I also use my guest network for the (notoriously insecure) IoT stuff. Oftentimes I’ll take it a step further and use my PiHole to block whatever servers they’re phoning home to.

A good example is my smart TVs. My TVs are the single most blocked devices on my network, by far. Like on a day of heavy use, my phone or PC may generate ~2000 blocked requests. On an average day, my TVs generate 7000+ blocked requests. That’s ~5 attempts to send telemetry data back to the mothership per minute, even when they’re not in use.

My neighbors had the FBI Surveillance Van SSID, so naturally I set mine up as “Definitely Not Russian Hackers”

Pretty sure everyone in the late 90’s and early 2000’s knew some poor kid who was dragged out of class for “hacking” the school network with net send. Send “you got a virus lol” to every computer in the computer lab in 6th grade, and suddenly you have your school computer privileges revoked for “hacking all the computers” until you graduate 6 years later.

There is also the hilariously misguided belief that good coders do not produce bugs so there’s no need for debugging.

Yeah, fuck this specifically. I’d rather have a good troubleshooter. I work in live events; I don’t care if an audio technician can run a concert and have it sounding wonderful under ideal conditions. I care if they can salvage a concert after the entire fucking rig stops working 5 minutes before the show starts. I judge techs almost solely on their ability to troubleshoot.

Anyone can run a system that is already built, but a truly good technician can identify where a problem is and work to fix it. I’ve seen too many “good” technicians freeze up and panic at the first sign of trouble, which really just tells me they’re not as good as they say. When you have a show starting in 10 minutes and you have no audio, you can’t waste time with panic.

Yeah, and you can dupe items in RuneScape by dropping them and pressing Alt+F4. Don’t worry, I’ll stand way over here to prove I’m not trying to steal it. If I try to pick up the item you’ll see me move, and you can just pick it up first.

If you mean changing which app natively gets used for texting, that’s not something you can do on iOS. You can choose to open a different app, but if I tell Siri to text someone it will always 100% without a doubt no way to circumvent it use the standard Messages app. iOS doesn’t let you change your default for texts.

Hell, they only allow you to change your default web browser because they were dragged into court kicking and screaming. And even then, all third-party browsers are forced to use Safari’s engine for the backend, and aren’t allowed to use their own engines. Even Chrome, Firefox, and Brave are just reskins of Safari on iOS. And even then, any apps that open an in-app browser will still use Safari even when your default browser is different. For instance, I’m browsing lemmy on Voyager, and it opens all links in a built in Safari browser, (even though my default browser is set to Firefox.)

Yup. Pretty much anyone who knew anything about copyright law agreed that they were making a monumentally stupid move. And their only defense basically boiled down to “bUT wE’rE a LiBRarY.” Which completely ignores the fact that even libraries need to comply with copyright laws for ebooks, via licensing agreements with the publishers.

At least on iOS, it takes it a step farther and tells you specifically when an app is accessing your location, microphone, camera, etc… It even delineates when it’s in the foreground or background. For instance, if I check my weather app, I get this symbol in the upper corner:

The circled arrow means it is actively accessing my location. And if I close the app, it gives me this instead:

The uncircled arrow means my location was accessed in the foreground recently. And if it happens entirely in the background, (like maybe Google has accessed my location to check travel time for an upcoming calendar event,) then the arrow will be an outline instead of being filled in.

The same basic rules apply for camera and mic access. If it accesses my mic, I get an orange dot. If it accesses my camera, I get a green dot.

To be fair, the stock Ford 750 looks like the douchiest pickup vehicle imaginable. It’s like if you had asked an AI to design a truck specifically for dudes with fragile masculinity and court-mandated anger management classes. All it needs is twin flagpoles mounted to the back, with the American and confederate flags flying side by side.

I swear to god, the Ford F-750 looks like if you had asked AI to design the biggest lifted pickup specifically for the dudes with fragile masculinities and court-mandated anger management classes.

The rich engineers weren’t the demographic affected by the “rolling” brownouts. The people in McMansions had power the entire time, while the people in apartments were shitting in grocery bags because their toilets had frozen solid from lack of power for heating.

The “rolling” brownouts were really just rolling around the same poor areas.

I have had major issues with exFAT across a variety of platforms. But I also work with a bunch of niche gear. But my point is simply that being widely compatible isn’t the same as being fully compatible. And OP was asking for the best way to reach the widest compatibility. That calls for FAT32, even if it has issues with things like file size.

This was my immediate thought as well. Portable launchers for the various OS’es on a tiny (just large enough to store the launchers) FAT32 partition, then a large FAT32 partition (the majority of the drive) encrypted by VeraCrypt. As long as it can read FAT32 and run VeraCrypt, it’ll be compatible. And that covers Windows, Linux, Raspberry Pi, and Mac ecosystems. It’s not as simple as just plugging it in and getting a password prompt, but it’s going to be the most compatible while still allowing for (nearly) the entire drive to be encrypted.

The Bible Game. It’s a game that was originally released on the GBC or GBA; I honestly can’t even remember which… I downloaded a ROM pack for my retropie and discovered it hidden inside. My buddy and I got drunk one evening, and decided to boot it up for shiggles.

It has you running around trying to answer bible verse questions to get keys from demons. It’s the single most boring and unintuitive game I’ve played. It also blatantly got several of the Bible verses wrong. We looked it up online, and there’s also a version that was on the Xbox, but it apparently had wildly different gameplay and was more like a game show, where the players answered trivia questions.

That’s because they’ve been pushing the iPad as a sort of Mac Lite, but they can’t do that unless you can plug peripherals or a thumb drive into it. You can 100% plug a USB-C laptop dock into an iPad, and it’ll work. You can even use a mouse with it if you really want to.

But they wanted to keep Lightning around as long as possible, because they made a commission on every single lighting cable that was sold; Companies had to license the rights to use the connector, and had to pay Apple for every one they used. That’s why Lightning cables were always a few bucks more expensive than a comparable USB-C cable. That extra few bucks was going straight into Apple’s pocket. It was a huge source of passive income for the company, which they were reluctant to let go of.

If you want Windows without a GUI, you should be using MS-DOS. The whole point of Windows is that it has a GUI.

That would actually be the safer scenario, as a failure in the PD handshake simply defaults to 5v which every USB device can accept. It would be more dangerous to only have the PD negotiation be on one of the three ports, because then you could potentially burn out devices on the other two by sending them too much voltage.

I guess the best case scenario would be to have the PD signal run on all three, then default to low voltage if any of them fail. But that’s likely not what they’re doing, because then things would only fast charge if all three ports are plugged into fast charge devices. Because an unplugged tail would likely register as a failed PD handshake.

Well there’s already WinToys, which does a lot. It may be a new project for them to just add in a legacy Control Panel tab.

I can’t believe I didn’t do this…well, 15 years ago.

For what it’s worth, your experience 15 years ago likely would have been very different. It’s only in the past few years that things like drivers for basic hardware have become widely available on Linux without a bunch of weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth. And even today, there are still certain drivers that often don’t like to play nice.

Ask anyone who had an nvidia GPU 15 years ago if they’d suggest switching to Linux. The answer would have been a resounding “fuck no, it won’t work with your GPU.”

Wait, the UK wires their ovens and stoves directly into the wall without a plug?