Sylamore

I remember back in the early seasons of the show, logging into Delphi (the VAX hosted text forum) immediately after to chat with other fans and sometimes people involved in show production. There were huge threads about the David Duchovny Estrogen Brigade (actually there were a bunch of these, but DDEB was the biggest by far) and the Gillian Anderston Testosterone Brigade, lots of fanfic, consipirary analysis and more. It made it feel like more than just a show and more like a community.

It does, though it was obviously setting up a future season things wrap up well enough. I wouldn't be mad to watch it again.

It was annoying because my previous house had some z-wave enabled thermostats I could manage through the alarm system without any of that BS, I thought the honeywell in this rental would be nicer but all it's done is confirm I'll be using something other than honeywell controls in my next house.

Resido - the app for honeywell smart thermostats - requires notifications to be enabled to view or manage your thermostat settings or run time history. This is relatively recent because I had disabled notifications over a year ago due to it pushing ads to me.

The good news is you can limit it to only showing badges, but you have to at least have that enabled or it just freezes on a blank screen after telling you to edit your settings.

Sadly it made my ex-wife worse off than before - she went from a functioning anxious person to being completely overwhelmed by anxiety all the time.

Some, the majority didn't care and of course we had the unfortunate few that were more than happy to help the company because they thought it would help earn them brownie points. We all got laid off the same in the end.

When I worked for a certain large telco, we used to get emails from our "CEO of {State Name}" asking us to support their lobbying efforts to shut down community ISP initiatives by donating to their PAC and contacting our legislators trying to make it look like there was grassroots support. These state level CEOs were strictly lobbyists.

Considering the company I worked for didn't even serve the community I lived in but multiple startups wanted to provide us fiber service but ran into all the road blocks my telco and others pushed, I was less than thrilled knowing the company i worked for was actively trying to block providing better internet to older neighborhoods.

I used to do that, now I just keep a OneNote with the things that would have been blog entries once upon a time - it's available across all my devices and I can export it to PDF when I do need to share something with someone - and I don't have to worry about someone defacing or hacking the site hosting it.

Email has the stigma of all the junk/grey mail, spam and scam attempts that come in via it - people want to not have to filter through as much of that and for the most part these chat apps solve that problem.

It doesn't help that Outlook's search capabilities have gotten effectively useless - I can type in search terms that I'm literally looking at in my inbox and have it return no results, or have it return dozens of hits without the search terms involved at all. I don't have that problem with Slack or Teams.

However, I think you are right overall on email being better overall for what people end up using chat apps for.

NC DMV replaced their regular forms with a chat bot and it's horrible. Takes forever to complete tasks that used to take less than a minute because of the fake interaction and fake typing. Just give me a damn form to pay my taxes or request a custom plate.

Disclaimer: I didn't vote for Trump/Vance and I'm deeply uncomfortable with the stuff happening with DOGE in particular.

All the republicans have to do for the 2026 midterms and Vance for 2028 is play clips from the DNC Officer election process that took place over the weekend as campaign ads.

Many of my friends can only perceive the election outcome and the actions currently taking place from a place of identity based policies. Virtually everyone I know outside of that circle and many inside that circle who keep their mouths shut are tired of that being THE focus.

Telcos I've touched have used Tandems for E911, SMS processing, Device authorization, and automated tariff negotiation between CLEC/ILEC, but FTP server is a new one!

I recently watched this channels videos on B-52 Astro tracking navigation system repairs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nkvN74wuT8w&list=PL-_93BVApb...

He's got a bunch of other vintage electronics stuff that's from the early space program as well, interesting stuff to see the insides of that gear.

HP BladeSystem p-series chassis were all DC bus bar powered back in the mid 2000s. You had a power enclosure which provided DC output to one or more chassis in a rack over the bus bar. We were glad to be rid of those blades but it wasn't because of their power configuration.

InfiniBand would make more sense than Fibre Channel

I know at one point Microsoft and IBM both invested significantly in studying UX research. It doesn't feel like that's happening or if it is, I guess I must be drifting out of touch with what's considered intuitive in user interfaces. It's not just MS either, I feel like the ability to discover what you can do in an app/site any more is hidden by aesthetic choices over functional ones.

I remember being pulled into user surveys and usability studies while wandering the mall back in the day and being given series of tasks to accomplish on various iterations of a windows GUI (in the Windows 9x era) while they observed, and then paid $100 for my time for each one I participated in.

Speaking of Tandem Databases, HP had released the SQL engine behind SQL/MX[0] as open source (Trafodion) running in front of Hadoop to the Apache Software Foundation but it appears they have shutdown the project[1].

[0] https://thenewstack.io/sql-hadoop-database-trafodion-bridges...

[1] https://attic.apache.org/projects/trafodion.html

Kinda the other way around, the NonStop kernel can present a Guardian personality or an OSS (Open Systems Services) linux-like compatible personality. The OSS layer is basically running on top of the NSK/Guardian native layer but allows you to compile most linux software.

Many people who use natural gas in the mountains of NC/TN right now are without any access because even the buried infrastructure there got destroyed.

Unless you are using an VPN, your ISP can see the IPs you are communicating with regardless of the hostnames associated with them and in turn resolve those back to hostnames or at least netblock owners.

Likewise I am convinced the "not interested" option does nothing, now I just straight block those pages/people when it shows up - the algorithm will send me another of nearly the same content but I keep blocking them and now a lot of that content is gone from my timeline, but FB is really convinced I want to see non-stop steam/model train and WWII content.

Or the non-stop dust from the wind and aridity.

Xcode is free if you don't consider the platform cost of needing to have only apple hardware to use it, however (generally) the hardware is cheaper than what MS charges for MSDN/VSE.

MS Authenticator will show the codes for TOTP if you go to the hamburger menu and select "show codes".

I had a bank that did this and it took me months to figure out WTH every time I tried to logon it failed, but when you reset the password it accepted longer length passwords while silently truncating them and getting you back into the account. I finally figured out their max password length was 8 characters anything longer would result in failures past the initial logon after a reset.

I know many companies I worked for in CA and CO did that at least for their parking garage gates but NOT for their building control readers, even though it was the same badge.

Not a user of either of those but that sounds an awful lot like "Reveal Codes" from WordPerfect which saved my ass more than once when formatting got screwed up in a document.

That has been my strategy for the last decade or so, Unless I have a solid reason to I never use my real name when placing orders and generally never the same fake name twice, always use a virtual credit card, if it's a non-physical product I don't even use my real address. I have some old phones I throw pre-paid sim cards into when I need to do number confirmation. The goal is to create a little consistent linkable data to me and at least generate some noise in all these data broker collection processes.

Yeah as recently as this last week with tech peers, apparently "search for" came across as "look for this in sharepoint" not to search for it on the internet, but "google it" instantly was understood.

Yeah, I still say "Google it" even though I've been using DDG and more recently Kagi for years - I discovered saying anything else seems to lose people when trying to help them. Even just saying "search for" gives me deer in the headlight responses until I say "search on google".