I tried for awhile to make osmc work on an raspi4 for media playing and it was always just… not quite there.

I ended up going with a Ebay mini pc with Plex on it and stream to my TV with a Roku stick. Just worked so much better without much effort on my part.

Huh I always thought ventoy was just another iso to usb writer. I’ve been totally sleeping on the fact it can hold a bunch of isos and installs them directly. That’s so handy

Ah gotcha. I’m kind of enjoying just hanging with regular people being regular on mastodon. Probably check out bluesky at some point.

Thanks for the info!

Haven’t been following Blue sky stuff at all. Any reason to use this over mastodon?

Right on, I rejoined IRC during the COVID shutdowns. It’s just nice to be chatting somewhere where a company isn’t flooding me with advertisements and/or harvesting my data (that I can tell at least).

That’s some OG shit there! I still remember my number. It was an 8 digit haha

I hear you. When I was a teen, Internet was: A handful of focused websites or your buddies geocities / angelfire site.
Chatting in crazy chat rooms on IRC, and having your close friends on ICQ.
Using a dial up modem to play doom, Warcraft 2, red alert, duke nukem, quake, StarCraft, total annihilation… etc.

Those were fun times. Felt like the bleeding edge of tech… hiding out and having fun in places people haven’t even heard of.

Pop OS is the whole reason I stayed on linux :) Lots of failed linux experiments in its wake previous to that haha

I finally jumped onto the linux train after the rumour that windows 11 was going to have ads right in windows explorer. I’m glad it never happened but now that i’m on linux for my main PC… i see no reason to go back.

new versions of windows just kind of feel like new phones now. It’s good but… who cares?

I can remember as a teen and upgrading from windows 98 to XP felt like jumping into the future.
Or, more recently, getting the first samsung galaxy after having a basic candybar phone.

Just seems like more of the same all while charging an arm and a leg for it.

I’m going to guess that MS AI determined the food bank is a tourist destination because it learned that more and more people are going there due to the rising costs of … everything. It also probably learned that people don’t like starving to death.

Can’t remember the exact quote but it was something to the tune of “you don’t have to know how a toilet works to crap in one but it might help you appreciate it more”. I feel its applicable here.

I started getting mini PCs when raspberry pi prices were peaking. My favorite mini PC I have was a bit expensive at around $200 CAD at the time. Its an hp elitedesk 705 g4 with a Ryzen 5 pro 2400g. Runs just about any server I need and does great for audio recording in Windows.

I also snagged a lenovo mini thinkcentre for about $100 CAD. It’s a bit older with a 4th gen i5 ( I think) and 8gb of ddr3. It sits in the data closet for contract work that I do and has all my work stuff, office 365, Visio, affinity designer, cloud connections.

I use a remote connection with my main PC ( running pop!_os Linux) to connect to either of the two instead of buying extra monitors or any peripherals. At the very least, It’s been a fun experiment.

My civic has a CVT and for the most part its OK. But sometimes when you’re on a highway, and if you have to brake hard… that lag time on hitting the gas again can sometimes feel like forever. And pretty scary.

Yea. I’m diligent about the phone staying in my own pocket while I’m driving. I forget I can’t always give others the benefit of the doubt.

That’s fair. I can understand your view.

My biggest gripe is the “safety” features that just enable bad driving. Too lazy to shoulder check? don’t worry, blinky light on the mirror has you. Don’t bother looking back when backing out? camera has you. veering off the road a bit cause you’re not paying attention? lane keep assist!
Any one of these things can fail and the shit driving habits are all some of these people have to fall back on.

Let’s go back to roll up windows, standard transmissions, and using your eyes to see where things are.

I didn’t think of the always online games.

Sounds like we just need to start a federated network of classic games sharing. Can’t sue a protocol, right?

( I know nothing of how any of that would work)

Ugh. I barely want to live my whole life on this planet with the ways it is going… let alone reverse back into my 20s with no actual “new game+”