Two shows that weren’t mentioned yet:

• Warehouse 13 - An endearing sci-fi show about a warehouse full of weird artifacts. Despite some intense episodes, it offered mainly a light, feel-good entertainment, and featured a really well-crafted send-off.
• Fringe - Starts out weird, then it goes totally off the rails, but in a good way. Also wrapped up nicely.

Because my stereo is so old that it only accepts tape or CD as an input. No bluetooth or even USB stick. However, it works, and it’s adequate for my humble needs, so I haven’t considered replacing it yet.

My stereo still uses CD’s, so that’s what I use. I have a DVD burner in my PC, and a spindle of blank CD-R’s and anothet of blank DVD-R’s. I use the former to burn music CD’s for my stereo, and the latter for extra backup whenever I’m about to upgrade my hardware (once every 10 eyars or so). This is on addition to a NAS and an external drive. I just figured that the disks would have the best chance to be read once I get a new desktop.

(I also saw the mention of floppies in the discussion. I have an old Win98 machine - for gaming only these days - with an internal floppy and zip drives. Those media easily outlast CD’s: I can still read almost all oc them, even though some are over 30 years old.)

I have an account where I only post after I translated my writing through three different languages and back to English. The original input and the output convey the same message, but have very distinct styles. Randomizing the three languages in my translation sequence introduces enough variety that I doubt current LLM’s can identify me. (Full disclosure: I don’t post any sensitive information under any account; I do it just for fun.)

Wiping away excess paint if I miss. Still wet paint is easy to clean away that way. A wet wipe around your finger makes tor a very fine precision instrument to keep the edges of your painting straight.

That’s what I use the wipes for. I find that I’m more precise with the wipes than rags or an old T shirt.

I used wet wipes when painting my house. They are, without a doubt, some of the most important painting tools. But also probably the most infuriating, especially if you can use only two fingers on one hand to pull out a wipe.

This one speaks directly to me: “The only decision you should make while angry is to stop being angry.” ~ Timothy Zahn, the Icarus series.

My current computer will be Linux, as soon as I stop procrastinating and clean up my documents and back them up on my NAS. Already did that with my travel laptop.

Does Skid Row count? The original band saw people come and go all the time, to the point that nobody really knew who was a member at that point. In 1987, Gary Moore, who hadn’t been a member anymore, actually “sold” the name to a US band. The last original member still disputes the sale. So, you have two bands with the same name, with the original band had members replaced multiple times, with even the last remaining original member leaving and rejoining twice.

Fragmentation of society. Can’t decide whether closer to Stephenson’s Snow Crash or Palmer’s Terra Ignota.

Bed athletics while the kids are downstairs, watching morning cartoons. Then, full day for me, driving the kids to their sports clubs while the Mrs is working on her upskilling certs. Then early bedtime because Sunday is my long run day.

Learned from growing up in a communist dictatorship: don’t discuss politics and religion with strangers. And even with friends or acquaintances, don’t discuss it in writing. It doesn’t mean you can’t have strong opinions, but don’t make them public. Talking (not writing) one-to-one or in small groups eventually toppled almost all communist dictatotships, so there’s absolutely no need to broadcast your opinions, unless your goal is to be martyred.

To me, the Internet as we know it is dead. I’m trying to build a new, better “internet”. Don’t know how, yet, but I have a concept of a plan.

My kids are getting old enough to get their own computers. I got them two mini-PC’s, put Mint on them, and for now a few DOS games. They are at the age where they still sound out everything they read or write, but it won’t take long before they’d like to go online. For now, though, they are happy with some of the games I used to play. Right now it’s Duck Tales, Dynablaster and Grand Prix Circuit, but I hope to introduce them to Sierra and Lucasarts adventures later, and Microprose strategies even later.

But I digress. I don’t want to let them onto the Internet, even if I disable access to some sites (they’re bound to find a way around). Instead, I’d like to self-host my own Internet. It would be largely static, with entire downloaded Web sites, and I’m currently compiling a list of what I’d give them. I’m also thinking of curating a selection of news articles, which I’d grab and present to them via my own server. As time goes by, I’d slowly immerse them in more, but my goal is to grow them to be discerning young adults, who’d know better what to believe and what to share than my generation did.

Other parents in my kids’ school have the same concerns. I was talking to some about my idea, and they’d like to join. Some of them are far more knowledgeable than me in the technical aspects of this undertaking (I’m still using a LAMP stack for all my needs). At the end, we may end up with a local “internet”, with its own dedicated message board, perhaps some social pages, and relatively harmless content. If we had this idea, you can bet that thousands of other communities already had a similar idea. I fully expect the human internet to eventually fragment into tiny local internets, and the traditional internet becoming a giant circle-jerk of AI’s in circular conversation.

In addition to “normal” uses, my kids got into the habit of leaving me messages on the camera when I’m in the office and they are leaving for school. I grew to love these messages.

Using Eufy with local storage. Don’t know whether anything gets stored to the cloud, but I guess data still passes through Eufy servers when I view the videos.

I may not be representative of a larger sample, but I used medium format for landscapes, and always shallow depth of field. For sharper images, I used longer lenses on a 35mm camera. So, a diffraction issue wouldn’t be bothering me on a medium format camera, if I ever even found the money to get one.

Still doing Vivaldi on a daily basic. But I think I’m a very specific use case: an old user who hates to change his ways, and is obsessed with keeping the page tabs on the bottom of the screen.

When I was your age, we called them Micro$oft. Too bad there were no extensions in Netscape Navigator.

Brave. Not sure about the version number, but it’s been working fine.

Web browser. I only have two other social media accounts, on Reddit and LinkedIn, and I use a browser for these as well. Even if a dedicated app worked in my OS, my phone doesn’t have enough memory to install it.