degrees57

I have the PayPal on Firefox problem. Once I see it, I just give up and use a credit card instead.

Off on a bit of a tangent, I 100% agree with you, and that was probably the best feature of California's Prop 13 from 1978. After it passed, the projected income to Sacramento was rock-solid for decades. California doesn't have an income problem; it has a spending problem.

Still, I would welcome the opportunity to let Sacramento know that, in my opinion, they spend too much on education and welfare and not enough on infrastructure.

You have to get acquired by Microsoft first.

Thank you! This was fun.

I had to learn WordPress to help a local org, so I went ahead and did my own blog for fun: https://www.gerisch.org/

Same. I am thankful that this sort of article shows up here.

I'd rather be a big fish in a small pond than a minnow in Microsoft's ocean.

My brother went looking for an N100 with the quietest fan, and gave it to me for Christmas two years ago. It has been an excellent little desktop with no discernable noise that I can tell. Morefine M8S, fwiw.

I was hoping to see a mention of Odex 1 by Odetics. I was working in a printed circuit board factory at the time (1983), and we got to build boards for it. Later on, there was a demo where it lifted one end of a small pickup truck off the ground.

I donate to FutureMe.org because I like the service, and want to see it continue. I used to be able to schedule a monthly donation through Paypal (I think), but something happened, and now I have to remember to send a donation out every year.

My other donations go out monthly to Internet Archive, EFF, and Thunderbird.

There for a while, The TOR Project had a thing where I could contribute by running (paying for) a node on a hosting provider (I think it might have been AWS?). That effort died on the vine and was shut down.

For content creators, I donate to Phoronix.

Yes, and in my opinion, this was what killed Slashdot.

I agree with you, and think that if Slashdot were to do a rebirth, it might succeed. Of course, they'd have to figure out what went wrong and put in mechanisms to prevent that.

But the five vote options (insightful, interesting, funny, off-topic, troll) were _useful_. Having a feed based on the score of votes plus friend bonus, friend-of-a-friend bonus, foe penalty, friend-of-a-foe penalty gave me a super news feed I stuck with for almost a decade.

I could see a more complex voting rule set being helpful. But basically, it was really good until it wasn't, and that was a problem of the people behind the scenes there, and not the system itself.

I switched my default search engine in my browser to perplexity.ai a few months ago and am super happy with it. The only time I use Google anymore is to specifically visit www.google.com and put site:example.com in the search field, when I know the results I am looking for are only found within that site. I've only had to do that five or six times in the last few months.

And yes, just plain old Google search is completely lackluster in comparison to the perplexity.ai search I get to do today.

I always liked that on SuSE, I had my choice with YaST of either the Ncurses interface or the GUI X Window System. The functionality was identical, but sometimes a GUI is pleasant.

Dude, you're taking the easy way out. Please go purist and pull the wiring boards out of the closet.

Thank you; I didn't know that Brave has a peer-to-peer sync.

Thank you. I was unaware of this.

I'd like to ask if there is a bookmark sync function and plugin sync function in any of these alternatives.

It does seem to me that Mozilla corporation management has become corrupted, and will only get worse; so I'd like to move off Mozilla Firefox and onto something else.

But I really like that when I wipe a machine and install a new OS, first I install the Bitwarden plugin, then that lets me log in to the Mozilla account, and then that syncs down all my plugins and bookmarks into Firefox. I really like my Temporary Containers plugin in Firefox, for example, in addition to uBlock Origin. But all of them, really: the GNU Terry Pratchet plugin is fun.

The Mozilla Firefox solution does also work both on Linux and Windows.

If there is some other form of sync for plugins and bookmarks, then I'd leap at Librewolf or Waterfox or Icecat. But I am unaware of a sync solution that would work.

Anyone have something they like? I can self-host if that is an option.

Okay, that actually made me laugh. Thanks.

My mom had subscribed to Scientific American for more than twenty years (maybe 30), but for this very reason stopped her subscription a few years ago. It had turned from informing its readers about science to political posturing. She was sad that she's lost a previously intellectually valuable resource.

I suspect we'll eventually get something like a Substack for Science author (editor) on a subscription model that will do long form pieces and invite SMEs to talk about their stuff.

I'm not a fan of email + magic link. I know of two security gateways which "click" on the link to check to see if it ends up going to a known malicious website. So then the end user calls in a trouble ticket, because the login authorization page says their magic link is already expired (before they even got it).

So for me, email + email OTP is the way to go.

I learned COBOL in college just to learn it, and I loved the verbosity of it. Verbosity was kind of the point: if you name your variables properly, you have self-documenting code.

Yes, the processing COBOL does is restricting, but then my first full-time programming job was two and a half years writing RPG II code. COBOL would have been an upgrade.

Agreed about learning bookkeeping. I was a programmer on a minicomputer decades ago, and when the bookkeeper spoke debits and credits at me, I stared back like a deer in the headlights (I had an engineering education). When I asked the bookkeeper if that was like positive and negative integers, she stared back at me like a deer in the headlights. I went to night school and learned bookkeeping. Turned out to be a very useful skill, both in my professional career and personally.

I'm quite happy with my PHEV. I charge at night at home, and have even gone a whole month without needing to get gasoline (in town driving only). But when I need to drive a long distance, it's a complete non-issue to find a gas station after 550 miles.

Yes, generally the taxpayer pays. I work for a County local government. When we lose a case, we have our litigation insurance pay. Then the insurance policy rate immediately goes up.

Sometimes the government employee does something so agregious that we say "we cannot defend you: you are on your own" but that is really rare.

I don't think they keep them for very long. I know that my organization looked at purchasing Smarsh, which hooks in to the API that providers present so that Smarsh can do it's archiving. IIRC, there was a short time limit (not a whole lot of days) on being able to retrieve the messages from the providers.

Also, if I'm a provider, keeping all those text messages is going to be a more of a liability than a benefit. It's an expense for storage and retrieval. I'm not sure they would really make any money off of maintaining a long history; it would be super rare that this would pay off. Better to just state that "after n days, they are gone, we're done. Archiving is up to you, the customer."

My school district got one; I assume they did accounting on it. RPG would be a good fit for accounting. But also, they taught programming to us students. I learned FORTRAN on one of these in 1979. 4K RAM and punched cards.

I thought about it more, and you are correct that Reddit enables private subreddits. My circle of friends on the Internet have one - but we've stopped using it. For me, a problem was that Reddit itself became polluted by influencers, so I avoid it (the whole site) as much as possible now. Since Discord hasn't had that problem, it was an easy, pleasant move to make.

Reddit suffers from intruders trying to influence. With Discord, you won't find my group of friends to intrude upon, because we won't invite you.

Yes, somewhat. It started as email -only, but then later added NextCloud file services. The hardware is passively cooled, so nice and quiet.

Although I'm sad that the system is going to shut down, I'm glad that they are doing the right thing and are going to let me move the domain name I have to some other service.