Not a replicant

And “National Lampoon”

The sky above the port was the colour of television, tuned to a dead channel…

We’ll see. I’ve set the Group policy to limit feature updates to Win 10 22H2. I will be unhappy if they over-ride or reset a GPO.

Lots of restaurants and cafes pouring their waste cooking oil down the sink instead of paying a collection service.

And in “The Man from U.N.C.L.E.” and in the “The Great Escape”

There’s a lot of music out there. Not all of it is available on Spotify.

And not all of us want Spotify applying algorithms to our listening choices. I like to be surprised at unexpected gems from artists I’ve never previously encountered.

I search www.live65.com for music in the genres I like. Blues, folk, world, deep breath adult contemporary (no, not the “decades” top 40s lists, more modern stuff)

I SHAVED MY BEARD FOR YOU, DEVIL WOMAN!

Get Crazy (1983). Just a fun piece of silliness with a cameo from Lou Reed.

And Electric Larry

Pi-hole can block microsoft telemetry domains, just need to keep the blocklists up to date, and flush the Recall cache every day.

But you can feed a scrambled egg back to a chicken.

Last time I bought a Win 10 Pro DVD to install on a customer’s machine, it was AUD$195.00. And I still had to use powershell to de-provision some of the bullshit. Better than the Home version (AUD$165.00), at least I can use GPEDIT to disable some “features”.

Of course, a Windows licence on a pre-built Dell or HP would be a lot less.

“If you think this is expensive now, wait for 20 years” “Not a problem, I’ll be retired by then, it’ll be someone else’s problem”

I’ve got an Asus eeePC running WinXP. It’s air-gapped and the wi-fi is disabled in BIOS. All it does is play music, connected to dumb speakers. I update the music periodically via USB. Remarkably reliable and long-lived hardware.

In Australia we have pre-poll voting (early voting), mail-in ballots, and every election day is a Saturday - with democracy sausages.

Happened in 2022 to a 2017 MBP belonging to someone I knew. She went out and bought a new one, and put the old one in a drawer. She brought it to me in 2023, I investigated and found the shitshow - Apple saying “nuh-uh”, the ACCC (Australian consumer advocate) saying “you’d better”, then Apple quoting me $1100 because the ACCC never enforced it, and me getting it fixed locally for $550. It needed a new screen, not because the screen itself was faulty, but because the failing flex cable was integrated with the screen. Screw Apple.

Pretty much anything in the “Known Space” series by Larry Niven (et al - there are works by some other authors in that space).

URLs like these:

http://edge1-b.exa.live365.net/a90706 and this https://cafedelmar.com/radio/

Disclaimer - I have a starlink terminal. I feel that the complaints should be made to the various governments that haven’t mandated modern terrestrial technologies to those of us outside metro areas.

I live 14km/9m from a town with underground fibre optic. The best I can hope for is geo-synch satellite with data caps and latency around 600ms. I will never see fibre optic rolled out here. I can sort of understand, it’s quite expensive and needs to be balanced against income from operations to justify it. But they rolled out electricity, and they rolled out PSTN, so the justification was found in those cases.

So, Starlink found a need and filled it. Had governments filled the need instead, the problem wouldn’t exist.

Syncthing

Destination: Las Vegas

Ford car: “Visit Hard-on Henry’s for hookers and blow”