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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

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  • OP, check out the websites about grants ISPs are getting to put fiber in rural areas and see if your area is on the list somewhere (I would try and link you to some, but I’m on mobile and for some reason I have a hell of a time finding those sites while on mobile). You can see below what I’ve had to deal with for about 20 years, until my area finally got covered by one of those grants a few months ago. I am super rural - like, I am literally surrounded by nationally protected forest and nothing else; it’snot a place I thought would ever be included in those grant locations. It was, though, and I now have Gigabyte internet with no cap, with VOIP, for $74.98 a month. If I’m not using WiFi, I get an actual gig of download speed. If I’m on wifi, it’s usually between 600-900MB.

    Up until recently, we paid Centurylink about $150 a month for two lines into the house. Each line maxed out at 0.75MB download speed and 0.23 MB upload speed. We needed two lines to even be able to function. Almost 20 years of this, with no other options besides Hughesnet. We tried them for a little while; their equipment cost a fortune, it was about$150 a month, the speed was nearly as bad and they had a 200MB A MONTH CAP. We had to turn off images for websites in order to not go over the cap. Previous to 2004, I lived in a very rural part of NY. We had high speed internet for $69 a month, no cap. I can’t remember the speed, but I remember that it took 3 minutes to download a full sized movie. 20 YEARS AGO the internet was better, and cheaper!


  • Of course it’s on purpose, and it’s understandable, too. And if you have voice along with Internet service, spectrum does not allow you to use your own modem for voice. It won’t work. You can use your own for the internet portion, but you have to contact them to get each item provisioned separately, and then get a splitter to accommodate both. You and also have to make sure the person your are talking to understand what you are talking about, because a lot either don’t, or just don’t care to accommodate you and just say no we don’t do that. I am currently taking a hiatus from going through this very scenario because I don’t have the mental energy right now to fight a tier 1 tech on something that should be so simple.




  • I don’t know if anyone has murmurings this yet, but if you leave a landline that is through your ISP, and connected to the router, you may not be able to use your own router. Spectrum doors not let you, and despite all the research I did before, I did not find that out until after I purchased my own. You can ask them to split the line and use the old router with the phone, and your new router for internet, but there are potential issues with degradation of service involved, as well as the more mundane problems of running into ISP support who are not interested in understanding what you want, and getting the line actually, physically split.



  • I also hate it when it has a name that is a super common word or phrase. Our last 3 records management prograns at work have been like this, and their help fires are terrible to non existent. Good like trying to search the internet for information on the software with those common names. Even adding terms relevant to what the software does, didn’t help much.

    (Apologies if this is terribly typed, I’ve got an impending migraine aura that stayed right as I hit reply and have lost a good chunk of my vision. I can’t see most of what I’m saying.)






  • I think that app choice makes a difference, too. I would guess that most people on mobile picked one or two apps to try, and if their picks weren’t great (or the user was too impatient to wait for improvements) they called the whole experience shitty and bailed. Those of us committed to the move hung on and waited for our apps to get better.

    In my case, I grabbed every ios app I could find and tried them all. Some were not so good, some were good and improving at a lightning rate. Living through those growing pains is worth it to me, especially when the improvements are crazy fast. I’m mostly using Memmy now, and I’m really happy with it. I only have one tiny, unimportant issue with it involving text selection, but it’s nothing compared to how good they’ve made this app so quickly. Memmy is a large part of why I stick around.


  • I got super frustrated with Mastodon because of this. I’ve tried a couple of instances with no luck. And hilariously, I have to think that the furry folks are either having the same problem finding a home, or they are stalking me, because everywhere I move, shortly after, a ton of furries appear and do introductions. Furry stuff is not my thing, but I can appreciate how they might have a hard time finding a good place to settle.





  • But it’s also hard for someone with depression, because you will kill things while you learn, and that can make you feel even more worthless and useless.

    THAT SAID. If you try it and actually discover you have an interest in it, it’s a lot easier to get past the, “Fuck, I killed another one!” and slide into, “How do I not fucking kill another one?!”

    Source: me :/