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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 19th, 2023

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  • I have a 2002 Ford F-150 7700 4×4 with about 320,000 km on it. I should be up in the 450k range right about 2032, assuming civilization hasn’t collapsed and fuel is still broadly available.

    It was my father’s truck, so I am quite invested in keeping it in good repair. About the only things not working are the AC, the rear window trim (when it rains), and the radio (haven’t been arsed to track down the fuse that blew). Everything else is in decent to great condition for a truck just shy of a quarter century. Runs like a dream, not a single leak on the engine.


  • For many places, it’s operational inertia. If you’ve had a hosting account at the same place since 1998, you’re bound to still have username/password access to services like FTP even though other (and better) options exist.

    And then there is the issue of sole control. Many greybeards like myself still run traditional username/password auth on services because,

    1. We have whitelisted our IP address, and if dynamic, keep that whitelist updated
    2. That outside of said whitelisting, the service is a quasi-honeypot meant to protect the machine as a whole. Any connection made from outside the address space of my ISP, by anyone else, is by default considered malicious, and is banned instantly as a precaution. They don’t even get the opportunity to attempt a login; merely connecting to said service is sufficient evidence of hostile intent.

    So while my setup is not ideal, it is ideal for myself. if I had anyone else as co-admin, or even clients, things would get stupidly complicated very quickly. But since it’s just me…


  • I’m wondering whether Europeans the other 96% of humanity

    There, FTFY.

    And yes, the other 96% of humanity would very much like to see Imperial measurements die.

    Hell, as a Canadian born after 1970, I wouldn’t understand almost all Imperial measurements even if they smacked me clear in the forehead. About the most I have ever used are inches, feet, and pounds, and only because they’ve hung on in tightly-linked-to-America blue-collar industries and (until about a decade ago) grocery stores. I would have zero clue how much a cup or a Florida Ounce is.


  • Piracy is the response when companies refuse to serve market needs.

    I mean, there will always be people trying to get something for free when they normally have no problem affording it or obtaining it personally. It’s why the Parasite Class continue to drive down wages while raising prices for that sweet labour-free profit margin, even though they already have obscene amounts of wealth. Their boundless greed demands they squeeze even more out of the Working Class whose labour is the source of all wealth.

    So yeah, there we’ll always be some people who will pirate purely for the fish.

    But in the end, any significant piracy is 100% the fault of those very companies that complain about it.








  • I kept reading about people having trouble during the restore process.

    It is Duplicati, and IMHO restores work best if they aren’t restores-in-place. As in, dump the restores in a central location then drag-and-drop the data into place. Most of the issues I have heard of involve restoring data and settings back to where it originally was backed up from, and restoring directly back to those places - other than fully user-controlled directories, such as Documents or Photos - seems to be problematic.

    Other than that, I have been using it for nearly a decade and have done a number of restores - after total drive deaths, so not just accidentally deleted files - to great success.

    The downside is that tweaking backups from within the hidden C:\Users\[username]\AppData\ directory involves many days of whack-a-mole to exclude untouchable normally-in-use files so you don’t get scads of errors in the backup process. Plus, there are a fair number of entries in there that don’t really need backing up. But once you get that to settle down, it’s largely smooth it’s-set-so-forget-it sailing.





  • Since a long press on any key doesn’t bring any of those up, my method involved going to the text replacement section of the system settings, and doing a replacement entry. I copy the glyph from wherever I find it on the Internet and assign a unique string (the “shortcut”) to have iOS insert it. I’ve used a reliable pattern, such as (degc) (yes, including the brackets) for ℃. You need to choose a string that you will never otherwise use, otherwise you’ll be fighting against the text replacement.

    Using this method I’ve added all sorts of special characters like fractions ¼ ⅙ ⅛ mathematical symbols ± « ≈ ≠ and even text emoji ಠ_ಠ ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ and other random symbols № ® ™.

    Fun fact: if you have an AppleID-linked Mac, this will all sync over, letting you use these shortcuts on the Mac as well.


  • They’re trying to be edgy and use the obsolete thorn character (þ) everywhere you would normally pronounce “th”.

    While I usually enjoy rifling through the UTF-8 character set for better/more-appropriate glyphs such as curly quotes instead of straight quotes and the numero glyph instead of the hash/pound symbol, the thorn character ain’t going to be making a comeback.

    Edit: fun fact, even the temperature symbols have their own fully-assembled glyphs — Fahrenheit ℉ and Celsius ℃ come fully assembled as a single character glyph that you can use without having to cobble together shit. One of my biggest annoyances is seeing the degree glyph (which a math glyph, and has NOTHING to do with temperature) mashed together with a letter in a wholly inappropriate Frankensteining.