it’ll usually be the artist’s name. Like if you search for “Taylor Swift”, you’ll get exactly zero results because that phrase is blacklisted due to a complaint from the label. If you instead search for a specific song, you will see results, and can work backwards from there to find the album you’re looking for.

Yeah, I’ve had to use that blacklist workaround on many occasions, lol

Nope, I’ll even specifically avoid companies that I see or hear excessive ads for. When I needed to change car insurance a while back and had a list of options going, I immediately removed all the ones I could remember seeing advertising for.

Two reasons:

1. I have an unhealthy hatred of advertising.

2. They’re spending an absurd amount of money on digital spam as opposed to making their product/service better or cheaper. Some percentage of what you pay for in the product is to cover their advertising campaigns, and I prefer that percentage be as small as possible.

Technically yes but if you need to re-terminate the end of a cable in the future without seeing the other end of it, it’s nice to be able to assume it was wired the standard way.

It I found an ethernet cable wired in the wrong sequence, I would re-terminate both ends immediately because otherwise it will be an annoyance in the future.

When I was a kid, for some reason I really wanted coal for Christmas and I was diappointed that only the bad kids got it. My parents decided to mess with me one year by hiding all my actual presents and only putting a piece of coal in my stocking. I was thrilled and thought it was so cool. I have no idea why I thought it was cool, I was a weird kid. My parents gave up on the joke before I even realized that none of the presents under the tree had my name on them. I was entirely happy with the piece of coal.

Ironically, it’s become one of my favorite Christmas memories and it’s one of few presents I still have as an adult.

I like to host as many services as possible and I’m fine with it being a second job at times since this is my main hobby, but I actually agree with you on your examples. The three things I won’t self-host are:

1. Emails - I am not willing to put in the effort on this. Plus, my ISP blocks those ports so I’d already be into using a VPS even if I wanted to host this. I’d rather just pay someone else, like Proton.

2. Password manager - I actually did self-host Bitwarden for a long time, but after thinking about it for a while, I decided to take the pay someone else approach here too. I’m pretty sure I’m doing everything correctly, but I’m not a security expert. I’d rather be 100% sure my passwords are in safe hands rather than be 95% sure that I’m doing everything right on this one.

3. Lemmy - I’ve heard about (luckily never seen) CSAM attacks on Lemmy/Kbin and will not risk that kind of content being downloaded because I’m federated with an instance dealing with those attacks. I’m happy to throw a couple bucks at lemmy.world’s Patreon and let them handle that.

My only “wants” for phone hardware are that it’s small and easily repairable. The iPhone Mini is small, the Fairphone is easily repairable, modern Pixels are nether. The repairability is also more of a concern on the Pixels since they kind of have a reputation for being unreliable, at least anecdotally.

Unfortunately, an iPhone 13 Mini.

I’d love to switch back to GrapheneOS (used it on a Pixel 3a for a while), but I really don’t like Pixel hardware. The Fairphone 5 is on my radar, but it’s expensive for what it is and also isn’t available to purchase in the US. I’m also not sure if CalyxOS supports it yet, and there aren’t any other Android roms that I’m interested in.

So I’m suffering with iOS until something else becomes available.

I’m hoping Linux phones become viable within the next 5-10 years. I have Ubuntu Touch on my Pixel 3a and PostMarketOS on my Pinephone. Mobile Linux is super cool and fun to play with, but is nowhere near daily driver ready yet.

I don’t play any Switch games and have never used Yuzu, but I just started donating to their Patreon. Hopefully they can afford to go to court over this. Nintendo can pound sand.

Disclaimer: I am not an electrical engineer, I am just an idiot on the internet.

I think this would be fine if it’s just a matter of discharging static electricity. If static is building up on your body, touching the car frame will redistribute that energy across both yourself and the car frame. By that point, there’s not enough potential energy in your body to damage whatever electronics you’re working on.

Also, if you happen to be working on computers, they’re pretty damn resistant to static shocks. Better safe than sorry of course, but it’s hard to kill a computer with static. ElectroBoom and LTT made a pretty good video about that a while back.

I’m absolutely at that point with Nextcloud. I kind of didn’t want to go the syncthing route, but I’ll probably give it a shot anyway since none of the NC alternatives seem any better.

I think I got Snapchat and Vine mixed up or combined in my head. I’ve never used either one, I thought it shut down years ago, but what I’m remembering is Vine shutting down.

I’m surprised that the fediverse is as popular as it is, I would’ve guessed <500k. That’s awesome. I’m also shocked that Threads is apparently that popular, I completely forgot it existed immediately after it launched. I also didn’t know that Snapchat still existed, so maybe I’m just out of touch on social media stuff.

Things are slowly improving, but public chargers do kinda suck right now. There’s an app called PlugShare that you can download which lets you see reviews for all chargers in your area. It’s saved some headaches a few times cause I can just avoid chargers with bad ratings.

Google has trained me to think “I wonder if that still exists” every time I remember one of their products.

The Google graveyard is vast.