ThePowerOfGeek

I just got back from taking one of my kids trick or treating with his friends. It was great. My wife and I got to walk and chat with the other parents while all of our kids knocked on doors and shouted “trick or treat!”. Lots of friendly, generous, nice people. And lots of shouted reminders from us for the kids to not walk on people’s front lawns, to say thank you, to be careful crossing the quiet roads. There were so many other kids out too. It was pretty crazy, but in a good way. About half of the houses were giving out candy in some way or other, with only about a quarter having an un-monitored bowl.

Then on the way home we drove past a church that was having a ‘trunk or treat’ in their parking lot. That just looked sad. There was no excitement for going up to the really cool houses that were decked out in amazing props and decorations. There was no need to hone analytical skills to determine which houses were giving out candy and which ones probably weren’t. Just going very short distances from one car to the next getting candy. My kid asked why they do that. I said it’s probably because they are a closed community who don’t really want to associate with ‘outsiders’. Give me the conventional experience over that all day every day!

I was looking into something similar recently, and asked around on Lemmy. The general consensus I heard was that a Mini PC weren’t ideal, mostly I think due to the fact that they aren’t designed purely for streaming.

One think someone said piqued my interest, and I might try this. They recommended buying a cheap, Android TV compatible streaming box (like an Onn brand one), and side-loading an open source (and ad-free) launcher onto it.

I found this thread over on the Huffman Shitshow that had some good instructions.

I have no idea why anyone still goes to McDogsbreath (I’ll likely hear some reasons in responses to this comment, but I’ve heard them before and don’t buy them). Back in the day I rarely had positive experiences when I was dragged out there reluctantly. Plasticy food of subpar quality, and very uncomfortable, plastic furniture.

And in recent years, between the prices quadrupling, the limited menu for people who don’t like burgers, the shite Wi-Fi, and now them not even being willing to lose 10c on a relatively small % of customers who get a soda refill… Why go there at all! There are so many better fast food options than that disaster of a chain.

That’s some low-key trolling there.

I like it.

Nah, they are just saying that to live is to short the market.

I don’t have a direct answer to your question. But I advise caution in putting your creative works online in the way you are planning. Between people plagiarizing it (either word for word or just the broader concepts) and AIs doing similar things, you could find that your work gets stolen.

Self-publishing might at least give you a bit of inherent copyright protection. Then at least you will have an ISBN associated to it, and you can always host your stories somewhere (WordPress, Medium, etc.).

If you want to self-publish your stories a free service like Smash Words would work.

This sounds like my old place, but much worse.

We used to have laptops we had to lock in a cabinet (yeah, one of those cabinets with a really puny lock that’s easy to pick). And we had to log into n old mainframe system that had numerous environment instances which each required a unique password that had to be changed every 90 days.

We (the software devs) basically rebelled on the laptop situation and insisted they find a better solution. Thankfully they changed policy and of allowed the laptops to be locked into our docking stations, which in turn were locked to our desks.

As for the mainframe system credential management, I tried using a standard third party password manager, but a) it wasn’t a good fit for the credentials, and b) the sys admins or security team forcibly uninstalled it because it wasn’t sanctioned software (even though it was a well-respected and actively maintained one). And our security group refused to go out and find one.

So being a dev, I wrote my own desktop password manager for the mainframe credentials. It was decently secure, but nowhere near as secure as a retail password manager. But it fit the quirks of the mainframe credentials requirements. And after my colleagues and manager did a code review of it, it was considered internal software, and thus fit for use.

As I was leaving they were in the process of removing all our local admin rights (without a clear path on how to accommodate for us developers debugging code - fun times ahead!).

But all of those annoyances pale in comparison to the shit you are having to deal with! Holy hell, that sounds like pure misery! I’m sorry.

Some brands now use plant or cellulose derived material for their tea bags. Though they still use plastic for the outer wrappers, which is a bit annoying.

It’s basically marketing people sniffing each other’s butts. To lay people (like you and I) the statements in the screenshots are vacuous, vague walls of useless babble. But to marketing people they are examples of how these companies can help you shape bullshit that dazzles C-suite executives and other senior business managers - they kinda of people who have the power to sign vendor contracts, but don’t usually have the insight to see past this kind of nonsense.

This article is from early August of last year, so it’s more 6 months old. Is there nothing newer than this?

Pfft, who would do that? As a Firefox user myself I never would. Carve out a bit of time on the down-low to enhance cross-browser support on a website after management shortsightedly told me to just block anything other than Chrome? No no no! Not me!

Of course as others here (including you) have pointed out, it’s much less of an issue these days. Though it does still happen, it’s nowhere near as bad as the IE days (that browser can burn in hell for all eternity!).

My subconscious autocorrected that the first time I read it. It was only after reading your comment and going back to look again that I realized they had not written “There are”.