Gasp, that would never happen! =D

I didn’t say it since I didn’t want to bring US shithousery politics into the thread.

Philippines has gotta stop with these actors and celebrities entering politics. And also the dynasties (sometimes composed of entertainers). How does being on a variety show or a soap opera qualify someone for high office?

I’m a member of a big credit union in my old city, but I don’t use it as my main bank. Honestly, I don’t see that many benefits.

• When I was trying to finance a new car at the start of 2021, the credit union rates were actually higher than the big banks and way higher than even dealership financing; I went with the dealership financing (>4% vs 1.9%)
• Also, they wouldn’t even give me a car loan because I lacked a history of a car loan. Admittedly, they weren’t the only bank that denied me in this way.
• Savings accounts rates are like 1% versus like 4-4.5% at like Ally or Capital One. Probably because my credit union is still as a B&M bank, while the others are online.
• My CU talks up annual member dividends, but you have to have significant amounts of money in your accounts and/or various products with them, such as mortgages or loans, before you get anything.
• The online banking and app experience is pretty trash; takes (relatively) forever for balances to update after even doing things like savings to checking transfers or vice versa. This sometimes affects Zelle interbank transfers, as Zelle thinks there’s not enough money in an account for a transfer, even though there is.
• Plus, they’re Zelle transfers are sometimes slow as shit, sometimes taking 2-3days. I know Zelle isn’t always instant, but it’s annoying because Zelle is often billed as instant transfers.

So I just use my CU accounts as a sorts of savings. I squirrel money away in there, like $25/week for a rainy day of sorts, but that’s about it.

I get much more utility and benefit out of my accounts at other non-CU banks.

I have a lifetime subscription for Windscribe, so I’ve just been using that with no issues for years. I’ve recommended it to some other friends and they’ve been fine.

I also pay for Proton services, so I have ProtonVPN, but I’ve yet to try it for torrenting.

I’ve only used Evernote sparingly over the last ~12yrs. 67 notes across 5 notebooks. Think it was one of the first apps I downloaded when I bought an iPad and iPhone. Still went ahead and exported everything, even though nothing of any serious importance. Some are just funny memories.

I would like to find something similar, maybe even self-hosted so it’s free. I keep seeing Joplin anytime someone mentions notebook programs; time to look into that.

It really was. I was more freaked out than he was. Even though it was video, I specifically yelling out, “someone needs to call 911!” So, so much blood…

It’s been a thing for a while now. I picked some up bedbugs while doing US domestic travel in like 2014/15. It was awful. Spread to a second room in the house before we were able to stop them and get rid of them.

But there are occasionally media panics about it. That said, better to be somewhat proactive with it. It’s cheaper to buy an anti-bed bug bag and be vigilant than is to deal with them. If you’re lucky, it’s just a lot of cleaning-up, wiping down all surfaces with bedbug sprays, lots of washing of clothes (even clean ones), and throwing out things that appear to be infested. At worse, it could be several hundred dollars or more of intensive professional services that aren’t even guaranteed to get rid of them. Either way, it’s fucking miserable.

I want to replace my 2014 13" MBP. But two things are really weighing on me:

1. I have 2 Windows laptops (one that’s more for gaming and another that’s more for productivity) that do what I need them to do perfectly well; why do I need another laptop? Plus I have two gaming desktops, a couple NUCs, a few servers, some RPIs…I really don’t need more computers, seriously.
2. Terrible base options with pricey upgrades. I’m tired of having to pay Apple extra for “premium features.” I’ve done with it iPhones over the years – wtf is 64GB (and now 128GB) base storage – At least my 2010 MBP I could upgrade aftermarket and did, but for my 2014 MBP, I had to pay the premium for more storage (base was 128GB; got 256GB).

Now I’ve never used my MBPs for anything resource-intensive. Some light-gaming – Stellaris and Eve Online, rarely – is probably the heaviest thing I’ve done it. Could I get by on 8GB RAM? Yeah, probably.

But it’s the principle of the thing. This isn’t 10yrs ago anymore, where Windows laptops from various manufacturers kinda sucked. My friend and I were looking at Windows laptops just the other day; so many nice Macbook-esque, thin, lightweight, but powerful enough laptops out there. And for the same price or less of an Macbook base model, they start at 16GB RAM, 512GB SSDs, etc. Many are still upgradable aftermarket.

I’m sure Apple Silicon is worth the premium. But not this other stuff that’s considered base on so many Windows machines.

I love Apple products, I do. But I’m not gonna keep throwing money at them for things that shouldn’t be considered upgrades. Guess I’ll keep holding out.

(I know, I know, matrix)

Getting people that you want to talk to – friends, family, etc – onto is a new platform is so difficult. No one wants to have 10 different communications apps, plus associated accounts*, just so they can talk to one or two people on each. It’s the network effect. It also doesn’t help that some of these platforms just aren’t as convenient or easy to use, especially for non-tech people.

But yeah, so many of these communities make no sense on Discord (or live chat period; IRC suffered from this too). I think troubleshooting is the worst, especially in larger, active communities. You have different conversations going on, so it’s easy to miss questions or answers. Plus, Discord’s search isn’t great, IMO. Better than reddit, but that’s not saying much. So someone probably asked the same question some time ago; good luck finding it, and even if you do, you still have to sift through the adjacent chat history to see if others responded and track that conversation.

Larger Discords remind me of the chats of large Twitch streamers, where the chat is going a million miles per hour. What’s even the point?

At least with a forum, it’s much slowed down, and there are clear divisions between topics, that give people the space to discuss those topics.

Websites are so easy to make these days, too. No coding experience even needed. I’m not saying Discord is worthless; it’s not and I use it plenty everyday. But it has its place. People need to use the right tools for the job.

*In many ways, websites suffer this issue, too. I have to make an account on this standalone separate website, just for my one question, and then after it gets answered, I’ll probably never go back to it? That’s why reddit (and Lemmy to a lesser extent) is so popular.

I’ve done it before using Duet.

But it’s not like that’s the only “monitor.” It’s always been secondary (mainly because I’ve used it with an MBP).

Mastodon is great. Feels very much like the early days of Twitter and is a solid product so far. I have a PixelFed account, but I haven’t played around with it that much yet. Seems pretty good., though we shall see. I have an account on a Matrix server, but I’ve only signed-in and used it once; Discord is still far more useful.

Lemmy is…Eh. Idk. Rome (or reddit) wasn’t built in a day, I know. It can be difficult to find the content or discussion I want because people are so spread out. Usually when numbers are low, you don’t want people spread out because it makes communities feel empty, further driving people away.

But more than all that, I find the platform itself so limited. Like the moderation tools are terrible. Can’t even block a problematic domain. It seems like if you delete a comment in a thread, all the comments underneath it vanish. Makes it difficult to sometimes leave moderation comments. And Federation or Defederation seems way too binary to me; there should be shades of gray. Though I think the Fed/DeFed binary is true of all Fediverse services.

Like I enjoy spending time here. But I’m not yet convinced that Lemmy is the right platform. FWIW, I’m also trying Kbin on a separate account; in some ways seems better, but in other ways, just seems confusing.

Simple selling to BBVA was shit. Simple was never my main bank, but it was a nice, simple service. That was free. Then they moved to BBVA, which almost immediately got bought up by PNC, and then PNC started charging monthly fees. Closed my account before the first fees hit.

I still have a Varo account. Surprised that hasn’t gotten vacuumed up yet by one of the traditional banks.

Microsoft Courier.

Do people still say this? This seems like one of those tired things that gets passed around the Internet in the name of “Boo Apple!”

I don’t think I’ve heard any Apple products users of any tech background (or none at all) say since the early 2010s. Yet non-users keep parroting it.

I saw this article from WaPo the other day quoting her. It’s gift link, so should work for all.

Do Egypt and Jordan not already have Palestinian refugees? I know Jordan definitely does. And it’s not small number; it’s hundreds of thousands, maybe even a million or more. Though according to Wikipedia, at least Jordan has given most Jordanian citizenship.

With regards to Egypt, can they handle that number of refugees? 2 million Gazans? That’s a lot of people. And it’s not like Egypt is some super wealthy country. And the Sinai isn’t exactly a great place to host 2million peolpe.

I don’t think there’s a single country that can readily accept that many refugees in short order, while properly feeding and housing them, and integrating them, without experiencing massive issues for both citizens and refugees.

That’s not to say that it’s right for Egypt to snipe at the EU, especially with a comment like that. But it’s not like either country can realistically deal with additional refugees. That’s part of what makes this whole thing a shitshow. There are few good options. And the few options that are good or better, people or governments refuse.

Discord, they will often get an answer within seconds.

That’s what IRC used to be for. I was gonna say it was annoying to get something like mIRC installed and set up, but that’s not even true since there are plenty of one click web clients. My subreddit used to have a channel on a reddit-affiliated IRC server and we provided a link to our IRC channel. Don’t even have to register a username on most servers to join a channel and idle.

Being text only, however, means no reactions emojis and preview of images and videos and all that. Which I can understand be kinda annoying these days. Plus servers didn’t necessarily talk to each other. There wasn’t/isn’t federation, or if there is, most servers are not federated. But if you’re just dropping in for a one-off question, that shouldnt’ matter.

Anything Popeye related.

So in the suburbs, yes and no. You can absolutely have grocery stores next to residential areas. So like if you have a main (st)road that has a grocery store, there may be housing behind the store. Here’s an example in my area (The Price Chopper is a grocery store). Residential zoning has bumped up against commercial zoning along the (st)road. Which means that the grocery store is next door for some of those people. Even a few blocks away is still pretty decent.

But let’s say someone wanted to build a grocery store next to this school for some reason. The developer is willing to buy up some houses (and people willing to sell them) and bulldoze them down to make a grocery store. The city will NOT allow that. That’s like a 99.9999% chance of never happening. Because that area is specifically zoned for strictly for residential and not commercial endeavors.

And it goes further. Let’s say instead of a grocery store, the developer wanted apartments or townhouses/duplexes. That keeps with the residential character and zoning, right? It does, but this area is probably zoned for SFH only. Not for multifamily units. It’ll never be built. At least not without overcoming significant local opposition.

This is actually being fought over in a neighboring suburb.

That’s not to say zoning is always terrible. If I build a house and then some industrial building/warehouse or commercial chicken coop wants to be my neighbor afterwards, with all the loudness and smells that brings, that’s not gonna be great for me. And if I want to move because my quality of life has decreased, who’s gonna buy my house? Nobody. At least not for the price I want.

So zoning has its benefits. It’s just a tool at the end of the day. But it can make things difficult when people do want change. It’s not as simple as tearing things down and putting up something new and completely different.

Astronaut. Space was my first love. At least up until about first/second grade (age 6-7).

Eventually, I became more interested in computers. My dad is a programmer in an IT capacity and he used to bring home parts from mainframes or servers. I was fascinated with these components. He would also write little QBasic programs for me that did cool graphical stuff, like colored bubbles floating on screen or colored “laser lines.” He’d bring me to his office to see the “computer room,” which was just like an entire floor of mainframes and servers and tape machines. I was amazed and thought I wanted to be programmer like him.

Around my preteen/teen yrs, I taught myself HTML/CSS and started making my own websites. By high school, I was taking programming classes.

I went to college for CS, but I also got a job as a part time website manager and email designer. Though I also became that guy who knew how to fix my coworkers issues with their computers. For various reasons, I never finished my CS degree, instead just opting for a 2yr degree.

Today, I’m solidly in the IT realm. Mainly in end user support, but I also do some more sysadmin-y stuff with the network and servers and even procurement. Still do some light web and email stuff, but it’s usually more on the technical side these days. Been just over 18yrs since I first got the parttime gig. I’m now on my second stint with this group and I’m the IT Manager. In a department of one!