Yes. You probably just don’t see them on the streets as much, because concrete parks are being build everywhere.

It’s now part of the Olympics and a lot more girls skate too these days, so the sk8erboi stereotype doesn’t really fit very well any more.

I think it’s fairly optimistic to believe that they’ll stop bugging you with the Windows 11 upgrade even if you do pay $30.

Well it isn’t 6.

From Wikipedia:

In 2002, lecturers and students from the University of Plymouth MediaLab Arts course used a £2,000 grant from the Arts Council to study the literary output of real monkeys. They left a computer keyboard in the enclosure of six Celebes crested macaques in Paignton Zoo in Devon, England from May 1 to June 22, with a radio link to broadcast the results on a website. Not only did the monkeys produce nothing but five total pages largely consisting of the letter “S”,the lead male began striking the keyboard with a stone, and other monkeys followed by urinating and defecating on the machine

Mike Phillips, director of the university’s Institute of Digital Arts and Technology (i-DAT), said that the artist-funded project was primarily performance art, and they had learned “an awful lot” from it. He concluded that monkeys "are not random generators. They’re more complex than that

forced into an echo chamber.

Yes, it does that.

Using YouTube on a new account or through one of the alternatives will result in a wildly different feed. I was recently shocked by seeing the default non-curated feed on YouTube.

Absolutely none of the content was interesting to me; most of it was directly anger inducing political crap or just plain brainrot. I would definitely not visit that shit page ever again if the default feed was my first impression. I don’t know if it’s supposed to be a right wing breeding ground by now, but it sure isn’t as balanced as I would have expected.

My regular YT feed is obviously much more interesting to me, and I can use it to find new content, but since I don’t want to wait for the ads, I now only watch my own subscriptions on a different frontend, which of course will create an even smaller echo chamber.

I get how a curated feed can benefit the user, but YouTube is just not making it possible. It will only show (rage) engaging content and without the dislike function, you can only decide not to watch the crap or get shown more crap until you do like it.

This is clearly a “why not both” situation.

Emissions must be cut and new technologies for reversing existing damage must be developed. There’s a whole bunch of different things that needs doing, because there is simply no single solution, but using one approach to argue against another is certainly not helping anyone.

The cheapst way is this: Don’t lie to your children. Take responsibility for your choices. Talk to your children and explain why an adult needs to make responsible choices.

Blooming Christmas

No problem. Have fun.

I don’t know if there’s a community for this, but anyway, this is my “surf guitar”.:

It’s been a few years but it still looks like the day I made it.

It would be nice if they would stop pushing the update on computers that can’t run the update anyway.

The kit I used was a Harley Benton from Thomann.

It was all pretty straight forward. The kit was made to be assembled with a bolt on neck all predrilled, so it was basically just shaping the body and headstock and then paint and varnish.

I did look up some painting techniques, but I really just wanted to stain the wood, so I did that with a brush and then 2 coats of varnish. I had to sand the wood first to make it more open for staining instead of paint. If you want to paint or spray paint you should probably keep or make a base coat to avoid the wood absorbing the paint.

It was a cheap stratocaster-like kit, so I wasn’t too concerned with making mistakes, but I’ll admit that putting the saw into a guitar was a little daunting at first.

I used a multi-cutter for most of it to make very precise cuts. And lots and lots of sandpaper by hand with different grit sizes.

It only took a few evenings to do, so it is not difficult at all, but I guess it depends on how much you want to customize it.

Yes absolutely, I enjoyed it and might do it again sometime with a different kit.

I do have a lot of tools already so that wasn’t costly, only good practice, but it did take somewhat longer than I expected.

I wouldn’t attempt to make the neck and fretboard from scratch, so a kit with a good neck is a good starting point.

I saw a headline on some guitar magazine “These are the most over priced guitars currently”. Says a lot and it’s true.

There’s not much point in throwing money at a brand name anymore. Quality control is long gone and they all come straight out of a factory anyway. It’s alright though, because factory quality is decent, and with a little know-how you can easily make them play good.

My best guitar is a $100 kit-build. Acknowledging that I’d need to do a full setup on any guitar I figured I might as well paint and assemble it myself, because I’m not going to pay several hundreds just for a paint job and a logo.

I doubt that’s deliberate (it’s probably depending on some other task or shit that you don’t even intend to use), but it’s exactly the kind of bloat that turns people away from Windows.

Windows seems to work alright for my work pc, where I’m constantly logged into their cloud, newer switch users, logged in long enough daily to get all the updates and have IT to roll out stuff, so I hardly ever have issues there.

My personal computer is a different thing. I have several users, use it about once weekly, making it basically unbootable. As soon as I open the lid, Microsoft starts bugging me to do a shit load of things and download gigabytes of crap that Microsoft, and not I, needs me to do before I can even use it. More often than not I simply close the lid again.

It’s not unusual to meet people who don’t even have a pc these days. Most people can solve their daily stuff on any cell phone browser. I find it kinda amusing that Microsoft is pushing people that way.

It’s always a resistor. Planned obsolescence is basically putting a too small resistor somewhere. The parts they make for repair shops are usually better, so if you do take the time to swap a print, you will have a better appliance afterwards for a fraction of the cost of a new shitty machine.

Soldering the specific resistor can be done too, but for anyone who doesn’t have a stock of resistors and soldering tools/skill it’s usually a easier and just as cheap to get new print if they’re available.

Perhaps someone could make a business of it then.

Chromebooks sold well enough. Google made $30 billion on that in 2023.

Anyone willing to put together a physical Linux machine, market and support it could take a chunk of that.

It would be nice if it was possible to simply go to a website, check off on the stuff you want and then get a full package.

I liked the idea of AV Linux, because it comes in a bundle of stuff that I need, but it also comes with a lot stuff that I don’t need, and I’m not sure the desktop is my choice. It also didn’t really work at the time I tried it.(Some years ago).

So… if I, a stupid user, could simply go to a website, check mark at the desktop, check off which office package, music apps, browser, etc.etc. and then get a download of that in one go where it’s all set-up and works, it would be a lot easier than having to go through the process of installing the OS and then installing/removing apps, and then making it work…

Like, let’s say I want a PC just for music creation, I should be able to download the the OS with the DAW of my choice, all the VSTis and potentially also the most common free sound banks. In one file.

If I wanted an office PC, I should be able to get the OS, the office suite of choice and all the misc. PDF tools, email client and whatnot of choice. All in one go.

Windows and macOS sort of came with everything before, but these days they’re just as annoying to set up as any Linux distribution. Linux as a whole could take advantage of that situation by offering a prepackaged but custom installation.

Of course it would also help if someone made a Linux installer for windows, so users didn’t have to use windows to create a bootable USB. I think this is the step that normal users hesitate on. I don’t know if it’s possible, but it ought to be possible from software to partion the disc and install dual boot or something.

Yes. Linux Mint works “straight out of the box”.

It comes with a preinstalled browser (Firefox), so if you only use your computer for online stuff, then you dont need to do anything at all. Just use it.

The only technical thing you might want to do is to enter the WiFi password and find the software manager to install any additional apps you need.If you can install apps on your phone, then you can also install apps on Linux Mint.

I actually found that it was a lot easier to install Mint than setting up a new Windows pc. The most difficult part was using a windows pc to download it and making a bootable USB stick. Your friend can help you with that or you can follow a guide.

I have had zero issues and I have never written a single command line. It just works.

Goes to show that it’s only human.

The ads have reached a breaking point.

If I can’t block them, I’m just not watching the YouTube. I’ll never pay.

It used to be funny to link a relevant YouTube clip, but it’s not funny if you have to sit through half a minute of ads just to see something silly.

It’s also not really a long time streaming service like TV channels or netflix etc., because the homemade content sucks in comparison to an actual documentary that I can also watch without ads on other services.

It’s like Google completely misunderstood the point of the service they initially made. Also following a decade of users attempting to “monitize” their fucking crap, you can be sure that there’s nothing worth watching on YouTube that couldn’t have been better presented in a gif or in text.

Then the player is also fucking up lately. Usually if I go there, I’ll check the written description while the ads play, just to see if the content is worth the wait, but nooo… you can’t even do that anymore, because the app will start reloading between the multiple ads and the screen scrolls around and minimizes the description and comments. They’re literally hiding any information on the clip except the title until you’ve watched the ads.

It’s fucking garbage. Enshittified to death.

Repeating: Google, if you’re listening: I’ll never pay for YouTube, no matter how intrusive you make the ads. Enshittification is not encouraging me to pay.