LMDE (Linux Mint Debian Edition) is a wonderful self-hosting platform.

ONE OF US! ONE OF US!

Me: *PTSD’s in SCSI chain

JDownloader should work.

Pirate today, buy tomorrow…unless its a AAA dumpster fire. Always pirate AAA games. The gaming experience tends to be better because pirates remove all the anti-cheat and other BS.

My wife and I were piss poor and getting finance degree at a third rate state college. I was paying my way with PC support. One day I spent money I didn’t have to buy a Wndows NT certification book and used the university’s T1 line to pirate NT 4.0 for myself and MS SQL and Oracle 7 for my wife (I also bought a CD of Red Hat Halloween). Almost thirty years later we literally saved a presidential election and are the ones keeping significant parts of the US infrastructure from falling apart. All thanks to piracy.

There is some functionality not available through the web apps. If you work in a corporate setting, the odds are really good that the web apps won’t be adequate for you.

One example that comes to mind is one of our clients that has us file a report once per quarter. The report is an Excel spreadsheet that can be filled but not edited. The submission demands that the file be then password edit protected and uploaded along with the password. You cannot secure files that way via the web app. We literally keep a Windows VM with the a copy of the desktop office suite, just for this client’s quarterly form.

Fun Fact: I started “archiving” games off of BBS back in the intel 386. By the early 2000’s I had hundreds of games and apps going back to Zork and other very early PC, backed up in hard drives, CDs, and Zip Drives. I have no doubt that I might have had one of very few copies in existence of some games.

Sad Fact: They all went missing after one of our moves. All I have left are a small stack of zip drives and no zip drive to read them with.

The point is that, had it not been for a moving mishap, I would have copies of long lost games to share with the world, all thanks to piracy.

No, the NYPD does not think we’re dumb. The NYPD knows that the average Newsmax viewer is very dumb.

We never make minor production changes on Fridays or right before holidays. It is always a bad move because if you get into trouble your odds of not being able to teach the necessary resources are greatly increased.

Major production changes are only done during a scheduled downtime which is planned well in advance to make sure everyone is available, including third party vendors.

I have response teams in a “follow the sun” model as well as having my US team spread coast to coast, plus all our clients set their servers to UTC. It makes the most sense to keep something set to UTC at a moment’s glance.

Anyone else keep nearly everything set to UTC?

Or…hear me out…stop streaming service enshittification.

I am watching the Miami Open (tennis) live on the Tennis Channel and every few minutes they cut in with the live odds from Fanduel. This TV channel is actively tempting viewers to go bet on the match they are watching before the odds update.

Yes.

This is an extremely binary haul. Items are either very healthy or very unhealthy with nothing in between. It’s kind of impressive.

Tips: Make your own Mac & Cheese and tortillas. Both are cheap, easy to make, and taste way better than premade stuff.

Not Amazon Music the streaming service. Amazon the store. You can (or at least you could) buy your music in MP3 format. I have to check.if you still can.

EDIT: Yes, they still sell MP3s

Amazon is probably your best bet. I am not sure if they still do this but I bought a few CDs back in 1999 and Amazon added the MP3s to my “owned” library. I found it to be a cool way to own both physical and cloud stored digital copies.

I also found this CNET list that might be useful.

https://www.cnet.com/tech/home-entertainment/best-sites-to-buy-mp3-and-digital-music-you-own-forever/

I run everything through a Tailscale intranet, so that should not be a problem.