Always been a bloke in the pub or car boot or whatever that can supply hooky dvds or games or hacked satellite, FAST always talks tough about busting them.

Early eights it was disk and tape trading, mostly tape trading in the UK. Was a way more social activity.

Late 80s and early 90s, it was all disk, and you really needed a connected friend who could get the menu disks (custom pirated compilation disks). These were often super hoarded, only traded for a lot of games, like certain private trackers today.

Very early web stuff was all usenet and ftp servers, often hosted at a university. If you knew where to look, anything was accessible.

Early 2000s was a golden period of easy access. It would be slow, and the quality would often be low if it was a video or mp3. It’s gotten harder to find the obscure stuff as time has gone on. I

t’s like the scene only remembers out and out classics or the latest thing outside of some niche places.

I use powershell for work as I need the m365 modules for work and its very flexible with decent module availability to plug in all sorts.

However it absolutely sucks for large data handling, anything over 10k rows is just horrendous, I typically work with a few million rows. You can make it work with using .Net to process it within your script but its something to be aware of. Being able to extend with .Net can be extremely useful.

I switched from Pop OS tiling that I had retro bolted onto stock ubuntu to Sway, massive step up and more importantly I get to keep my Ubuntu/Wayland base.

As with most add on WMs I had a bit of a learning curve sorting out the extra bits and pieces that just come stock as part of Ubuntus Gnome implementation such as a launcher (I use dmenu), a menu bar (swaybar for me), and even a lock screen (swayidle). Even doing things like wallpaper needed more effort.

Gravy or curry sauce

I use powershell by default on windows and I prefer it for scripting any day of the week vs. shell scripts. It’s not the fastest but you can always plug in .net to your scripts to dramatically improve performance. Sure, I could write the script in rust or whatever to make it even faster, but that’s way more work than I need for the lifespan of the script.

UK you have the concept of black box car insurance that offered a substantial discount for having either a dedicated device installed into the car or an app on your phone that tracks a bunch of stats as you drive. It’s as shit as it sounds as it marks you down for every little infringement such as driving at peak times because that’s more dangerous. Get enough points and you can have your policy cancelled. In the UK there are knock on effects for ever having an insurance policy cancelled and you have to legally declare you did when asked.

While you can uninstall the app good luck making a claim if you don’t have it installed with data for that journey. They’d also be pretty suss with no data over an extended period of a few months.

Worst part of these is that it’s expensive to switch to a non black box policy when you can afford to as you get older and more experienced.

Not the OP but having got rid of my Flair as it was too painful to get great coffee out of at 6am every morning, the learning curve is very steep unless you are already familiar with making espresso.

Servers I run Debian, I do not want flashy I just want stable and tested security fixes.

I could not hack being that far behind for my desktop OS however (which I run on three different devices), so I run Ubuntu, which I remove as much Ubuntu and Gnome baggage as possible such as snaps and by running Sway.

I should really swap to a different distro that also has Debian as its root but without the stuff I don’t want and Sway by default. However I also want stuff to be simple and up to date, as I make my money on my desktop PCs, I cannot afford for it to be a PITA every time I try to install patches.

I do have one PC running arch, but its mostly for the memes (and for PIKVM)

I did used to be Red Hat through and through. I started with Linux back in 98 using Red Hat CD ROMs, but I left for Debian over some previous controversy that I do not remember now, years before the Centos stuff.

Ha, love the audio tell of the resource stealing

One of my favourite wars was to open audio files on other people’s SPARCs, somebody had the loudest bag pipe music that usually ended things.

Access to the SPARCs was normally restricted to third year but if you knew the right person you could get an account created pretty easily. Had the fastest access to the internet at the time within the uni as well.

Stories like that make me glad when I had the choice as a kid to go to Chef School or to get into Software Eng. I chose Software Eng. At the time it was down to the normal working hours being better for why I chose Tech, but as toxic and exploitive as Tech can be, it just seems to be nowhere near as bad as all of food service.

I still wonder what my life would be like if I had chosen to be a chef, and I still really enjoy cooking.

While I really dislike Amazon I can email ebooks including pdfs and epubs direct to my kindle, I don’t even need to go get it and plug it in and I can do this from my phone if I want.

If I have something really funky I can use calibre to convert and then email, or if it’s really big I can always plug it in and transfer directly.

There are a lot of reasons to not like Amazon products but the kindle is actually pretty good considering who makes it.

Yes, I was aware, just hijacking the top comment as not everybody would have been aware it was actually fucking possible in the past

It used to be able to do it via an experimental feature, then they took that feature away. https://www.dignited.com/114084/how-to-relocate-the-chrome-address-bar-on-your-android-device/

It smacks of some VP of product development hating on the concept, despite it being optional, and wont back down over the decision. Most likely they used the navigation buttons on the bottom and this caused their great big sausage fingers a problem.

Another fan of pikvm, love mine. I have it plugged into a HDMI switcher so I can control four boxes from one pikvm. It does use some pins so if you wanted to control the power switches you have to do some extra work.

Worth considering if you want to get a UPS at the same time for the NAS, pikvm and any networking you have. Will all last longer with one to avoid random power cuts or surges.

If you need to access it remotely I would strongly suggest getting wireguard or some other reliable VPN setup rather than exposing the web interface to pikvm directly to the internet.

Starlink, mostly because of Musk being Musk, but also because the replacement schedule of the satellites is against what I would prefer for a more sustainable service. Yeah I am well aware of why they replace them that often but I would rather they didn’t.

I only use the service as I travel in a RV a lot, 4g/5g just cannot compete for high speed internet in the middle of nowhere or even the middle of somewhere, and that’s with a proper roof mounted and powerful external aerial. Cost vs. Other mobile satellite services starlink is just massively cheaper for large amounts of data. It seems expensive compared to 4g or 5g but it really isn’t when compared to satellite services.

I did not know that about Zoom, but would make sense given how stubborn the Gnome lot are that such a terrible bodge is required rather than them working with others.

The one that got me with them was when they banned third party screenshot tools from using the default screenshotting hooks. They cited security concerns, which is valid as it stops malware from hijacking this, however rather than adding the ability to add to a user controlled allow list (or any other potential workaround) they just rejected working with anybody on fixing this issue. Instead it came off as a transparent attempt to push their own screenshotting tool.

I did an in place upgrade to testing about a month ago on my PIs after running Bookworm on x86 VMs since it came out. Worked fine for me but my usage is pretty light compared to some as they are headless servers for me and I can rebuild really quickly if I had needed to from backups.

Today I had a shed load of updates per PI, about 160 packages so I guessed it had gone live.