers PWA and it’s very nice to have the thing in a “clean” browser.

Again, I don’t use Apple for reasons like this, but Firefox is already pretty bad with PWA and having those possibilities mangled or removed wouldn’t be acceptable to me.

Maybe you don’t use a browser on mobile and just do everything through terrible apps. Maybe most people do the same. But if you don’t use it, why do you care if those using it want to retain the possibility to do so?

I personally don’t watch TV so nobody watches TV anymore, right?

Yet to me, G4 represents the downfall of TechTV and when everything became pretty bad.

The Screen Savers, Call for Help, X-Play… then G4 merged with TechTV and everything went downhill.

TechTV was the sole reason why I had satellite TV. When G4 turned it into a full gaming channel instead of a tech one, I just cancelled my subscription.

If you own your music, you can have it in a digital format and copy it somewhere else.

I’m an old millennial that started with dial-up and downloaded MP3s from IRC/Napster/Kazaa/torrents.

Eventually I started to buy what I could on CD then ripped them, then bought MP3s when possible. Otherwise I don’t mind using yt-dlp.

Those MP3s have been played by a portable CD player, then a Samsung MP3 player, then 3 or 4 phones. I’m still playing that collection on my actual phone, using Poweramp.

The device that plays the files may not last but you can certainly copy those elsewhere and do what you want with them, for as long as you want.

Of course there is a detailed list of all the chairs that have appeared in Star Trek. I never thought I’d say this about chairs but… interesting.

I’m a tech and not a serious programmer but I really like scripting with bash. It’s an easy way to automate and program tasks while also manipulating data.

For example, I’ve automated reports for my work and made lots of screen scraping scripts.

It’s my go to for anything. I’ve recently started to learn python but often catch myself thinking it would be easier to accomplish most of what I want with a bash script.

And my least favorite has to be Tcl. It’s one of the first serious languages I “learned”, because eggdrops in the 90ies, and I still don’t like it.

It depends on your instance. I have account on lemmy.world and it’s indeed been having stability issues. However some other instances seem a bit more stable, like lemmy.ca.

I’ve seen posts on lemmy.world asking for more voluntary admins because of the sudden growth. And apparently they are also the preferred instance to be attacked.