• 2 Posts
  • 74 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 4th, 2023

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  • Before June 2023, I was a mod on several Reddit communities for about 13 years and outside of Reddit since the turn of the century. I just kinda stepped back once the Reddit BS happened.

    10 months later, my happiness and over all quality of life has improved. Not only am I no longer stressed (bye bye moderation based nightmares!), but I have way more time to dedicate to my passions and goals.

    I thought that dedication to holding together a few niche communities and battling the “bad guys” defined me and gave me a sort of immortality.

    I was VERY wrong.

    Our great grand kids won’t be trolling reddit archives, telling everyone how “cool” grandpa was.

    The greatest thing I ever did to improve my QOL was step away from moderating and leading communities on the internet as a whole. Doubly so if they involve political talk.


  • Coincidentally, I just got a knock-off Soda Stream from Phillips. It’s over $150 cheaper and works 2x-3x times better. I wanted to build something similar for a homemade soda bar concept, and discovered how truly cheap it can be to make soda and carbonated water at home. I was shocked at what a simple concept it is, and how much of a profit these sodas water companies make. Phillips even charging $50 for their system is a total rip-off.

    Truthfully, I think the increase in quality in the Phillips machine is due to fewer parts is an “exception that proves the rule” as these in-bottle carbonators seem to work better with fewer parts. It’s just a pressure hose connected to a co2 tank. Literally, all of $6 if you were to build one yourself from parts on Amazon (or $3 if you got he Alibaba route)

    I truly believe that the fewer parts the better in any DIY or commercial product due to the less chance of a failure in a part if there are fewer parts. This works fantastically for the “lower quality” producing companies, like Phillips.

    My inventive and engineering entrepreneur friends and I call this “fewer parts the better” concept, a “Murphy’s law compensator” as the fewer parts there are, the fewer parts that can statistically “go wrong”





  • Explosions&Fire and its sister channel ExtractionsAndIre

    The person who makes these science videos does it in such an entertaining and funny way that you forget that it’s a science channel. He uses homemade tools and chemicals to make explosions and fire and SO much more…

    The best part is that he puts his videos up, no matter if he fails or not. In fact, he fails more times than not on ExtractionsAndIre. I’ve been watching him for years and years, and any day that he posts a new video is a wonderful day.

    Undoubtedly, he’s been my inspiration to muddle through chemistry experiments without the proper background nor proper safety equipment.


  • I just closed 47. All of them Amazon…

    My best friend is having a babby…

    Xmas…

    Starting a small business and tools are needed…

    I just moved to south Florida, and the bugs are the size of house cats, so I require a salt shotgun…

    SO. MANY. HOLIDAY. DEALS.

    Like I’ve never been a shopping addict, but I had a budget of about $1000 for all of that, and I blew through it QUICK.

    I could see how it could be addictive, but I do know when to walk away.



  • Everyone should be using the Facebook addon “Facebook Purity” if they are still using the platform. I’ve been using it for over a decade and I can’t stand using Facebook without it…

    They are always a few steps ahead of Facebook and work well with other blockers.

    Not only that, you can block specific parts of Facebook, not just the adverts. You can block the shorts, people you know, groups, keywords, and even whole topics.

    You can change settings, like how you see your feed and it will stay changed.

    Changing the font size, type, spacing in addition a bunch of color and night mode options are just icing on the cake.

    In my professional opinion, it’s the only way of working with that platform is not harmful to one’s sanity.





  • I have been using WUB, and some other extremely helpful tools that this company makes, for a few years at this point.

    The part that I LOVE about WUB is how complete and exhaustive the shut-off is for the ease of use.

    There’s no editing files, no editing anything, just download and press a button to turn on update blocking (while protecting the services that could mess up by blocking). Press another button to unblock everything as good as a fresh install.

    It’s as if it was never blocked when updates are toggled on, and it’s as if Windows update is completely removed with the blocking is toggled on.


  • My alts are always on my same name. It helps me not have to remember, but it helps me to compartmentalize.

    I have one over on lemmy.world that I made when RiF went down and it pointed to that instance. ‘Reddit is Fun’ was my trusted app of choice for so long that I figured that I’d go with their recommendation.

    That mindset was apparently shared with a lot of people, and lemmy.world became overcrowded and unusable every other day for a while due to traffic. That’s when I read that one should get registered at a closer and/or smaller instance in order to have better service.

    That’s when I moved over to SDF’s shockingly fast lemmy instance.





  • Random computer quirks always fascinate me. The strangest one I had involved a computer that shouldn’t have existed.

    One time in the early aughts I had a patchwork computer that I put together from the junk pile of a local computer store that a buddy of mine ran.

    It was barely holding together in a rusty frame, with zip ties and wood glue.

    Its modem was temperamental as hell. It would only stay online so long as it was pinging a website via command prompt. It was only some websites, too. Like I could ping Geocities, but not livejournel.

    I remember many weekends doing Mephisto runs in Diablo II, praying that my command prompt doesn’t bug out anytime I’d get anything worthwhile.


  • This is the truth. I was being abused by a boss of mine, with him demanding to know the whole of my medical history. He also demanded doctor excuses go directly to him, and not HR as I was told,

    Needless to say, HR shared that I was bitching about him and he messed up my desk, breaking an ornament and a knickknack that was precious to me at the time (I got it on honeymoon). I took photos, and HR even saw him near my desk at the time of all of that happened

    It took a major civil suit to get the video, but after the judge saw it ‘my case was won’ according to the judge. It was so obvious of evidence of him breaking stuff, spitting on my chair, snapping my laptop.

    I even got special consideration because my boss then gave me a laptop that was so old that I couldn’t load the required VPN software.

    I’m glad I got out of a corporate run tech field. It’ll eat your soul without you noticing until it’s too late…