One of those tiny low power PCs with OpenSense is a good alternative, but a bit more work. The only downside is that you need a separate switch and wifi access point.

Sure, but it’s still really interesting from a historic point of view.

Easiest? More like… The only way.

Is this what burnout looks like?

Not OP, but there is value in having competition. DDG is just a bing front-end. The big search engines have a major problem with the quality of results going down, as the internet is SEOd to death. The companies behind these engines don’t seem to be very eager to fix it, they are just hoping to replace them with AI. We’ve also seen how these engines have been turned into ad platforms, which changes the incentives… Instead of ranking quality, they are ranking who pays more.

Taking a different approach to ranking results that isn’t ad driven, that can punish AI generated content and low quantity results would bring a huge value.

I just use a planetary mixer that can mix the dough. It uses a lot less space, and it can be used for multiple purposes. For resting, rising, i will just transfer it over to the pan and put it somewhere warm, like next to the radiator or in the oven on a very low setting.

Depends on the phone. On some phones, it is on a separate tiny board which is cheap to replace. If it’s on the motherboard, it requires soldering, and it can be fucked if the copper pads get torn.

Slower is usually better for the battery, use it if you charge at night. It also decreases the wear on the usb port.

A bread machine. Had good reviews. I used it like 3 or 4 times. The mixing things are too small to mix the dough properly, and having to fish them out of the bread after it was done was a huge hassle. The bread was not great… Shell was too hard, and the top side didn’t cook properly. Then I realized, I could basically do the same with a planetary mixer that can mix the dough and the normal oven, and the end result was far better.

The honestly prefer the bottom one than the modern 50 step wizards that take 10 seconds for each page to load, and load an ungodly amount of JS scripts.

A company I worked for was using an ancient bug tracking tool (called Pivotal) that looked like a 90s site. It was so fast and responsive. Later, we moved to something modern. It was 10 times worse, significantly slower and overly complex.

I have a Surface Laptop 5 as my work laptop. I hate it with passion, it’s one of the worst laptops I ever used.

Beyond the lack of IO (not even a fucking hdmi port) and the piss poor cooling, the USB C display isn’t connected to the integrated GPU, it uses a different display adapter that is so bad the mouse stutters on high res displays.

The built-in display has a 3:2 aspect ratio. I wanted to use a lower resolution so I could disable scaling (having different scaled monitors is annoying to use), none of the “supported” lower resolutions are 3:2 and they all have ugly black bars.

It has a touch screen, but the lid only opens about 120 degrees, making it completely useless.

And it uses “special” locked down hardware that is very hostile to other operating systems like Linux.

First couple of minutes would be nice to catch up with world events. I would take some time to find money making strategies, like learning what to invest in, or what about to buy. If the person has any knowledge about some revolutionary technology, it would be nice to learn about it. Maybe we could use the knowledge to advance mankind. I would also want to learn about things to watch out for. Maybe I should move to some other country because the one I’m in goes to shit.

You can find a password checking utility on haveibeenpwned.com (the tool doesn’t send your password to the server, but only the first 5 characters of the hashed password, which is very safe). There are CLI tools on GitHub you can use to bulk test passwords. They also provide a downloadable list of hashes.

Alternatively, check if your password manager has a built-in tool for checking for passwords in known databases.

Google isn’t any better. And there aren’t a lot phone operating system options you can choose from.

Android is not privacy respecting by design. Your best option is to use a normal PC running Linux. However that has its own drawbacks, like lack of HDR support, no Dolby Vision or TrueHD, incompatibility with streaming services DRM.

And the bad part is that it is being forced upon us. You can’t even find non-smart TVs to buy anymore.

I wouldn’t be surprised if appliances come with their own data plan, because the data they collect is valuable.

And why the hell would I buy a region locked Blu-ray, and be forced to watch through those FBI piracy screens?

I would be careful with gadgets that have software on them like phones and laptops. God knows what kind of Chinese spyware they come with.

While in this particular case I agree with you, I’ve noticed a frustrating trend that just keeps getting worse. On one hand, search engines are failing to adapt to content farms. On pretty much any topic, you will find these generic sites that have poorly written articles that are hard to distinguish from AI. Try searching for “best linux distro” to see what I mean. Even on programming topics, you will find many sites that simply copy the content from stackoverflow and github.

On the other hand, people aren’t making websites and blogs anymore. More and more people are only using social media platforms, which aren’t being indexed by search engines. I hate seeing that so many discussions are now on Discord instead of forums. How many Twitter threads have you seen that should have been blog posts?

I really like more melodic stuff, and my favorites are Ad Infinitum, Dark side of the Moon, Enemy Inside, Beyond the Black, Scarlet Dorn