Super double middle fingers to YouTube! My goal is to avoid it as much as possible. Techmoan and Flack's vids excepted, naturally.

I use Firefox for most tasks, but no matter which ad blocker I use, even so-called undetectable ones, YouTube will get pissed off and warn me if I continue using an ad blocker the site will disable access. Which is why I use Brave exclusively for watching YouTube videos. I never see the ads YouTube inserts in the videos, it's absolutely seamless, and YouTube hasn't the slightest clue anything is happening.

Sorry - I misspoke. Brave doesn't block the site itself, but it blocks the pop up ads that the pirate site wants to serve. The pirate site in question has configured things to not let you click on games unless three or five pop up ads show. So Brave is doing what I would want it to do.

There is probably a way to make exceptions, but I just sort of like sequestering what the different browsers do. Using a bunch of them keeps me up to date with any differences they have, which is helpful in my line of work, a little.

Which ones automatically block pirate sites? There was one, maybe Chrome, that said I was being naughty by trying to go to TPB. That was the minute I got Brave and haven't looked back.

Here is my BROWSER LINEUP.

Home:
Brave: main browsing browser.

Firefox: the site that I use to watch pirate streams of sports is constantly doing the pop up tab nonsense for ads. Brave is so good at blocking the pirate sites, the sites don't work on Brave. So Firefox's only purpose is to act as a containment dump for sportsurge.

Opera: I have Opera when I want to test if things are accessible to the internet or not, without worrying about being logged in. So if I change permissions on a Google Drive folder in Brave, I will go check the link on Opera to make sure it looks to the general world how I'd like it to look.

Work:
Vivaldi: main browsing browser for work-related things that don't have to do with the web apps we make. I have found it much easier to do my job if I have a browser for all the HR stuff and github and gmail and Jenkins where I can leave cookies there and - when asked - "could you clear cache and try it again?" I'm not having to deal with all the applications I need to do my job.

Chrome, Firefox, Safari - used to see if our stuff works.

Edge is the only one I don't look at. My special thanks to PINBACK for writing software to make it so that we don't have to actually go in there and look manually/visually.

There is a good (or stupid) reason for not being able to remove Edge and that's because of Windows based programs (including games) which talk to Edge.



Note: I do not use Edge. I prefer Safari (ha!) and Vivaldi.

Yeah, I learned the same trying to remove Edge. They will not let you do it. Crazy to me how you can get in trouble the way that Microsoft did in whatever it was, the 1990s or early 2000s and then just do similar shit later and hope nobody notices. (I know it's not the same, but it's close enough.)

Christmas is the time of upgrades! My nephew's big Corsair PC case is going into the Magnavox tv. I replaced it with a peanut butter sandwich PC, the GMKtec something-something from Amazon. Its faster snd 1/10th the size and totally quiet. I also get Win11 Pro installed...hmmmmm.

I figured out the local account login so there's no password needed, thank god. I found out how to turn off most of the crap as well. Why does the end user have to spend an hour just disabling stuff when they get a new phone or PC? Ridiculous!

Note: They will not accept FUCK YOU as a Microsoft account name, just saying.
Soon as it was online I installed Brave and hid any Edge shortcuts as much as possible. I know I can't totally get rid of it.

Update: tablet works fine but it's just too slow. Old phone is faster and can use the cell towers.

This is an update to my tablet thread. I might might not even have started one already but who knows anymore. Long ago I carefully followed explicit directions for a whole afternoon and was able to root my Nook tablet. It involved a lot of downloading from sketchy places and lots of text based commands and just the right size micro SD card.
I've been wanting to do the same kind of thing to my Amazon Fire tablet because my phone battery isn't what it used to be and the tablet works just fine but it's loaded with bloat and ads. XDA has a way to root the thing but it involves taking it apart and shorting out a contact with the case ground, not something I'm willing to do. So the device sat in a bookshelf for the past five years. While browsing earlier today I came across the Fire toolkit, a very easy to understand piece of software that can take care of all the built in garbage without the arcane rooting process. All the Amazon apps are gone, there's no more forced lockscreen ads and I can use the browser of my choice. It seems I'm the winner for a change. I'll play around and see how things work out

Shes been playing Diablo 1, 2 and 3 since they came out. She likes those arpg games, the clickfest kind while listening to Rush Limburger (or whoever)

AArdvark wrote: Sat May 25, 2024 1:52 pm Q: do the kids of tomorrow only want to rent ones and zeros?

When Napster became a thing I gobbled music that I never even listened to, just because I could. Maybe it's not having it 24/7 growing up that makes us old folks stuff hard drives like that. The only music I had, apart from WBBF was my mom's Reader's Digest big band collection. So current.

In other news, I'm powering down the White Monster pc and trying out the Forum Minis pc for a week and see if I can deal with that (again). The last time I used it there was no sound and I couldn't get drivers for all the hardware inside. My mom's pc, the Dell Precision 490, had some issues recently and I figured I should start looking for an upgrade for her. While looking around I found a driver package for my peanut butter sandwich pc so now I have sound and Bluetooth working. I bolted it on the back of my new monitor and have been futzing around with all the games my mom plays
In hopes of moving her up to Win10. Meantime I've been playing Diablo 2, Path of Exile and Sacred (still trying to get that working) on Windows 10. Maybe it'll be her Christmaspresent. All the games that do not require an internet connection to work.

Wow, your mom plays videogames? She's super cool. The only mom playing videogames was my friend's mom played win solitare like it was her only passion.

Q: do the kids of tomorrow only want to rent ones and zeros?

When Napster became a thing I gobbled music that I never even listened to, just because I could. Maybe it's not having it 24/7 growing up that makes us old folks stuff hard drives like that. The only music I had, apart from WBBF was my mom's Reader's Digest big band collection. So current.

In other news, I'm powering down the White Monster pc and trying out the Forum Minis pc for a week and see if I can deal with that (again). The last time I used it there was no sound and I couldn't get drivers for all the hardware inside. My mom's pc, the Dell Precision 490, had some issues recently and I figured I should start looking for an upgrade for her. While looking around I found a driver package for my peanut butter sandwich pc so now I have sound and Bluetooth working. I bolted it on the back of my new monitor and have been futzing around with all the games my mom plays
In hopes of moving her up to Win10. Meantime I've been playing Diablo 2, Path of Exile and Sacred (still trying to get that working) on Windows 10. Maybe it'll be her Christmaspresent. All the games that do not require an internet connection to work.

When I discovered my laptop had a second HD slot I added a 2TB M.2 drive and when I told my kid he said... why? And when I told him I wanted more storage he said... why? And when I said so I could store pictures and eBooks and music and movies and documents he said... why? It's an entirely different mindset. We grew up in the era where hard drive storage was like a dick measuring yardstick. In the Commodore 64 days, only lame BBSes ran off of a single floppy disk; decent boards had at least two drives, and the really elite ones had hard drives (which started around $800 for 10 megabytes). When I ran the Gad Chamber BBS in the mid-90s on my PC, nobody took any warez board seriously unless they had > 1GB of storage. (I paid a lot of money for a six-disc CD-ROM changer, which made my BBS instantly popular). That's old man thinking. I owned more than 1,000 audio CDs and neither of my kids have ever owned a single one. That's who Chromebooks are for, people who don't know where their data is stored and frankly don't care. I'm not sure it would ever be a primary solution for me -- too limited on apps and games -- but for something to take on a road trip and use in a hotel room, it's a great solution.

I looked into the Chromium OS but could never log in using my Google account. Maybe I really needed a Gmail account instead. Oh well.

You have written the first post that ever got me interested in Chrome OS! Because the iPad 2 I got Melissa was ruined by Apple, and because another Android tablet I once had stopped being able to do anything, I sort of "gave up" on tablets. I realize now this is not a tablet OS. But something an older laptop could have.

Yes, even just running APPS would be nice. Thanks, Flack!

I gave my Acer mini away. I couldn't sell it and no one in my circle (that's computer friends and relatives) wanted it. When I was 10 years old I would have accepted any electronic device for free that flashed, beeped or blooped. My nephews took one look at this thing, decided it wouldn't play Fortnite, and said no thanks. I spent a lot of time brainstorming things I could use it for but every solution I came up with was a far stretch and something that could be easily done by a different device, almost always better. The last project I attempted to cram it into was as a music hub for out in my workshop -- all I needed to do was connect it to an amplifier, buy a Bluetooth adapter, and set up a bunch of software. I ended up buying a stereo amplifier the size of a deck of cards with Bluetooth built in that did everything I needed for like $50. Whenever I buy a new laptop I always keep the old one -- I feel like it's been liberated and can serve a function other than being my main machine at that point -- but this one was like five or six laptops down in the chain and it was just time for it to go.

For my oldest laptop in circulation, I dumped Linux and installed ChromeOS Flex, which is the Chrome OS designed to run on Intel processors. It boots in a matter of seconds, patches are nearly instantaneously applied and non-intrusive, and it runs 10x faster than Windows did on that old thing. The tradeoff is you have to buy into Google's infrastructure (you have to log in with a gmail account to even get started) but if that's not a deal breaker, it's a great solution. It's not a fully functional operating system and app support is lim ited, but if you're just "online" stuff like surfing the web and streaming content, it's a great solution.

Ok, I decided to work smarter, not harder. I went back to Win10, even though it has this long-ass malware scan every time I boot up. I took the 120G solid state drive from the Acer and put it in my desktop as a C drive. The other two terabyte drives are now storage only. The malware scan takes mere seconds now and I don't hear a thing. I should have done this a long time ago. Of course the Acer mini is now recycle fodder but I wasn't really using it for anything except farting around with Linux distros.

THE
HAPPINESS +5
AARDVARK

I installed zsh and then ohmyzh and I guess it is fixed. I should have had that installed anyway. I just didn't. GET OFF ME. STOP. STOP. STOOOOOOPPPPP. Okay. God. Stop. All right it's there, Jesus.

I set my Ubuntu machine to upgrade last night. I went into the terminal today and it is displaying a "[OS^" character when it waits for input, or before it outputs anything. It has made the terminal totally unusable.

I don't care how or why it happens. They have to test this stuff, fix it and BE BETTER.