I was a late bloomer and I still feel like my brief brush with religion in my late teens and early twenties crippled my social skills for over a decade. Having said that, I managed to have a few awkward dates here and there and fewer still became relationships. Something they don’t tell you is that 80-90% of dates are awkward and terrible, but for many people including myself, when it clicks, it clicks.

I knew a woman at work once. I always stay very professional at work but I am friendly and nice to people. One day we were doing some bullshit paperwork and had a really good conversation and at some point when we were smiling and laughing I felt the vibes. We got a beer with friends after work. A few weeks later she got fired for some stupid shit but we stayed friends and dated for a month or two after. In this instance dating was primarily fun and adventurous. Getting to known each other etc. Bonus points because she had a cool roommate and her ex who came by for the kiddo once in a while was a cool too.

Another women I dated was already a longtime friend of mine. She went away to college and I saw her rarely for years. When she moved back, I invited her to hang out and we hit it off. We had a lot of fun and I felt the attraction, so I asked her out on a date. Because we had such a strong friendship beforehand, dating her felt like hanging out with my best friend, but more romantic.

For me, the thing that changes it from friend hangout to a date is:

1. Intention, everyone has to know it is a date.
2. A date typically has some hint of a potential romantic and or sexual interest, even if it’s subtle, not stated overtly, or vague. Having said that, it’s better to be bold and clear. When I first started dating I used to go in slow for the kiss when the vibes were right. I never misread the vibes too badly, but it’s 2024, so now I always get verbal consent before I even kiss someone. I was honestly surprised at how often “I would like to kiss you,” or “would you like to kiss me” gets a yes. If you get a no, most people are thankful to have been asked and that somewhat counteracts any awkwardness from being shut down.

Java edition is still generally okay, but MS has been trying to cram it in the typical mobile game mold with a store and stuff. If MS had made Minecraft, we’d probably have item stacks of 10 or 100 rather than 64. :D

I see a lot of people saying something along the lines of “their network; their rules”.

With this in mind, it’s still shitty that they frame this as a compatibility issue when in reality they just want to track you.

They should be forced to say that they disallowed this private relay thing in order to obtain more info about their customers, because that’s significantly more accurate and truthful.

The browser ad on doesn’t work in apps, and if they have a blocker outside of that, it probably uses a VPN on the loopback interface to strip out the ads. I run a VPN a fair bit, so I would only be adblocking when I’m not on the VPN. Are there any non-root methods that can do full system ad blocking other than the VPN thing?

Going to probably try this after I build my pihole and I can VPN home for ad blocking. Currently I need root to avoid seeing ads.

Daily computing is mostly FOSS programs and my laptop is sold with Linux preinstalled (though I bought the higher spec Windows version and installed Linux myself. Cloud is FOSS, self-hosted in the public cloud (until I get fiber). Phone is rooted Android w/ FOSS apps wherever they meet my needs. I’m about 50% through degoogling and de-Microsofting. Ereader is KOReader (FOSS) running on old Kindle brand hardware. Keyboard is Ergodox Ez which I think the firmware is FOSS. Smarthome is still Smartthings which is not FOSS.

I’m going to give myself a C- 70% FOSS

This guy has mad FOSS cred. I bet even his socks are made of free range organic open source wool released under a Creative Commons attribution share-alike licence.

Seriously though, that sounds like an amazing setup. I always wanted to mess with gadget bridge some more. I have a number of old MiBand devices lying around as well as a Bip. The third party apps for that thing had more features than almost every fitness tracker I’ve had potentially even including my Garmin watch. What tools do you use to analyze/review/visualize the gadget bridge data?

I don’t know if I’ve used Strawberry, but I used Clementine, from which it was forked for several years. Like OP, Rhythmbox wasn’t doing it for me. Clementine/Strawberry is definitely worth a look.

The funding gives them visibility though. Without third parties that people know and might vote for, there would be no additional challengers to point to when arguing for ranked choice voting or anything else. If there are no Green, Libertarian, Constitution voters, then FPTP loses a good portion of its luster.

Additionally, if enough people vote 3rd party, the big two may shift to win those voters back. We saw an interesting situation with the Libertarians and the Republicans this time around where the Libertarians weren’t going to primary a candidate against the Republican if the Republican met certain qualifications. If the Democrats lose even a percentage point to the greens in a tight race, they can possibly get that voter back by representing their interests to show that they are also green.

Having said all that, I agree that FPTP is a big problem and is strongly contributing to the toilet bowl death spiral American politics is experiencing.

Definitely illogical and judging by the comments here, its a number of us who notice. It’s odd, because they went through the effort to preserve the option of separate search and address bars.

Urbanists.video is what I’m binging now. As a child, I wanted to be a transportation engineer and as an adult I’m a frequent cyclist, so I find this stuff interesting. Plus, most of it is in English when many peertube instances are not.

I hate new Outlook. Might as well switch the whole company to Yahoo mail or Hotmail. :D

Recently I found some peertube instances that had good quality content that was interesting to me and had more of a chance to test drive it than I have in the past. Very nice!

Lol, the minimalist window decoration had me thinking you were running a terminal inside of the home directory of your file manager. :D

I’ve seen weirder things.

My Logitec MX Master devices can be configured on Linux via Piper. Logitech Options (the official software) is for Windows and I’ve never messed with it, even on my Windows devices. The two MX Master devices I have work plug and play and having 2 Bluetooth connections and a dongle channel lets me easily switch between my computers without swapping mice. Apparently with the official software, I could drag the mouse from one computer’s desktop to another, but I’m happy to mash the little button on the bottom to tab between devices if it saves me having to interact with another hardware manufacturer’s half advertisement/half utility app.

Still using a 5 year old laptop with no degradation in performance and expecting at least another 5. All I had to do was uninstall some malware that was eating up all the system resources and popping up a bunch of ads. It was called Windows. :-D

Good point. If I know it’ll meet my needs, I’m sometimes inclined to buy tech that’s a few years old, especially if the newer version just adds cloud, AI, or something else I don’t want/need. In many cases it’s still marketed the same so I think end of support dates should be clearly marked on the product itself so the consumer can make an informed choice. Intentionally bricking a device should be treated as littering and the company should be responsible for disposal fees.

Linux is a different story because of the volunteer presence. If anything Linux should get subsidies for keeping e-waste out of landfills after the manufacturer has long abandoned the product.

My laptop is about 5 years old now and still runs as fast as the day I bought it, if not faster. I replaced the battery twice, but this thing could go another 5-10 years if I don’t drop it or spill something on it.

May they all fall asleep sunbathing on their yachts… and wake up redder than a traffic light.

The map in my head will be deemed content theft because it cuts into Google’s profits.

Totally feel that. I will go to extreme lengths to avoid ads.