cobysev

I’ve spent nearly 2 decades connecting with friends, family, coworkers, and associates through Facebook. I hate Facebook, and actually use F.B. Purity to remove 90% of the content, ads, promotional junk, games, marketplace, etc. from it. But as the main way I’ve stayed in touch with people I’ve known over the course of my life, I just can’t dump it.

Besides that, I have Lemmy (of course); LinkedIn, which I’m not really using anymore since I retired young; Imgur, which I mostly just use for browsing memes; and Discord, which I only use to communicate with a few close friends whom I game with weekly.

I created accounts for Instagram and Whatsapp, but I’ve never used them. They were too self-promoting for my taste. When they first became a thing, they were all about taking selfies and sharing your face with your friends. I wanted discussion and interesting content, not to see selfies. They created the generation of “social media influencers” who think they’re entitled to things in life because X number of people follow them on social media.

I also avoid TikTok like the plague. I was in the US military (working as an IT guy) when TikTok became popular, and we discovered it embedded itself in your phone so deeply, you couldn’t fully remove it even when uninstalling. Plus, it gave itself full admin rights to your phone, then started trickling your data to Chinese servers. Which is why the president made such a big deal about TikTok being a national security threat. It’s not because we didn’t get along with a Chinese company; it’s because a foreign government was collecting personal data and building profiles on American citizens. I will never touch that program as long as I live.

I’m 40 years old, by the way. A lot of people say Facebook is only used by old people, and yes, I just turned 40 and am finally becoming an “old person.” But I’m still relatively young compared to people’s expectations of Facebook users. And I have a lot of Facebook friends who are much younger than I am.

Why does this percentage keep going up? Who keeps inflating the numbers? The first time I heard about this, it was like 64%. Then 77%. Now 81%?! Tomorrow, I’m gonna see a meme stating 97% of Mozilla’s income is from Google.

Years ago, when I learned that World of Warcraft allowed you to either speak in common tongue or your character’s native racial tongue, I would park my night elf in capital cities and shout in Darnassian about how night elves are superior to all other races. Got a lot of LOLs from other night elves.

There was one low-level night elf who popped up once to rant back in Darnassian about how dwarves were the superior race. Guess someone made a new character to see what all the shouting was about and got offended. We had a pretty fun debate over the characteristics of both races, and it came down to personal preference by the end.

I miss old WoW.

I may be in the minority, but I kinda enjoy hearing Aloy muttering to herself throughout the game. Partly because I catch myself doing it all the time, so I don’t feel alone in the practice.

But also because I know the voice actress for Aloy (Ashly Burch) as Ash in the YouTube series, Hey Ash, Whatcha Playin’? and to this day, it’s still amazing to me to hear her speaking so deadpan seriously. I’m used to her Ash character basically being an animated, loudmouthed wildcard, not this dramatic, serious character. And I kind of enjoy knowing that Ashly has a bit of range to her acting; she’s not some kid who repeats the same YouTube personality she became famous for; she can actually act.

Meh, don’t feel confined to the sidewalk. Be adventurous. There’s a path to the left there, where others have continued their walk.

I guess MS envisioned it as a digital replacement for the physical suitcase of documents you’d bring to/from work.

The whole computer was originally visualized as a digital office replacement. That’s why you have the “desktop,” like an actual desk top surface to work on. Files had icons that looked like papers, folders looked like the tan file folders you’d store in a filing cabinet. Plus a slew of other office-related parallels.

The briefcase was just a continuation of that digital theme. Office workers would bring their work files home in a briefcase to work on later, then bring back to the office the next day. Microsoft tried to digitally replicate that by creating a briefcase folder that would automatically sync your files to a floppy disk, so you didn’t have to do it yourself. The Internet kinda ruined that concept, though. Now you can just email yourself files, text them to yourself on your phone, or store them in a cloud service to edit live on the site.

Will Smith passed on playing Neo in The Matrix to do… Wild Wild West. He had previously said it was his biggest regret in acting.

Personally. I don’t consider it a vacation until I’m cut off from everyone and everything. Let me relax in peace for a while, without distractions.

That analogy doesn’t make sense. Volkswagen is a brand; PC is not. Every personal computer is, and always has been, a PC. That’s why we differentiate between desktop PCs and laptop/tablet PCs in the industry. Macs are a type of PC. I know this; I worked IT in the federal govt for 20 years and there’s is no name brand just called “PC.”

What you’re confusing for “PC” is specific name brands of PCs, with specific hardware. When they added PC to software designation back in the day, they were letting you know it was specifically for a personal computer; not a VHS, not a record, not a game cartridge, not a cassette tape, etc. That was the designation, and then there would be more details about what specific hardware/software was required to use it. (e.g. Windows 95 with 512 MB RAM, at least a Pentium III processor, etc.)

When Apple started marketing their PCs, they built their own unique system that wasn’t compatible with other PCs, so they started pushing the Mac vs. PC campaign to separate their equipment from the rest, which eventually culminated in those Mac vs. PC ads many years later. Products started receiving a Mac label instead of PC, to show that they wouldn’t be compatible with the rest of the PCs on the market.

It helped that the rest of the PC industry started standardizing their equipment, to be compatible across all systems. Macs stood out from the rest, by refusing to be compatible with other PCs and forcing their users to stick exclusively with Apple products. It was a very anti-competitive practice, preventing users from sharing across systems, and one of many reasons the federal govt never went with Apple computers; we need to be able to share data with a variety of systems across the globe.

But Macs still fall under the umbrella of a personal computer. They are PCs. Even if they prefer no one calls them that.

On a side note, the EU just forced Apple to standardize their cables to USB-C, so they’re getting rid of their Lightning cables and finally joining the rest of the world in cable standardization. But they’ll fight tooth and nail to prevent any other changes. They’re still fighting against Right to Repair laws, as they want to force you to return to them directly for any maintenance.

As an IT guy in the early 2000s, it was really annoying to see all the “Mac vs. PC” arguments. PC stands for Personal Computer - a Mac is literally a PC! When I was a kid in the '80s-'90s, my schools all used Apple IIe computers (and later versions of Apple products as I got older), but they always called them PCs.

But those Apple ads convincing people to ditch the frumpy old guy PC for the young, hot Mac guy did their job, and pop culture decided that a Mac wasn’t a PC.

I have no idea what PT means in this context. They use it twice in the article, but it’s not defined.

I know of two meanings for PT: the most commonly understood version is physical therapy. Which makes no sense in this context.

The other is from my military days. We used PT to refer to physical training, our acronym for exercise/going to the gym. Also not applicable here.

I was referring to PlexAmp. It’s decent, works well, but I just liked the interface for Symfonium better. It seemed more functional than PlexAmp when I switched over to it.

I actually haven’t used PlexAmp in a few years, so maybe it’s gotten better lately. I guess I’ll have to compare apps.

I’ve been maintaining a self-hosted music library for so long (30+ years now), there used to not be any tools for editing metadata. I used to have to go into file properties and manually edit the data for each individual MP3 file. Nowadays, I use Mp3tag to manually edit entire albums at a time. I have ADHD though (the hyperfixation kind), so I’ve literally dedicated thousands of hours to manually fixing metadata.

I guess I never bothered to look for more advanced tools to auto-update metadata. I had to go in and manually fix stuff that updated automatically from the Internet in the past, so I guess I stopped trusting online databases. But they’ve really advanced since the last time I went searching for tools, and their databases are a lot more complete in this day and age. I’m gonna play around with some of these programs and see how well they work.

I host my music library through Plex, then use Symfonium on my phone if I want to stream my Plex music remotely, just because I like their interface a little better than Plex’s.

Honestly, I always felt the $60 price tag for games (now $70+ for AAA titles!) was way too much, so I usually wait about a year or more, then buy it on sale.

So I get to sit back and watch the shitshow when people pre-order games and then get screwed when the game is garbage.

Dragon’s Dogma II was super hyped up recently, and even I got the free character customization demo to pre-build a character. Then it announced day-one microtransactions the day before release and pissed off the gaming community.

Remember when games used to be a finished product on a cartridge/CD? You just bought it at the store for a base price of a video game and that was it. Any bugs found in the game became widely accepted, and maybe even exploited by competitive gamers. But there was no patching, no updates, no DLC. You paid for a game up front and that was it.

I miss those days.

A few months ago they required that you have a watch history to display the homepage.

I’m actually glad for this change. I hated the random junk they always suggest on my homepage. I spent ages clicking on the menu on each video and selecting “don’t recommend this channel.” It took a few years, but I actually got a clean, empty homepage. Then they changed their website and all the videos came back. I had to start over, cleaning out my feed again.

Now with this new change, my homepage is always clear. Thanks, YouTube!

For the record, I only watch my subscriptions. If I learn about a new channel, it’s through another site/person recommending it. I don’t let YouTube recommend me stuff to watch. And I definitely don’t watch YouTube Shorts or whatever they call their vertical video nonsense.

I have it through Steam, but it just forwards me to Ubisoft Connect, their own game launcher. Since their game servers are shut down, they’re just not letting it load through their launcher.

This makes me think of the film W., a chronicle of president George W. Bush’s life. Who played the goofy-looking, monkey-eared president? None other than Hollywood hunk Josh Brolin (Thanos in the MCU, Cable in Deadpool, Brand in The Goonies, etc.)

I remember watching this film when it came out in 2008 and thinking, “Damn! George W. Bush is buff!” Especially in the oil rig scenes.

Truth. I just retired from the US Air Force 2 years ago. Spent 20 years as an IT technician. Most of the time, I just worked in a safe, secluded server room. Even while deployed to Iraq, I pretty much worked and lived in bunkers. Wasn’t even allowed to leave the base. My job was pretty safe.

I deployed to a Marine camp once in 2005. My Marine boss said she hoped to god she never saw an Air Force person with a gun in their hands. She said that would mean the planes are down, the base is overrun, and the Marines are dead. She said we were literally the last line of defense. So if we were ever attacked, she told me to just hand my weapon and ammunition to the nearest Marine and go take cover until it’s all over.

NEVER click decline all. There are loopholes built in that still grant access to “legitimate interest” cookies, which are recognized differently from “consent cookies.” If you click reject all, it still allows collection of certain personal info through cookies labeled legitimate interest. Which is entirely up to advertisers to categorize.

As annoying as it is, always open up options and manually uncheck cookies.