There’s tons of these? I’ve been using DizqueTV for like five years without issue.

Like we don’t have child labor here in the good ol’ USA.

Hell yeah, dude.

Hey if your list of projects isn’t insurmountable what are you even doing with your life?

Most carriers have an email to sms gateway address Usually your [email protected] or similar.

I feel you, trying to find a smart gadget that is actually smart in 2025 and not just a data collector is nearly impossible. Learning to DIY a lot of these projects. Throw one of these or similar in there with a little control board set to email you if 0 changes to 1 or w/e

That’s at least like… Ten crunchwrap Supremes!

^Wow ^this ^user ^has ^all ^the ^same ^hobbies ^as ^me, ^maybe ^my ^people ^are ^out ^there… ^Oh ^wait ^bicycling? ^Nevermind

I kid of course, I could use a hobby that incorporates some kind of motion.

But for real $1k is part of a good used lens, a fifth of the camera I really want, or a couple of decent hard drives to add to the collection. I remember I once lost my shit over $10, now I can’t even get it up for $1000.

I love to read. I have picked up Walden multiple times. I cannot for the life of me get through it. Thoreau is thorough in his writing, if nothing else.

Eternal September:

“A cultural phenomenon during a period beginning around late 1993 and early 1994, when Internet service providers began offering Usenet access to many new users.”

"The flood of new and generally inexperienced Internet users directed to Usenet by commercial ISPs in 1993 and subsequent years swamped the existing culture of those forums and their ability to self-moderate and enforce existing norms. AOL began their Usenet gateway service in March 1994, leading to a constant stream of new users.

Hence, from the early Usenet community point of view, the influx of new users that began in September 1993 appeared to be endless."

Funny, this is the first I’ve heard of it.

The internet of my childhood was pretty awesome. All the TV channels I liked to watch had a bunch of amazing games that were absolutely free, sometimes you could join a kid-friendly chatroom with a big celebrity like Vitamin C. You could download whatever song or movie you wanted and half the time it was even labeled correctly. You didn’t have to search for anything, just type what you want and add a “.com” to the end and nine times out of ten it’s exactly what you are looking for. If you couldn’t find it Jeeves or Lycos could help. You could chat with your friends and ‘meet’ their friends, or just show off how cool the lyrics to the music you listen to are. The internet wasn’t free of idiots or trolls, but most of the riff-raff of humanity had not yet discovered it, or it was too "nerdy’ for them. When Myspace first came on the scene there were only three pages of people ‘near me’ and I knew half of them irl, and this was in massively overpopulated South Florida. Later I would come to know almost all of them IRL because the Internet used to bring people together. Now I don’t even want to use any social media that’s used by people I know IRL. There is nothing free without heavy microtransactions and/or data collection. It was never a great place for kids, but now I wouldn’t let a kid near it unsupervised. The only thing that’s really improved much is the piracy. I almost never accidentally download Shrek anymore.

Wasn’t aware of this, that’s awesome. Unfortunately it would need to be able to cast to various HTPCs and be easy enough for my family to use to fully replace YouTube in my house.

Just tell her you don’t want to meet up and why. Save her the headache of thinking you’re even remotely interested in being her friend.

How is she a dick for having two children???

Maybe not any plot holes per se, but there’s definitely some character inconsistencies, a whole lot of convenient timing and coincidence, and they stretch plausibility to its absolute limits. But hey that’s what makes great television.

ITT: Edgar Wright movies

By a long shot. The sentences have been absolutely unhinged the last couple of weeks, and full of words I haven’t learned on top of that.

That’s pretty hilarious considering I’ve been using Duolingo (cracked apks) for years and these last couple of weeks the sentences it’s been giving me are insane and weird, stupidly awkward things that no one would ever say IRL.

Airlearn isn’t quite there as far as speech recognition but the lessons are a lot more natural and it actually tells you why and explains different parts of the culture around the language and why an idea might be expressed a certain way rather than how we’re used to in English. An LLM could never.

Well like I said you can start running servers right now for free with your desktop. Then your best bet is in my opinion going to be buying a NUC, Elitedesk, or another smaller form factor PC, this will save you on energy costs and noise, and flashing truenas to it (Or you can run everything you need to in Windows or Linux or containers if that’s what you’re comfortable with) and using either external hard drives or getting a hard drive array and using that to store everything. This is going to cost more than a Synology and takes a little setting up but it’s infinitely expandable and will suit your needs whatever they become. And don’t forget the 3-2-1 rule of backups. These rules are written in blood. And RAID is not a backup, I learned that one the hard way, myself.

Totally fair. I’m actually in the process of building a dedicated Proxmox VM host / TrueNAS server to ease up on my little media server, but for a quiet and powerful yet economical little package these mini PCs are great for the task. After all this time the only modification I’ve had to make was adding a 2.5Gb compatible NIC.