I miss watching the little moon spin with the shooting stars of Netscape Navigator. It’s weirdly the most nostalgic thing for me. Maybe because my first full memory ever is the library computers and learning how to use Netscape in first grade. It’s the first time I started really retaining information fully, aside from snippets of Oregon Trail for the Commodore 64 in my kindergarten class.

Oh, this is interesting. I’m not the most advanced OSM user, but I’ll definitely take a look at this and learn.

I love this app, found it a bit ago on F-Droid. I’m moving to a very rural town up north and there’s nearly nothing done there. Very excited to get up there and start working on it.

Krull is one that stays in all my libraries. It’s so obscure yet has names like Liam Neeson, Robbie Coltrane, and David Battley. It was my dad’s favorite movie.

I thought about this a few times at my last job, but unfortunately the job was solo work and if no one showed up, the whole contract would have been rescinded. My boss certainly abused my sense of responsibility, though.

My ex-fiancee and ex-girlfriend for 7 years was getting hit on by our boss. She used to brag to me about it. They started texting back and forth until suddenly she wanted to “just be friends” with me (which entitled “benefits”).

This was all about a month before our wedding. So naturally I declined being “friends” and slept with her bride’s maid. We decided the sex was good enough to try dating.

That was 12 years ago now.

Story time.

I learned Debian-based distros back in high school from a college tech class. After leaving school and getting my first job, I built my first computer (after two DOA boards and much gnashing of teeth). I sat happily in my Windows bubble for a long time.

Years later I had a catastrophic failure when trying to get clever and unlocking my system32 folder to do some tinkering. I’d had enough of Windows. Thought Pop! OS looked really nice.

But we sometimes have that one friend. Arch. Every time I talked about my OS or showed him my clean setup, Arch. If I had a problem with packages. Pacman. AUR. Arch.

I was going nuts. Did he care I was running Pop! OS with KDE Plasma using Kubuntu backports to jury rig a later version? No. Arch.

After a long and grueling battle, after slogging through mountains of unsolicited Arch memes in my DMs, after vehemently defending Debian, I will only say this:

I use Arch, btw.

That’s enough from you, gregorium.

I found a cool little app on F-Droid called Gramophone. It has neat little animations that make me happy, and it can color the player controls according to album art. I’m a sucker for nice UI. I was using Auxio before that. Both are good.

If you want something for ad-less streaming, RiMusic is really nice. For local audiobook playback with chapter selection, Voice is the best I’ve found so far.

IF you needed the storage and badly, then I remember Hiren’s BootCD used to come with a tool to scan for and quarantine bad sectors. However, this is just a bandaid on top of an infected wound.

The wound will keep spreading, eating up precious backup files. I’ve only ever used quarantining once on my mother in law’s laptop because she had to wait weeks to get a new drive, due to the Philippines flooding back then.

Also, this was an old copy of BootCD that ran through terminal prompt, not a built in Windows PE, and I believe the tool I used has been removed. However, it seems to be replaced with a few alternatives.

That’s hopefully the plan if that time does come. Two of my three sisters lived at home and single while raising their first kids, so I tried to help them out as much as I could. I wouldn’t be completely blind going in. I’d be fretting a lot at first, though. The world would seem much more dangerous with a kid to worry about.

Two people, a cat, and a venerable bunny with a large cage. Litter and shavings usually account for one full bag a week, as we can’t really keep it around smelling in our apartment. Our cat has some medical stomach issues with diarrhea, so scooping only goes so far (he’s on special vet assigned food). Its about one bag a week for us excluding pets, with an extra full bag of the previously mentioned dry garbage every 3 weeks. We try to keep things low and recycle where we can.

I may also be overestimating a little bit right now, since we’re in the middle of spring cleaning, but even then most spring cleaning stuff goes to the free store, not the trash.

Not for the lack of trying though. They’ve been trying to destroy alternative frontend apps for a while, but the devs just keep rolling out workarounds. You know when your app is buffering endlessly that is time to check for an update.

None taken, friend. I understand that, but I still think about these things a lot. I’m still young enough where I could have a happy accident, even if we’re not trying. My mind is always on how to be a good father if it did.

Two bags a week here. As long as there’s nothing that’ll rot in them, we try and keep bags around in the spare room until they’re completely filled. Dry unrecyclable garbage, basically.

The rubbish that exits my mouth, however, that’s endless; especially if I’ve been drinking.

This is the way to go. I don’t have kids, but it’s how my sisters went about it. For the longest time if my nephew wanted to call and talk to me, the number would ring up as my sister’s number, because not only was it a spare phone, but it was dually connected with her number (not sure how tbh, she worked for a carrier for a long time).

It’s just hard to find that thin line between allowing them to have something or have them be behind all their friends who do have access to one.

My policy would probably be worse, tbh. I’d toss them an old Nokia and be like, “Legends say it’ll take the force of an 18 wheeler and a flood and still work.” For context, I had a friend who ran his over 3 times with his dad’s mack truck, reducing it to just a screen and PCB which he used as his phone at school. Then I watched him accidentally drop and fully submerge said screen and PCB into a half foot deep puddle while we ran down a mountain in a thunderstorm and that sucker still worked.

It was his experiment, to keep trying to destroy it to the point where he couldn’t use it but have to use it if it did. I think it died not too long after, though.

Can confirm, I had a heck of a time figuring out Bluetooth and sound myself. The distro I was using came with Bluetooth hard disabled and PulseAudio by default. The wiki, these four packages, and setting my Bluetooth to autostart on login got everything working with minimal hassle.

I’ve started using Fulguris lately, just random tryout. Its actually decent and has a built in content blocker where you can add lists with the big three main ones already being there. I’m not 100% sure how barebones privacy is on it, but it is open source and from what Exodus says there’s no trackers (unless you opt into Google Crash Reporting which is off by default). It does have some extra permissions you might not need, so if you want a near-permissionless browser, it might not bwe the one for you.

If you haven’t tried Spiritfarer, it’s absolutely worth the playthrough. So many feels…